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Jesus Land: Our Longreads Member Pick

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Julia Scheeres | Jesus Land | 2012 | 21 minutes (5,152 words)

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For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share the opening chapter of Jesus Land, the bestselling 2012 memoir by Julia Scheeres about her strict Christian upbringing in Indiana, her relationship with her adopted brother David, and the stint they did in a Christian reform school together in the Dominican Republic. Our thanks to Scheeres and Counterpoint Press for sharing this story with the Longreads community. 

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It’s just after three o’clock when we hit County Road 50. The temperature has swelled past ninety and the sun scorches our backs as we swerve our bikes around pools of bubbling tar.

A quarter of a mile downwind from Hanke’s Dairy, the stench of cow shit slams up our noses, and we rise in unison, stomping on the pedals and gasping toward the cornfield on the other side.

It’s been two weeks since we moved to the country, and this is our first foray into the wilderness beyond our backyard. Our destination is a cemetery we spotted during a drive last Sunday that Mother insisted on taking after church. While David and I sat in the back of the van glaring out opposite windows, she coasted down dirt lanes, chattering about edible corn fungus, pig manure fertilizer, and other gruesome factoids she’d gleaned from her recent subscription to Country Living magazine.

David nudged me when we drove by the graveyard. It was set back from the road a bit, filled with brambles and surrounded by one of those pointy black fences that circle haunted houses in children’s books, usually with a large KEEP OUT sign on the gate. This fence bore no such sign. We looked at the tombstones jutting sideways from the ground like crooked teeth, and knew we had to return.

We have a thing for bone yards, as we do for all things death-related. It’s part of our religion, the topic of countless sermons: Where will YOU spend ETERNITY? THE AFTERLIFE: Endless BLISS or Endless TORTURE? We are haunted by these questions. If we die tomorrow, will we join the choir of angels or slow roast in Hell? We’re not sure of the answer. So we are drawn to graveyards, where we can be close to the dead and ponder their fate as well as our own.

Once we pass Hanke’s Dairy, we sit back down onto our bike seats. Along the length of the cornfield, a series of plywood squares nailed to stakes bear a hand-scrawled message:

Sinners go to:

HELL

Rightchuss go to:

HEAVEN

The end is neer:

REPENT

This here is:

JESUS LAND

You see such signs posted throughout the countryside: farmers using the extra snippet of land between their property and the road to advertise Jesus Christ. Mother approves. She says the best thing you can do in life is die for Jesus Christ as a missionary martyr, but posting signs by the side of the road can’t hurt either.

“Anything to spread the Good News,” she says.

It was her idea to move to the country. She grew up in rural South Dakota and had been threatening to drag us back to the boonies for years. Dad finally caved in. His drive to Lafayette Surgical Clinic, where he’s a surgeon, is half an hour longer, but now he’s also gotten into the country act, donning his new overalls to drive his new tractor around our fifteen acres.

Our three older siblings escaped this upheaval by leaving for college, so that leaves my parents, my two adopted black brothers, and me.

Jerome, our seventeen-year-old brother, hightailed it out of this 4-H fairground a few nights after we landed. He got into a fight with Dad, stole the keys to the Corolla, and drove off. Hasn’t been seen or heard from since, which is fine by me, since Jerome is nothing but trouble anyhow.

So basically it’s me and David, our ten-speeds, and the open road. And while the country graveyard is puny compared to the one by our old house—Grand View Cemetery, which we visited often in search of fresh graves—it still contains dead people, and that’s what interests us.

It takes us five minutes to pedal past the cornstalks, standing higher than a man’s head, to a cluster of double-wide trailers on the other side. They’re anchored in a half circle, with an assortment of plastic flamingos and gutted vehicles strewn on the bald clay before them. The irritating twang of country music leaks from the trailer nearest the road, and as we sail by, a heap of orange cats lounging in the engine compartment of a rusted station wagon scatters into the dry weeds.

I curse myself for wearing a dark T-shirt in this booming heat. We haven’t seen another human since we walked outside and would have stayed indoors ourselves if boredom hadn’t driven us into the farmland.

“Watch for heatstroke,” Mother, a nurse, warned us before we left. “If you get cramps or diarrhea or start to hallucinate, walk your bikes.”

Sweat drips into my eyes, warping the landscape, and I lift my T-shirt to wipe my face, flashing my bra at the empty world. Ahead of me, David rides shirtless, his scrawny torso gleaming like melting chocolate. He’s draped his T-shirt over his head and tied it under his chin like a bonnet. Like a girl. As if he didn’t look dorky enough with those black athletic glasses belted to his head with that elastic band. If anyone from Harrison sees us, we’re doomed.

William Henry Harrison is our new school; Hick High, the townspeople call it. There will be 362 people in our class, compared to twelve at Lafayette Christian, our old school, and we don’t know a single one of them. These are farm kids who’ve known each other since they were knee-high to a rooster, kids who’ve probably never seen a real live black person before. Kids who worry us a lot.

I stand up and stomp on my bike pedals, trying to catch up with David and tell him to put his shirt back on, but he’s on his second wind and flying over the crumbling pavement at enormous speeds. I yell at him and he rolls to a stop in the shade of an oak tree, turns and grins as I glide up beside him. I stand over my bike, panting, and point at his head.

“What’s up with that?”

“Keeps the sweat outta my eyes.”

“Looks queer.”

He shrugs and pushes his glasses up his nose.

“Come on, take it off. Someone might see you.”

“So?”

“Do you want people to think you’re some kind of weirdo?”

He shrugs again and stares across the road at a herd of cows trying to cram themselves into the shade of a small crabapple tree. His jaw is set; once David’s brain has clamped onto a notion, there’s no unclamping it.

I shake my head and reach into the grocery sack strapped to his bike frame for a can of strawberry pop. When I yank off the metal tab, warm red froth bubbles over my fingers.

“Gosh darn it!”

I hand the can to David.

“Go on and drink your half.”

We’re saving the other can for the graveyard. I lick the sugar from my fingers and watch a cow, this one with a black body and white face, plod after the shadow of a small cloud that drifts across the pasture. When the shadow slips over the fence, the cow halts, lifts its tail, and spills a brown torrent onto the ground. I wrinkle my nose and turn to David.

“Remember when we used to ride to Kingston pool to swim every day?”

He stops drinking and peers at me sideways. His face is dry while mine drips sweat; maybe there’s something to his bonnet notion after all.

“’Course I remember, dufus. That was just last summer.”

“Point is, we never knew how good we had it, compared to this.” I swipe my arm across the landscape: corn, cows, barns. More corn.

“Could be worse,” David says, giving me the pop can.

“How’s that?”

“We could be dead.”

“Well, yes. But this has gotta be the next best thing.”

He snorts, and I drain the can and drop it back into the sack.

We push off and are just gaining momentum when a long red car with a jacked-up rear end barrels around the corner ahead of us. It races in our direction, the thrum of the motor getting louder and faster. Suddenly, it lurches into our lane.

We swerve down a small embankment into a cornfield, crashing hard into the bony stalks and paper leaves. The car blurs by amid hoots of laughter.

David untangles himself from his bike and offers me a hand up. I charge up the embankment to the road.

“Stupid hicks!” I scream after the car, as it evaporates into the horizon. “Frickin’ hillbillies!”

David walks over to stand beside me.

“They must be bored too,” he says. He shakes his head at the blank horizon and reties his bonnet. He always takes things calmer than I do.

We’ve seen the country kids before as we’ve traveled back and forth to town for church or supplies. We’ve seen them slouched against pickup trucks, sharing round tins of spit tobacco. Lounging on plastic chairs in front yards, watching cars go by. Maneuvering giant machines through the fields, their bodies dwarfed by metal.

They are alien to us, as we must be to them.

So much for the famous “Hoosier hospitality.” When we moved to our new house, no one stopped by with strawberry rhubarb pie or warm wishes. Our neighbors must have taken one look at David and Jerome and locked their doors—and minds—against us.

David and I shove back onto County Road 50, determined not to waste our journey. We clear a small rise and spot the cemetery a quarter mile ahead.

“Race you!” David shouts.

We crouch behind our handlebars, and David gets there first, as always. We lean our bikes against the fence, which is coated with a fine layer of orange rust, and walk around to the gate. It creaks as I push it open. David rushes past me to a gray block of marble just inside the fence that is roped with briars. He tramples down the vines and squats before it.

“Here lies Mabel Rose Creely,” he reads as I peer over his shoulder. “Born April 18, 1837, dyed November 9, 1870.”

He looks up at me with a smug grin.

“They spelled ‘died’ wrong.”

“Like, duh.”

I pick my way through the brambles and crooked tombstones to a large tablet set off by itself in a corner and tap it with my shoe to flake off the mud plastering its surface.

“Check it out!” I call to David. “Enus Godlove Phelon! He’s got your same birthday, June 2, 1851! Died October something . . . I can’t make it out.”

“What’s that name again?”

“Enus Godlove Phelon.”

“Anus?”

“No, Enus! With an ‘E.’”

“What kinda name is that?”

“A redneck name, for sure!”

We snicker and kick about for more stones. As I crouch to read them, I try to put the car out of my head and focus on the dead people beneath our feet. This is serious business, and I’ve got serious questions.

First, there’s the appearance of the folks in the boxes. Do maggots fester in their eye holes like in horror movies, or do they stay pickled like the frogs in Biology class? David thinks it takes about two hundred years for a person pumped full of formaldehyde to turn into a skeleton, but I’m not so sure . . .

Then there’s the Afterlife question. Where is the soul of the person I’m standing on right now—Heaven or Hell? Were they satisfied with their lives, or did they want more? If they could go back and do it all over again, what would they change? Is Heaven all it’s cracked up to be?

As I’m contemplating all this, I detect a movement out of the corner of my eye and raise my head. The red car. It prowls noiselessly along the cemetery’s edge and rolls to a stop beside our bikes. I look at David, who’s bent over a marble cross, cracking up over some dead woman named “Bessie Lou.”

“David.”

“. . . better name for a cow, don’t you think?”

“David, stop it!”

His head shoots up at the alarm in my voice, and he follows my gaze to the car—four white bodies emerge from its interior—before standing to untie his T-shirt and slip it over his narrow shoulders.

They’re farm boys, our age. Bare-chested and wearing cutoff jeans and baseball caps. You can tell they’re farmers by their sunburns: Their faces, necks, and arms are crimson but their torsos are pasty, as if they’re wearing white T-shirts. If you looked up “redneck” in the dictionary, they’d be there to illustrate, and I’d say as much to David if they weren’t marching toward us with tight faces.

They halt in a row behind the fence. I glance at David. Behind his smudged glasses, his eyes are wide with fear.

“Whatch y’all doing?” the tallest one asks as a cow moos in the distance. He takes off his Caterpillar cap and fans his face with it.

“Just looking!” I say breezily, as if this was Montgomery Ward’s and these boys were salesmen come to check on us.

“This here’s the final resting place of my great-great-grand-daddy!” yells a boy with a Snap-On Tools cap.

The tallest boy tugs a piece of field grass from the ground and sticks the end in his mouth. He chews it slowly and saws his eyes back and forth between David and me.

David’s mouth is gaping. I step between him and the farm boys, still grinning.

“We just moved out here from town and . . .”

“Obviously y’alls ain’t from around here, else you wouldn’t be in there,” says a third boy—this one in an International Harvester cap.

The runt of the litter, an acne-scarred boy in a Budweiser hat, grabs the fence in his fists and shakes it violently, rattling our bikes. Behind the tall iron grate, his stumpy body heaving back and forth in anger, he looks like a caged monkey having a tantrum.

“This here’s an American cemetery!” he shouts. “Only Americans are allowed in there! It’s the law!”

I take a deep breath and look back at David, who’s now gaping at the trampled brambles at his feet. Close your mouth.

“That’s fine,” I say, shrugging. “We’ll just leave, then.”

I move toward the gate, and the human fence behind it, listening for the rustle of David’s footsteps at my back. Move.

“What’s wrong with blacky?” the runt asks. “Cat got his tongue?”

He lifts his Bud cap and orange hair falls to his neck. I ignore him, keeping my eyes on the road beyond him, the road that will lead us to safety. He moves aside at the last moment to let me push open the gate. I’m on a hair trigger. If they so much as breathe on us, I’ll bloody their eardrums with my screams. I stop and wait for David to walk through the gate, then follow him to our bikes.

The farmers are at our heels.

“That darkie your boyfriend?” one of them asks to a burst of snickers. I pull my bike upright and wheel it forward so David can get his.

“No, he’s my brother.”

They crowd around us.

“What, your momma git knocked up by some Detroit nigger?”

There’s a shuffle of dirty laughter and the runt leans forward, his pimpled jaw working up and down. He hawks a glob of chew into the dirt, narrowly missing David’s sneakers. I glare at him and he throws his shoulders back and grins proudly, a string of spittle stretching from his pink face to the dust. David contemplates the lump of brown slime at his feet with knitted eyebrows, as if it were the saddest thing he’d ever seen. Don’t you freeze up on me. Don’t!

“Let’s go,” I order David, elbowing him in the ribs.

“Yeah, you’d best skedaddle,” the tall one says.

As we mount our bikes, they watch with crossed arms and slit eyes. We’ve got enough fear ricocheting through us to propel ourselves all the way home without stopping. We ride in silence, cringing and waiting for the gunning motor, the flash of red behind us.

Only when we bump down the gravel lane to our house do I notice the trembling cottonwoods, the frenzied chirruping of sparrows, the dirt devils churning across the back field. On the horizon, heat lightning dances along a column of towering thunderheads. The air is suddenly sweet and cool, refreshing. It’s perfect weather for a tornado.

Down in the basement, I fling myself belly-down on the cot and stare out the window at the trees pawing the green air. David’s out there somewhere, walking Lecka before supper.

Neither of us uttered a word about what happened. We never do. But I can’t smudge it from my mind. The farm boys’ sneering red faces. The runt shaking the fence. The brown lump of spit tobacco. The anguish in David’s eyes. They don’t know the first thing about us; they just hate us because we’re black.

The first time I felt surrounded by such hate was in 1977, when we were ten. We were driving down to St. Simons Island, Georgia, for vacation and stopped at a roadside diner in Birmingham for supper. David and I were cranky with hunger because we’d stuffed the liverwurst and lettuce sandwiches Mother passed out for lunch under our seat cushions in the van.

Dad led us to a round table at the back of the restaurant that was big enough for the eight of us, then David and I busied ourselves with the game on our placemats as we waited for the waitress to take our order. This was in our dill pickle stage, and while we looked for animals hidden in a jungle on our placemats, we debated whether to share a side of the crunchy sour disks or order a bowl each. We knew Mother’s rule: We had to finish whatever we ordered, or eat it for breakfast the next day. We decided breakfast pickles wouldn’t be half bad and to order a side each.

After a while, we noticed a silence and looked up. Our parents and older siblings—Deb, Dan, Laura, and Jerome—sat like statues, and beyond this familiar circle, the other diners glared at us with disgust stamped on their faces.

I was used to the curious looks and occasional frowns David and I gathered as we walked down the streets of Lafayette—I assumed people were as perplexed by my brother’s skin color as I was when I first saw him—but I’d never seen anything akin to the contempt reflected in the eyes of those Alabama folks.

Mother gazed down at her place setting with a clenched jaw, and my father’s cheeks burned red as he watched the waitress refill the coffee cups of the patrons at surrounding tables. David and I put down our crayons and focused on our parents, waiting for them to show us what to do.

After several minutes of this silence, Father pushed back his chair and stood up. He nodded curtly at Mother, who swept her arms upward like the choir director signaling us to stand, then bustled us out the door.

As we drove from the parking lot, I looked back at the diner. Through the window, I saw the waitress scrubbing our unused table with a rag and a spray bottle. No one mentioned what happened—not that night as we sat in the van, silent and hungry and searching for a drive-through—or ever afterward.

“Learn to leave things be,” Mother likes to say when bad things happen. “Turn the other cheek.”

And that’s what we try to do. Pretend these things don’t happen. But they do, again and again.

Outside, the sky has dimmed to olive, and I hear Lecka bark playfully. David’s home safe again.

I wonder what would have happened that night in Alabama, if, instead of walking out in defeat, our father had stood up and rebuked those people for treating a God-fearing family in such a shameful fashion. Our family was hungry just like they were. Didn’t we have a right to eat? Weren’t we all equal in the eyes of Jesus Christ? How dare they deny small children food? This was America after all, a country founded on the principles of Christian love and harmony!

Maybe he felt the same way we did this afternoon—outnumbered and out-hated. Maybe it is better to turn the other cheek in certain situations.

Reverend Dykstra often tells us that this world is not our home.

“This place is merely a proving ground,” he says. “Our suffering shall be rewarded in Heaven.”

But sometimes I think that I’d rather have less suffering now, even if it meant less glory in Heaven.

The basement door opens and the brass bell clangs. Supper. I drag myself off the cot and climb the dark stairway. Mother’s in the galley kitchen, stirring a large pot on the stove as Rejoice Radio plays Christian pop music over the intercom. At her back, the long windows cast a murky light over the hardwood floor of the great room. The new, L-shaped sectional lurks in semidarkness in one corner of the large room, the television and card table in another. A couple of boxes listing next to the stairwell—marked “winter gear”—wait to be carried downstairs and unpacked.

As I walk behind Mother toward the dining table—where David sits with his back to me—I inhale the sour steam billowing off the pot on the stove and grimace. Garbage Soup, again. I slide into the chair across from David, silently grabbing my neck as if I were choking. He smirks his agreement.

Garbage Soup is Mother’s name for it, not ours. She makes it from old vegetables and plate-scrapings—flaccid celery and carrot sticks, chicken bones, potato skins, cheese rinds—that she collects in a mayonnaise jar and freezes. When the jar is full, she stews the contents in salted water for two hours, strains the broth, adds hamburger, and le voilà, Garbage Soup! She says it’s loaded with vitamins, one of the most nutritious meals ever. But it tastes just like its name, sour and dirty and old. It’s summertime, the air con is off to save energy, and I’m damp with sweat, but the mayo jar was full, so it’s Garbage Soup for supper. Waste not, want not.

Mother grew up poor and takes pride in her penny-pinching talents, which include an apple pie made entirely from saltine crackers that costs only three cents a serving. We eat this stuff despite our sprawling ranch house and the Porsche Dad drives to work every day.

“You forgot the beverage,” Mother says wearily to David as she sets the rust-colored soup on the table. She stoops her shoulders as she ladles the broth into our bowls, making herself look more frail than she already is. Steam billows onto her glasses and into the tight light brown curls of her hair. I wait for her to raise her head and look at me, but she doesn’t.

David returns with a pitcher of Carnation instant milk, which he pours into the glasses. As it swirls watery gray into mine, he smirks at me again.

After Mother blesses the food, we eat in silence as she leafs through Christianity Today magazine at her end of the table. She’s in one of her moods; we knew it as soon as we returned from our bike ride. She was in the kitchen, ripping coupons from the newspaper, her lips smashed into a hard little line. She didn’t say hello and neither did we. We took one look at her and went downstairs; it’s best to fall under her radar when she gets like this.

The wind moans against the side of the house woo woo! and rushes through the open windows, fluttering the napkins in their stand. Outside, the trees dance at the edge of the back field as Sandi Patti sings “Yes, God Is Real” on Rejoice Radio. Mother lifts her spoon and blows across it without taking her eyes from the magazine. I stare at her and wonder what set her off this time. Maybe she got news of Jerome. Or she’s peeved that Dad’s late for the third night in a row. She glances up to see me staring and draws the magazine closer to her face, blocking me out completely. I look at David, and he shrugswhadda ya gonna do about it? Sometimes it seems the smallest signs of our existence— our laughter bubbling up from the basement, a book left on the couch—irritate her. She often tells us that she looks forward to the day we all leave home.

“God will be my family then,” she’ll say.

God and her missionaries. She’s got missionaries around the globe. Sends them letters and packages, birthday cards, chewing gum, $10 bills. Pins their photos to the bulletin board over her desk. White couples, posing with mud huts and dark children, their locations jotted on the back of each picture: “Loving the Lord in Laos.” “Coming to Christ in Colombia.” “Giving God to Ghana.” It all sounds vaguely pornographic to me, although I know they’re working hard to save souls.

She and Dad go on medical mission trips from which she returns giddy with enthusiasm. They make us sit through slide shows that document their god squad adventures. Look at this football-sized tumor. Here’s a gangrenous spear wound. We brought these loin-clothed pagans to Jesus, healing bodies and souls at the same time.

“Such gratitude for Christ, such a hankering for The Word!” Mother will gasp, shaking her head at the wonder of it.

Sometimes they show movies about missionary martyrs after Vespers, projecting the film onto the back of the church while we sit in folding chairs in the parking lot, drinking Kool-Aid. Mother holds these people in high esteem. Says she would have been a missionary herself if it weren’t for meeting our father.

I used to wish she’d show the same enthusiasm for us, pin our family photographs to her bulletin board. When I was in third grade, I poked all her missionaries’ eyes out with a thumbtack in a fit of jealousy. She paddled me for it.

I excuse myself to fetch the salt shaker from the kitchen and glance down at her magazine as I walk behind her chair. “God Is Everything” is the title of the article she’s reading. When I sit down again, David crosses his eyes and bares his teeth at me. I roll mine. Dweeb. He hooks his front teeth over his bottom lip and slits the corners of his eyes like a Chinaman. I shake my head and trace figure eights in the pool of fat skimming my soup, ignoring him. He knows I’m in a foul mood after the run-in with the farmers and is trying to cheer me up.

He wriggles his fingers in front of his bowl, insistently, and I lift my head. He flares his nostrils and pokes out his lips like those Africans you see in Cartoon Classics, the ones with the bones in their noses who dance around boiling cauldrons of white tourists. I snort despite myself—I don’t like it when he pokes fun of his features, but he’s trying so hard to distract me—and Mother lowers her magazine. Her bifocals flash as we quickly spoon soup into our mouths. When she lifts her magazine again, David flips up his eyelids, exposing the pink undersides, and rolls his pupils skyward so it looks like he’s got white marbles for eyes. He taps his fingers along the edge of the table, a blind man, finds his spoon and jabs it at his soup bowl. Ting! It collides with his milk glass instead.

“What in Heaven’s name?!” Mother exclaims.

David slowly turns his marble eyes in her direction as I tug on my milk, trying not to laugh.

“That’s ridiculous!” she sputters. “David! Put your eyes back, now!” Milk sprays out of my mouth and across the table.

“Julia!”

And then David’s doubled over and I’m doubled over and we’re both convulsing in our high-backed chairs. And we can’t stop no matter how much Mother shouts for us to stop or threatens to tell Father or bangs the table.

For a few moments, there’s nothing but us and our laughter, the soaring joy of our laughter, our laughter crashing through us like tidal waves and raining down our cheeks as tears.

* * *

My parents didn’t set out to adopt two black boys.

They wanted the white kid on my sister’s pediatric ward. Laura was born with spina bifida, and she spent much of her childhood in hospitals, being repaired and recuperating from repairs. During one month-long stay, she met an orphaned white boy, and they became fast friends. In the desperate manner of lonesome, suffering children, they clung to each other like family. My parents inquired after adopting him, only to learn he was taken.

But the adoption agency persisted. There were scads of other children who needed homes, they said: black children.

It was 1970, and America was scarred by racial violence. Civil rights leaders had been gunned down in the streets, and communities across the nation were smarting from race riots. My parents’ own state, Indiana, had once been a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan, and was still a haven for backwater bigots.

To reject a black baby would have been un-Christian, a sin. God was testing them. This was a chance to bear witness for Jesus Christ, to show the world that their God was not prejudiced and neither were they. Red and yellow, black and white, they’re all precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world. They would take a black baby home and call him son.

Such was the theory.

Years later, I learned that the first time my mother touched David, she feared “the black would rub off on her hands.”

Later still, I learned the miracle of my brother’s beginnings. That David was born to a thirteen-year-old girl, three months premature and weighing two pounds—less than a bottle of Jack Daniels. That machines and heat lamps kept him breathing during his first crucial months. That he was placed with a succession of foster families that gave him different names and collected their government checks and shut doors so they wouldn’t hear him cry. They weren’t paid to love the fragile baby with the liquid brown eyes, they were paid to keep him alive.

My parents would keep him alive and save his soul.

* * *

From Jesus Land, courtesy Julia Scheeres and Counterpoint. Purchase the book here.


Without Chief or Tribe: An Expat’s Guide to Having a Baby in Saudi Arabia

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Nathan Deuel | Friday Was the Bomb | May 2014 | 21 minutes (5,178 words)

 

For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share a full chapter from Friday Was the Bomb, the new book by Nathan Deuel about moving to the Middle East with his wife in 2008. Deuel has been featured on Longreads in the past, and we’d like to thank him and Dzanc Books for sharing this chapter with the Longreads community. 

Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle)

Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks)

 

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I was having lunch at the swan near Hyde Park and some son of a bitch took my bag with all my documents, the email began. It was June of 2009 and I was sitting at a desk in Riyadh. Assuming this was spam, I was about to press delete, when something made me reconsider.

Outside, it was summer in Saudi Arabia, where temperatures could exceed one hundred and thirty degrees. My wife Kelly and I had lived in the country for nearly a year. We’d spent much of our lives in foreign countries or in strange corners of North America. We’d met in Cambodia, spent years in Southeast Asia, got to know Russia and the former Soviet Union, and I proposed to her on a commercial fishing boat in Alaska. This time, however, the Middle East in general seemed a little beyond my talent set. Maybe it was the heat making me feel weak? By this time of year everyone was spending entire days indoors, emerging only to drive air-conditioned cars, in which metal could be so hot it might burn your skin. Streets buckled, the wind howled in from the desert, and meanwhile booze was still illegal, women were forbidden from consorting with men they weren’t related to, and it was hard to imagine why anyone would ever choose to settle here. Considering all this, we—the swashbuckling couple who had never shied away from doing something insane—were about to bring a new baby into the world.

Earlier that spring, my wife had consulted with our doctor, who was open to natural birth. Pressed, she admitted that even at this, the best hospital in the country, we couldn’t know in advance which doctor we might get for the actual event. Most doctors, we feared, would just wheel in the knives and proceed to surgery. In Saudi Arabia, women could have up to eight babies, and the rich ones understandably came to view childbirth with as much ceremony as a hair appointment and scheduled caesareans weeks in advance. After these procedures, the nurse would arrive, take the baby to the nursery, and when it was time to leave, a nanny fed the child and carried her to the car. Honestly, I didn’t think that sounded too bad. And Kelly might have agreed, too, had we not met that Swiss doula at a camel race outside town. While we watched the beasts galumph around a desert oval, the beatifically maternal Swiss woman advocated for a natural birth with as little to do with medicine or surgery as possible. Over the next few days, driving around Riyadh’s wind-blown terrain, we talked and I suppose both became convinced—enamored, really, by the challenge of it. After all, it seemed ironic—in an otherwise throwback culture, which was leery of modern progress, which loved all things pure and holy—that they might consider a natural birth odd and subversive. Kelly heard about a doctor who could help. We drove to his clinic with a stack of cash nearly half an inch thick. The money—five thousand dollars—was a guarantee he’d come any time, day or night, no matter what.

“Don’t worry,” he said after we’d paid the receptionist. “I’ll be there when you need me.”

Driving home, I remember thinking how easy that had been, but also what kind of freedom we’d lost in the transaction. Already, we were beginning to accumulate things that might slow us down. The rental car was about six hundred dollars a month. After we were kicked out of our first apartment, we took a risk and rented a roach-infested apartment in the middle of the city beside the Kuwaiti souk. Almost everyone in the building was a deeply religious Saudi family. But what could we do? We’d soon be parents and needed a place to stay. The landlord required all six months up front, an amount that would get you a month in a sprawling penthouse in Manhattan. We were paying all that in one of the harshest climates in the world, in the country perhaps more hostile to outsiders than any other, where Islam was practiced in its strictest form, where people were executed for witchcraft and adultery. We were incredibly alone and trying to have a baby in a country where family and religion was sacred, where the locals were intensely loyal to whatever group or ideas they considered theirs, and where rising oil prices meant everyone was getting rich. Meanwhile, we were living on the edge, without tribe or chief, attempting to ask questions of ourselves and others and be open to the world, making it as freelance journalists without health insurance or savings, no real safety net, and no formal support except for the distant and somewhat restrained awe and encouragement of friends and family back home. (“You live where? Why?”) Now we thought it’d be a good idea to become parents.

Occasionally, thinking about the implications of becoming a dad, I wondered if I’d ever again do something like walk from New York to New Orleans, which I’d done in 2007. All of a sudden, I had a pregnant wife and drove through hellish traffic in a city of ten million people, in the middle of the desert, and I’d recall how it was only on the slimmest of pretexts—a new kind of journalist visa—that we’d even been admitted to Saudi Arabia in the first place. For decades prior, few western reporters had been allowed much more than a short visit, during which they would be clung to by a government minder. But when the Saudi ambassador in Washington, impressed as he was that she occasionally worked for NPR, offered Kelly a week’s visa—and later when he agreed to sponsor me, though not to work, just as a spouse—we jumped at the chance. Who could say no to the opportunity to access one of the most under-covered and misunderstood corners of the world? Well, perhaps a lot of people. But not us. We could not say no.

When our 747 landed in September 2008 and we cleared passport control, we couldn’t believe our luck that no minder appeared, that we could simply retrieve our bags, walk out into the fearsome heat, flag down a taxi, and do whatever and go wherever we chose. It felt like everything was snapping into place.

That first night we went to the cheapest hotel in town. Moving from crap-room to crap-room, we managed, with some haggling over money and rules, to replace our original weeklong visas with a month’s permission, later converted into a three-month permit. We felt cocky, I suppose. Then Kelly learned she was pregnant. We attended a party that week with a bunch of diplomats, and I sipped their illicit champagne as we talked feverishly about what to do next. For the first time we envied, rather than ridiculed, the various British accents and networks of support and jobs and health care everyone was plugged into. Untethered from a world of parents and friends—the people you might take for granted when you’re wild and young, but the community that feels so critical when you’re pregnant—we wondered: Should we go home? I downed another glass, and we decided, fuck it, let’s do this.

That winter we secured a pair of six-month permissions. Kelly was already four months pregnant. If everything went well, she’d give birth in June and we’d get out just before our visas expired. (If you overstayed your visa, you could be deported, imprisoned, or worse.)

Her belly got bigger, and I started writing more regularly, and she filed more reports for NPR. When she was at full term, our visas were set to expire, and the due date was just a few days before my thirtieth birthday. Both of our moms were flying in to help—mine first, to be replaced immediately thereafter by Claudia, Kelly’s mom. With all of this on my mind, I sat at my computer in what would eventually be our daughter’s room, preparing to work on a book I’d been attempting to write for several years, trying to cool off when I opened the email that would change the tenor of what was already a complicated couple of weeks.

I was having lunch at the swan near Hyde Park and some son of a bitch took my bag with all my documents. The email was riddled with bizarre but authentic-feeling typos. It is sunday—US consulate closed til tomorrow…there are copies of my visa and passport on the frig 9i cannot remember Al’s email address-phone is almost dead-i have nothing!!! what to do now…

Al: That was my father’s name. This wasn’t spam. My mom was stranded in London hours before I was to pick her up at the airport in Riyadh, days before my wife was to go into labor.

Working illegally, I’d recently been let go from one crappy media job, and inexplicably lucking lucked into a second crappy media job at the last minute. The boss at the new shop agreed it wouldn’t make sense for me to start working while my wife was in labor. I could start, we agreed, a day or two after my kid’s birth.

The whole situation was a bit overwhelming. I tried not to think about how badly we needed the money. Then there was or the fact that my mom was stranded in London. With a brain frying from the high heat of an Arabian summer, I couldn’t help thinking again of the several thousand dollars we might need if there were complications—plus enough to pay for rent, to and buy a bed before my mom arrived—if she ever did—and still more to host Kelly’s mom, Claudia, who would arrive as my mom departed. Could you put a C-section on a credit card? I hoped you could. I slapped myself. I stopped stressing and I started writing.

Dear Clive Ward, I began, responding to the unfamiliar email address. Are you my mom?

* * *

Clive Ward, it turned out, was my mom’s new friend and the manager of the Hyde Park Hotel. During a ten-hour layover, she’d left Heathrow and taken the Tube to into town. While she drank at a pub, her purse had been stolen along with her wallet, passport, and brand-new camera. When I finally talked to the woman who’d given birth to me, her voice was shaky, and she expressed a great deal of regret about the whole thing. I calmed her down as best as I could and walked her through what she’d do: Get an emergency AmEx card, withdraw a bunch of cash, go to the US embassy for a new passport, beg the Saudi consulate in London for a new visa. This kind of stuff was old hat for Kelly and I, but it felt like a lot to put my mom through, and I began to think that maybe we’d overextended ourselves.

Bright and early Monday morning, with a fistful of cash and a new credit card, my mom waited at the US Embassy only to have American officials cheerfully inform her that the passport photos she’d gotten were a tad too small. She’d need to go make new ones. In tears, she wandered nearby streets trying to find a place that could make photos the right size for America.

The next day, with a new U.S. passport in hand, she asked the Saudi Embassy if they’d reissue her lost visa, without which she’d be turned away at the airport in Riyadh. It seemed like a simple request—especially with the backing of the Ambassador in DC—but London officials said, with regret, that it was in fact only the Saudi Embassy in the U.S. that could reissue such permission. Kelly’s due date was Thursday.

* * *

 

Miraculously, my mom arrived before the baby. On the day Kelly was due, with no signs yet of labor, I took the ladies to an Indian restaurant in Riyadh, where modesty laws required that we all sit in a booth behind a curtain, so that no one could see my wife or my mom’s faces. To summon a waiter, there was a button in the middle of the table. Whenever he arrived to bring more naan or to refresh our water, the waiter avoided our gaze. We ordered the spiciest food on the menu, hoping it might induce Kelly’s labor. My mom tried to be of good cheer. She was totally exhausted. London had cost her at least a thousand dollars. She needed a drink, but with Saudi’s strict rules against alcohol, we’d be lucky to have even a small taste of booze while she was here.

After lunch, we went to the mall. Other than mosques and a handful of grim parks, it was the only place in the entire city we could relax outside the apartment. (Movie theaters were outlawed; public space in general was highly charged and patrolled by religious police, who carried clubs.) Under the fluorescent glow, Kelly drank from a quart bottle of pineapple juice—said also to help induce labor—and she rode the escalator down, then walked up the stairs, repeating this over and over in hopes of jostling our child into being.

Every time we left the house I braced myself for some strange experience: Religious police asking us for our marriage license, a car wreck in which I might have to pay blood money, or an eager proselytizer trying to convert my family to Islam. With my slow-moving wife an easy target, I expected we might be accosted by a crowd of horny teenagers. I scanned the area. One afternoon, in the same mall, I’d seen a boy on an ATV ride in through the glass doors, rev his engine around the glass-ceilinged courtyard, and blast back outside, gunning his machine into traffic. There wasn’t much to do here.

The next night, my thirtieth birthday, Kelly’s water broke. The contractions started rolling in, and we cracked a bottle of white wine a diplomat gave us. My mom and I sipped, taking turns napping. Eventually, Kelly began to moan from the pain, but still she was adamant about not going to the hospital before she was ready. For two hours, she sat in the bathroom, the only spot in the house she felt comfortable, all the while moaning and slumping over. When she finally agreed to go, it was four in the morning. She’d been in labor for seven hours, and she could barely talk, let alone walk.

It took us an hour to get her pants on, then my mom and I frog-marched her into the car, where she was laid out like some kind of injured mermaid, sprawling in pain across the front passenger seat, which I’d reclined to full capacity. By that time of the night, the desert air had cooled. A light breeze ruffled a few palms. No cars were out, and you could hear the click of the traffic lights as they changed colors. The baby seat we’d bought for the occasion was in the trunk, as were snacks and water and various bags of gear. The car roared to life and I started driving northeast, through the city’s sprawling outer developments. Billboards advertised imported soup, luxury cars, and washing machines. I floored it between speed bumps, which, when hit, caused Kelly to groan. The hospital was twenty minutes away. Could I deliver a baby by the side of the road, in Saudi Arabia? I drove as fast as I could.

At last, I could see the emblem of the hospital—the outline of a palm beside a crescent moon—and at sixty miles per hour I barreled into the parking lot. A male attendant watched with wide eyes as Kelly limped in the door. Nurses examined her. She was already dilated eight centimeters.
***

 

The team that morning included women from Jordan and Tunisia. I’d met the Jordanian earlier in the week, when we’d dropped off a box of sweets along with the latest copy of our birth plan. I’d felt foolish then, but seeing familiar faces, I was glad we’d taken the time. My mom unpacked our bags, and I thought someone might object when she set up speakers that quietly played hippie flute music. Then she hung some eagle feathers on a wall, and our room began to feel like some sort of Ashram—illegal in a country that banned all religion but Islam—and for second I thought about what might go wrong.

Soon, we were hurtling toward the final push. I checked my watch. The doctor we’d paid all that money to still wasn’t here. I asked one of the nurses, and she shrugged. That’s when I noticed the appearance of another doctor, covered head to toe in a fearsome, strangely form-fitting Islamic robe, which revealed only her eyes—she was even wearing black gloves—making her look like a severe little ninja. Behind her came an orderly, who was wheeling in a cart of gleaming surgical equipment. This was exactly what we didn’t want to happen.

The tiny doctor lifted up Kelly’s robe, and her hand disappeared under the fabric. My wife began to bellow. She’d hunted for pirates in Indonesia, nearly had her arm torn off when we worked on a fishing boat in Alaska, and a few years from this moment, she’d embed with Syrian rebels. In this hospital on this day, her face was ashen and furious. I worried she might kill this tiny doctor. Taking care not to touch the black-robed woman, I ushered the doctor out of the room, explaining that we’d already paid for a specialist to be in attendance, that he was in fact en route (I hoped), that our birth plan requested no drugs or any major intervention unless absolutely necessary, that this plan was posted to the wall in the nurse’s station, that under no circumstances was she to come back into our room for any reason. She clicked her tongue at me and walked away. Kelly, grunting, took refuge in the bathroom.

I stood outside the door, listening. There was a low moan. I went in.

“Just give me some gas,” she pleaded. “Just a little? Pleeeeeeease. I need it.”

We’d practiced this. Kelly wanted to do the birth without drugs. In the moment, we were told it was all but certain she’d want them. Yet she’d ordered me not to listen to her begging or reasoning. I was to do whatever it took not to let her have what she wanted.

“They don’t have any,” I said, hoping she’d forgive me. “They’re all out.”

So fragile was Kelly—who normally took no shit—that she simply looked at me sadly, eyes wide, believing me completely. It was hard to imagine any other situation in which she’d take no for an answer.

My mom edged into the bathroom with a cup of Gatorade. The doctor had finally arrived. I poured some of the red stuff into Kelly’s mouth, as if she were a bird, taking care not to bump her nose. She hung her head, having neither eaten nor consumed liquid in twelve hours. As I hugged her shoulders, I felt her muscles liven, fortified perhaps by the salts and sugar. With a sigh, she let me help lift her off the toilet. Her head fell on my shoulder. She wore a loose gown and her skin was warm. I held her arm and walked her slowly through the door. She looked at me, climbed slowly up onto the bed. Then she got into position.

For that last hour—or was it five minutes?—I sat on the bed behind her, my legs out, steadying her, sometimes rubbing her back. My thighs cramped up so badly they’d felt like they might explode. Solidarity, I thought. But whatever I felt was nothing. I listened to all kinds of strange noises, and all I could see was the face of the Jordanian nurse, who smelled like cigarettes.

Y’allah,” she said to Kelly, speaking in Arabic. “Let’s go, honey. Let’s go, let’s go.”

Just after eight AM, I scrambled off the bed, putting my hand to our baby’s chest, saying, “Hello, baby, it’s so nice to meet you,” keeping contact as the doctor moved the two of us across the room to a small theater—me chanting, “Hey, baby. I’m here. Honey, I’m here”—when the doctor proceeded to look for signs of life. Seeing the little swollen bits between a tiny set of legs, my mom screamed, “It’s a boy!”

But she wasn’t. This was Loretta, who with one final thwack against her chest cried. I lifted her up, placed her on Kelly’s chest, and nearly fell to the ground in triumph. My birthday was over.

* * *

 

A day later, I sat in the hushed office of my new employer, a Lebanese-Syrian publishing company, which had postponed my start date until Loretta was born. The boss was agreeable enough—offering a congratulatory slice of his pizza and a few bites of his salad—but I’d soon learn that he was always too busy, preoccupied with making another deal. He had no time to oversee any of the projects he’d already agreed to. Plus, it was so difficult to recruit and train anyone to work in Saudi Arabia. His crew was a mix of weirdoes—the desperate, the incompetent, and the insane. In the sleepless haze of post-birth, I fit in just fine.

Most of my colleagues hunched unhappily behind ancient computers, tapping away at whatever it was I could never figure out, biding time before the next trip home. One guy was completely cross-eyed. Another seemed to speak no recognizable language.

But they all presumably had families they loved as much as I loved my own. However alienating Riyadh was for all of us, each of us had a connection as strong as the one I felt to two people back at an apartment across town. The only woman on staff was pregnant. There wasn’t much else to do in this country.

Unlike in less-wealthy Oman or Yemen, Saudi Arabia’s staggering oil profits were distributed in such a way that few nationals did much work. Foreign workers were imported to staff restaurants and shops, to build roads and fix and install technology, to manage and grow the thriving commercial sector. It wasn’t easy to get someone to come here from abroad. Whether they sought a janitor or a graphic designer or a writer, companies had to pay for annual flights back, and most firms even supplied housing.

A majority of those Saudis who did work had cushy jobs in state agencies paid for by oil profits where they were reported to drink lots of tea. But a new law on the books required private enterprise to employ at least one local. Our token local was a handsome dude in his early twenties who arrived at ten AM in his red sports car. Most days, he’d glide into the office, take off his sunglasses, listen to a little music, surf the web, make some tea, then go home. One day I asked him to translate some stuff for an article I was writing about Japan. He looked at me quizzically then wandered off to the bathroom.

We met regularly with clients, piling into the CEO’s luxury sport utility vehicle, plowing down kilometers of new asphalt, where we’d arrive at the gleaming headquarters of some massive state-run medical cooperative or an oil conglomerations. Our sales pitch was to produce a variety of unreadable magazines and in-house circulars or occasionally a glossy brochure for a company who sold specialty drill bits or plastic sacks for transporting salt. I wore rumpled dress shirts and tried to smile. My role was to be the marginally enthusiastic American, trotted out to speak perfect English and say a few words of encouragement, such as, “We care about your company’s success” or “I love health care and corporate social responsibility in equal measure,” justifying, I suppose, whatever huge fees we were charging. The whole thing was demoralizing at times but always fascinating and occasionally hilarious. When we met up with friends—many of them diplomats or journalists—I never told anyone where I worked, because it was all technically illegal, seeing as how I was in the country as the spouse of a journalist. And I was also embarrassed. On my worst days, I told myself this: enjoy the money and think of the whole thing as a crazy experiment.

More importantly, there was the matter of an exit visa for Loretta. Until she had some kind of Saudi paperwork, we learned, there’d be no attempting to leave the country. In essence, according to local jurisprudence, Loretta wasn’t even ours. My mom was long gone and Claudia had only stayed for two weeks. We spent much of their visits lying around in a giant bed, watching baby TV. Since Loretta’s birth, Kelly had stayed home, breast-feeding and cooing. And though she had done all the work to put things in motion, it was I who chipped away at the mountain of paperwork required to get us out of the country. On short lunch breaks, when I wasn’t cutting out of work early to go to some obscure office to get a new stamp or form, I would cross an eight-lane highway thick with Suburbans driven by crazed teenagers in order to pace the halls of a mostly moribund mall near my office. I’d smoke cigarettes and make calls and drink Diet Pepsi, and in a way that was becoming all too familiar, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things that could go wrong.

First we needed a Saudi birth certificate, which required U.S. Embassy-approved translations and notarizations. With those in hand, plus several forms printed out and filled out in triplicate, plus a bunch of photos of Loretta, who when taken to a photo studio was two days old and asleep, only then could I get in line at the U.S. embassy to get her a passport, which had to be manufactured in the United States and sent back to Saudi. Disclaimers in all caps from the State Department warned us that they couldn’t help us if we overstayed our visa, that jail time was possible, that heads of families had indeed been forced to send their children home while they battled some immigration case. Waiting in line to pick up the passport one afternoon, I watched as a woman sobbed, “I want my husband. Where is my husband? Can’t someone help me!” With time running out, I drove to the dreaded immigration headquarters in south Riyadh, where I would submit the U.S. documents along with several inscrutable Arabic papers I could not even begin to decipher. It was a mind-meltingly sunny day in July, and I was waiting in an epic line when a man slithered up beside me like an eel. His teeth were bad and he seemed drunk.

“I can help you fill out your forms,” he said.

A roomful of men turned to look at us.

Years before, I might have figured out how to enjoy this, or at least see it as a bit of an adventure. But with the stakes so high—Loretta was so small!—I couldn’t help jumping to conclusions. What if they tried to take her away from us? She was born on their soil, and we were at their mercy. The consequences of failure were of a magnitude so vast and incomprehensible that I couldn’t stomach any kind of problem. When I was twenty-four and living in Indonesia, for instance, the prospect of going to jail was kind of hilarious. But as a father, there was nothing to laugh at, just the little girl who needed me to complete her paperwork.

Through the window I saw a line of what looked like Afghan guest workers outside. Their legs were chained to a long iron rod, and they shuffled in the sun across a sandy lot. My shirt was soaked through and I imagined my own legs in chains and then my ladies in limbo and I couldn’t take it anymore and—I’m not proud of this—I skipped ahead of all the men from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and India and walked right to the front desk.

“You have to help me,” I said, pleading, staring into the eyes of a very thin Saudi army colonel in epaulets who was smoking a cigarette. He took a long drag. “My daughter,” I said, showing him a picture. “We need to get her home in time for an important religious ceremony.”

This was our trump card: baptism. I hadn’t been to church voluntarily in my entire life, but Kelly’s grandmother had long worked in a convent, where Kelly’s aunt was still a nun. My grandmother on my dad’s side prayed for us all the time. For all of them, we’d decided to give the little girl her dunk in the holy water.

The man put down his cigarette. Religion meant something here, even if wasn’t Islam; faith commanded respect, and more importantly, action. He walked to a shelf filled with thick leather binders. Paging through the yellowing paper of one, he found an open space and took out an ink pen. Peering closely at my shaky handwriting and the picture of our newborn daughter, he slowly began to write. Then he stopped, inspected my forms again. I held my breath. I said a little prayer. Was something wrong? Then with a sigh, he resumed scratching, producing line after line of flowing Arabic. Finally, he took out a stamp, moistened it with a small sponge, affixed it to little Loretta’s passport page, signed, and with that, we could leave.

* * *

 

Back in America, Loretta was baptized, and we began a sort of victory tour up and down the East Coast. In New York, we grilled pork sausages and clinked cold beers. On a sunny day in Miami, where my parents lived, I watched my dad hold his squirming grandchild. It felt like nothing could go wrong.

Then, NPR, which had been flirting with giving Kelly a better gig, issued fresh signals that a full-time correspondent job might be in the cards. With more to prove—to ourselves and others—we went back to Saudi Arabia.

We were on a short assignment in Yemen months later when we learned my dad was sick. By the time I got to the hospital in Florida, where he died, I realized how tired I was. A few weeks later, after another lunch in DC, NPR made Kelly an offer she couldn’t refuse.

Sitting on a lawn in suburban Virginia, my dad dead and buried, I talked to my wife on the phone minutes after she’d accepted the job. My daughter picked at pieces of tender grass. In some ways, we would finally have the stability a new child seemed to demand. The problem was that Kelly’s new job was in Baghdad.

* * *

From Friday Was the Bomb, copyright 2014 Nathan Deuel and Dzanc Books.

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Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

The House of Mondavi: How an American Wine Empire Was Born

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Julia Flynn Siler | The House of Mondavi | 2007 | 14 minutes (3,328 words)

For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to feature an excerpt from The House of Mondavi, Julia Flynn Siler’s book about a family that turned a Napa Valley winery into a billion-dollar fortune. Thanks to Siler and Gotham Books for sharing it with the Longreads community.

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* * *

Crush: 1966–1972

The first few months at the Robert Mondavi Winery were chaotic. Carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians, and the winemaker, Warren Winiarski, were all working on top of one another. By late summer, there were walls, but still no roof, catwalks, or ladders to reach the tops of the new stainless steel fermenters. Parts were missing and there was no place to do any lab work—let alone a lab technician to do it. Since there were no desks or offices or tables, Winiarski worked from a clipboard. Robert, who had a small office in a trailer, was seldom in one place for long. Winiarski would see him early in the morning and late in the day; the rest of the time, he was a whirlwind of energy, conferring with the builders, making deals for grapes, consulting, and purchasing equipment.

Robert’s energy was infectious and his aspirations heady. But he was strongly motivated to start making wine. Fired from Krug without any significant severance pay, Robert was under severe financial pressure. With construction costs mounting, he sought to produce cash flow as quickly as possible. So he set an ambitious timeline. He was determined to bring in the harvest that first year and crush grapes to make the Robert Mondavi Winery’s first vintage. From groundbreaking to crush, he had two, or perhaps three, months at most. Although Robert had probably not fully formed his intentions for the new winery in 1966, even by then the people who were helping him to make it happen recognized that his dreams were lofty.

“It was not meant to be a small winery and it was not meant to be a family winery.”

“From the beginning, the Robert Mondavi Winery was meant to reach out,” says Winiarski.

Once again, the friendships that Robert had built after twenty years in the valley came to his rescue. William Bonetti, by then the production chief at Charles Krug, helped Winiarski with some lab work, allowing him to come over and use the Krug lab to run simple analytical tests of the fermenting juice, as well as to borrow equipment and chemicals. Winiarski had assumed that Bonetti had gotten Peter’s implicit, if not explicit, permission to help out his brother, but it wasn’t exactly clear, since neither brother had spoken openly to Winiarski of the simmering feud.

Krug also crushed grapes for the Robert Mondavi winery’s first year, sold it yeast, bottles, and a labeling machine, and loaned the new winery a bottling machine free of charge. As a safety net, Peter and Rosa agreed to pay Robert a $9,000-a-year consulting fee after he was fired, although he never performed any consulting services for Krug. While they didn’t welcome Robert as a competitor, they also didn’t want him to fail. As Peter later explained, “We felt that he needed some support from the family inasmuch as he ventured, and we wanted to see him make a success of what he was doing.” Louis Martini and the winemakers at Beaulieu also pitched in to help out their old friend.

And when the time came to design the winery’s first label, Robert again turned to people he had worked with at Krug: a well-known local printer named James E. Beard and a graphic designer named Mallette Dean. Dean had done beautiful work over the years for Krug, including a delicate woodcut of a farmer tending grapevines that had graced the masthead of the Krug newsletter “Bottles & Bins.”

The label the pair created for the new Robert Mondavi Winery captured its spirit centered around Dean’s wood engraving of the Cliff May building, with its elegant arch and wings. But Dean struggled with a lack of vertical balance in the frame, which he eventually corrected by adding a flank of poplar trees to the scene. In the real setting, a series of trees planted on the walkway had failed to flourish in the 1970s, so eventually, to match the reality to the image on the label, the winery ended up planting poplar trees where Dean had imagined them.

Dean’s label for the Robert Mondavi Winery quickly became one of the iconic images of Napa Valley.

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Photo: aphasiafilms, flickr

The cool weather that year also came to Robert’s aid, pushing harvest back by several weeks. Fieldworkers picked the last Cabernet grapes on Veterans Day, November 11, in a season marked by tule fog and cool evenings that often cloaked the valley until ten or eleven in the morning.

To the astonishment of some of the friends and rivals who’d called him crazy, Robert managed to make wine that first year. In 1966, the new Robert Mondavi Winery crushed about 490 tons of grapes—even though there was nothing even close to resembling a building on the site yet. By the time the crush rolled around, there were only concrete slabs on the ground, foundations for the fermenting tanks. In the open air, Robert pumped the juice from the fermenting tanks into other tanks. As summer became autumn, workers were plastering the walls of the newly erected building, even as Warren Winiarski made the wine.

Returning to the rituals and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church, Robert marked his winery’s first crush of the grapes surrounded by his immediate family and his most supportive friends on a sunny morning in mid-September. Robert halted the whirl of painting, plastering, and sanding for a few hours. On a concrete platform surrounded by dirt, a group of a few dozen people gathered on the north side of what would become the winery. Father Levinus of the nearby Carmelite monastery, wearing a long black robe that fell to his ankles and a white cassock over that, faced the gondola that held the grapes. Marcia Mondavi, with her short-cropped dark hair and a ladylike knee-length skirt and sleeveless blouse, bowed her head and clasped her hands together. The priest began his benediction in English sprinkled with Latin words.

blessing
Photo courtesy of Robert Mondavi Winery

In the background, Winiarski operated the lift that raised the gondola filled with grapes and tipped them into the hopper. From there, the fruit moved along a conveyer belt to the crusher. The mechanics of the moment only hinted at the deeper transformations that would take place as the grapes moved toward their transfiguration into wine. The atmosphere was solemn: There was no round of applause or cheering as Robert’s partners Fred Holmes, Bill Hart, and Ivan Shoch stood watching, their families beside them. Also present was Charles Daniels and two of his sons. Daniels had been distributing Krug’s wines since the 1940s and was close friends with Robert. He wanted to support him in his new venture and offered to distribute his wines when they were released in the spring of 1967, even though he knew that support would infuriate Peter.

For growers such as Holmes and Hart, crush is a moment of death as well as birth. The life that they have nurtured from bud break through harvest is coming to an end; another is about to begin. “There is a death taking place here,” reflects Warren Winiarski, who later became one of the valley’s most famous winemakers. “It’s the death of the grape. I never saw a grower sad, but solemn. They’re glad that it’s happening but it’s a mixed feeling. They’ve worked all that season to make these grapes what they are and now they are being crushed, being destroyed in order to be reborn into a different substance. They’re glad but also a little bit mindful of destruction.”

But that moment of solemnity passed. Robert said a few words about a new beginning. The group included workmen clad in overalls and hats to shield them from the sun. Marjorie began pouring the white wine that had waited for the group beneath a folding card table in a plastic tub filled with ice. Looking cool and elegant, with her blond hair pinned into a chignon, Marjorie, like her daughter, had dressed for the heat, in a conservative A-line skirt that stopped just below the knee and white flats, even though miniskirts and go-go boots were shocking the nation elsewhere.

After the ceremony, the Holmeses, Shochs, and Mondavis gathered for a group photo in front of the grape-filled gondola. The adults held long-stemmed wineglasses. Robert smiled at Marjorie. Timothy, fair-haired and with the gangly look of a teenager, wore black-and-white-laced Converse sneakers. Then just fifteen years old, he, too, held a wineglass in his hand. Marcia, looking contemplative, sat below the row of standing adults. Perhaps in a foreshadowing of the family drama to come, Robert’s elder son was absent on that momentous day.

* * *

The new Mondavi winery was the most significant to be built in the valley since Prohibition, and with barely three dozen bonded wineries operating in the valley at the time, the groundbreaking marked a key turning point. “The construction of the Robert Mondavi Winery marks the effective beginning of American wine’s rise in both quality and prestige,” wrote the wine historian Paul Lukacs.

“What happened there helped ignite the revolution in American tastes.”

“It also helped change broad public attitudes toward wine in general and American wine in particular.”

That fall, however, the significance of Robert’s bold new winery—a venture that some dismissed as “Robert’s Folly” and others as an example of his hubris—seemed to offer concrete proof of the fissure between the proud and talented Mondavi brothers. Fellow vintners watched the rising feud between Robert and Peter with a mixture of sympathy and dismay. After all, Robert was building his winery just five miles south of Krug on Highway 29. The brothers were barely on speaking terms. Other vintners in the valley didn’t talk about it much; mostly, they looked the other way.

But what also caught everyone’s attention and provoked some amused comments was that almost as soon as he started his own winery, Robert began pronouncing his surname differently than Peter, Rosa, and the rest of the family.

He restored it to “Mon-dah-vee,” which was how the name was pronounced before Cesare had Americanized it after immigrating to the U.S.

Meanwhile, Peter and the rest of the family continued to pronounce their last name as they always had done: “Mon-day-vee.”

However slight the change, the new pronunciation had the intended effect of distinguishing Robert from his younger brother. When his longtime friend Charles Daniels asked Robert why he’d changed it, Robert explained with a straight face: “That’s the proper Italian pronunciation.” Daniels also recalled that around that time, some people in the valley began asking, “What is it with this Mondavi business?” referring to the rift between the brothers and Robert’s startling decision to Europeanize his last name. Robert never formally announced the change in pronunciation; it just spread through usage. In later years, his sister Helen would even jokingly introduce herself as “Helen Mon-dah-vee Mon-day-vee.”

And soon enough many people—and especially newcomers to the valley—started referring to the entire family as “Mon-dah-vees”—a galling, frequent reminder to Peter of Robert’s linguistic coup over the rest of the family.

The Robert Mondavi Winery’s growing reputation was built on fine wines, meaning expensive wines made almost exclusively from Napa Valley grapes. It was also built on Robert’s gift for hiring talented winemakers. Keeping those winemakers was another matter, though. For Robert faced an ongoing problem: With one son in the business and another likely to join, the family would always get the credit for the elegant wines that were produced at Oakville, even though it was often the staffers doing much of the work. And although Robert would pay employees 10 to 15 percent above other wineries’ wages and offered such perks as weekly wine tastings, there was a ceiling to any career ambitions that a staffer without the last name Mondavi might entertain at the winery. The family openly acknowledged this.

Michael, upon his return, worked hard and earned just $650 a week. To try to drum up business, he would sometimes drive slowly down Highway 29 from Rutherford to Oakville, waiting for cars to stack up behind him. Driving a pickup truck borrowed from his father-in-law, he’d then slowly make the right-hand turn into the winery. When a car or two followed him, as they often did, he’d jump out of his truck and stick out his hand, saying, “Hi there, I’m Michael Mondavi. Would you like a tour?” Yet, Michael also clearly enjoyed an advantage because of his last name, even joking about it at times. On meeting Michael for the first time for a job interview, one applicant asked if he minded that the applicant’s wife also worked at the winery.

Robert’s elder son leaned back in his chair and grinned: “Nepotism can be a good thing.”

But this practice carried a sizable cost for the company: Ambitious employees often ended up quitting for better opportunities elsewhere. The first to go was Warren Winiarski, the academic refugee from the University of Chicago. Winiarski worked through the first two crushes at the Robert Mondavi Winery, amid the chaos of construction, and left shortly before the third in 1968.

This first year, Winiarski did much of the lab work himself as well as supervising crush, fermentation, and aging of the reds. Michael was doing his National Guard duty for much of the first year as the Vietnam War raged, so Winiarski took his guidance from Robert. In terms of the day-to-day production, Winiarski was in charge, without any sort of directions in terms of style from either Robert or Michael to produce, for example, Bordeaux-style wines. Because so much else was going at the winery—completing construction, negotiating grape contracts, and selling their first year’s wine—Winiarski was left mostly to his own devices. Yet by 1967, Michael had returned from the National Guard and become, in title at least, the winemaker at Mondavi.

That proved frustrating for Winiarski, who, despite his differences with Lee Stewart, had embraced his old boss’s style of paying close attention to even the seemingly most minor details of winemaking. Michael, in turn, had no formal training in enology or chemistry and while he had absorbed a general understanding of winemaking from his days as a cellar rat at Krug, he was not by nature highly detail-oriented. So when incidents occurred in Winiarski’s second and third years at Mondavi, such as Michael taking the valves off the tanks and not replacing them, thus inadvertently exposing the wine to air, Winiarski started to wish he had more control. “There were things he didn’t see because he didn’t care,” says Winiarski. “He liked wine but it wasn’t his passion.”

Winiarski had borrowed money in 1965 to buy fifteen acres of his own up on Howell Mountain, where he hoped to plant a vineyard. His first season in 1967 was a disappointment but he didn’t give up. The following year, his plans to start a vineyard of his own started to come together. So, hoping he could support his family as a freelance winemaker and consultant, he announced he was quitting the Robert Mondavi Winery, shortly before the crucial time of harvest. As Winiarski tells it, Michael was not happy about the timing of his departure. But “I didn’t come to California to be the number-two man in a two-man winery,” recalled Winiarski, referring to his relatively short stay at Souverain Cellars. “The same thing was true at Mondavi.” While Winiarski learned an extraordinary amount at both places, he bridled at working under someone else.“Everyone who is devoted to making something wants to have control of the material—finally and completely—and that couldn’t happen there because of Mike and Robert. It was their material,” meaning it was ultimately their grapes, yeast, barrels, and wine.

It didn’t take long for Robert to recruit Winiarski’s replacement: a talented Croatian immigrant named Miljenko “Mike” Grgich, who was then working at Beaulieu Vineyard for André Tchelistcheff, the quality-driven winemaker who demanded high standards of cleanliness and precision from his staff. Tchelistcheff was about to retire, but ironically his own son had applied for his job, which seemed to suggest that Grgich was unlikely to become the next winemaker at Beaulieu, the most revered producer of fine wines in the valley. Robert knew of Grgich’s situation and thought he might be looking for a new position. So the men arranged a chat in the fall of 1968, just a few weeks after Winiarski had left.

Grgich made the short, two-mile drive down Highway 29 and met with Robert on a wooden bench, near the Robert Mondavi Winery’s mission-style arch. It was a sunny fall day and Robert’s enthusiasm was infectious, as he explained to Grgich his dream of making French-style wines with the newest and most technologically advanced equipment available. Robert also explained that his son recently had returned from duty in the National Guard and was the vice president of winemaking. “I need someone to help my son Michael, who is very young,” Robert told Grgich. While his job title would be head of quality control, in fact he would run the winemaking operation for the family and be the actual winemaker, in a deus-ex-machina fashion. In return, Robert offered Grgich the opportunity to build his reputation as one of the finest winemakers of his generation.

“Mike, if you join my company, I’ll make out of you a little André Tchelistcheff!” he promised him.

It was an irresistible offer, made more so because of Robert’s evident passion to make the Robert Mondavi Winery America’s finest. Grgich accepted and got to work, introducing—among other methods he had learned at Beaulieu—malolactic fermentation, a technique that lends a soft, buttery quality to wines by converting hard malic acids into soft lactic acids. Every Monday, led by Robert, the staff would have their own blind tastings of Mondavi wines against the best from France. It entered into company legend that the winery was California’s largest importer of French grand crus because of these competitive tastings. Robert showed up at the winery nearly as early as Grgich, at six or seven each morning during crush, to taste the progress of the fermenting juice from the barrels or discuss a technical issue with his winemaker.

The very first Cabernet Grgich made for the winery, the 1969, was entered in a blind tasting—which meant that the wine labels would be hidden from the judges—against several other Cabernet Sauvignons from California. Organized by the Los Angeles Times’s wine writer, Robert Lawrence Balzer, the judges, who included Tchelistcheff and Robert, had made most of the wines being tasted that day. When the judges voted the 1969 Robert Mondavi Winery Cabernet as the very best, that decision led to a rush of favorable publicity for the young winery, catapulting it overnight into the ranks of such revered wines as those made at Beaulieu.

Though Grgich had made the wine, Robert took credit for it.

The Balzer tasting, as it came to be known, was the first big publicity breakthrough for the winery, sending its sales soaring. It helped attract the attention of the European wine trade, which, a few years later, in 1976, would organize a blind tasting that would have an even more significant impact on Napa Valley.

* * *

From The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty by Julia Flynn Siler (juliaflynnsiler.com). Published by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA), LLC. Copyright © 2007 by Julia Flynn Siler.

Photo: flydolce, flickr

The Story of H.M.: The Amnesiac Who Profoundly Changed the Way We Think About Memory

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Sam Kean | The Tale of Dueling Neurosurgeons | 2014 | 12 minutes (3,008 words)

For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share a story from The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, a new book from science reporter Sam Kean looking at stories about the brain and the history of neuroscience. Here’s Kean:

In our minds, we more or less equate our identities with our memories; our very selves seem the sum total of all we’ve done and felt and seen. That’s why we cling to our memories so hard, even to our detriment sometimes—they seem the only bulwark we have against the erosion of the self. That’s also why disorders that rob us of our memories seem so cruel.

In the excerpt below, I explore one of the most profound cases of amnesia in medical history, H.M., who taught us several important things about how memory works. Perhaps most important, he taught us that different types of memories exist in the brain, and that each type is controlled by different structures. In fact, H.M. so profoundly changed our ideas about memory that it’s hard to remember what things were like before him.

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In the early 1930s a bicyclist in Connecticut struck a small boy, who tumbled and cracked his skull. No one knows whether the accident alone caused his epilepsy—three cousins had it, so he might have been predisposed—but the blow probably precipitated it, and at age ten he started having seizures. Each lasted around forty seconds, during which time his mouth flopped open, his eyes slipped shut, and his arms and legs crossed and uncrossed as if curled by an invisible puppeteer. He suffered his first grand mal on, of all days, his fifteenth birthday, while riding in the car with his parents. More followed, in class and at home and while shopping—up to ten seizures a day, with at least one major episode per week. So at an age when most people are struggling to find an identity, he was saddled with one he didn’t want: the kid who shook, who bit his tongue, who slumped over and blacked out and pissed himself. The mockery got so bad he dropped out of high school, and he earned his diploma only at twenty-one, from a different school. He ended up living at home and working in a motor shop.

Finally the desperate young man—soon immortalized as H.M.—decided to try surgery. When younger, H.M. had dreamed of practicing neurosurgery himself and studying how the brain works. But while H.M. did end up contributing, profoundly, to neuroscience, his affliction ensured that he would never grasp his own importance.

H.M. started seeing Dr. William Scoville around 1943. A noted daredevil—before a medical conference in Spain once, he’d stripped off his jacket and mixed it up with the toros in the bullring—Scoville liked risky surgeries, too, and had jumped onto the American lobotomy bandwagon* early. But he disliked the drastic changes in his patients’ personalities, so he began experimenting with “fractional” lobotomies, which destroyed less tissue. Over the years he basically worked his way around the brain, carving out this piece or that and checking the results, until he finally reached the hippocampus.

Because it was part of the limbic system, scientists at the time believed that the hippocampus helped process emotions, but its exact function remained unknown. Rabies often destroyed it, and James Papez had singled it out for attention. (A poetaster, Papez even penned a ditty to his wife that read: “It’s Pearl, my girl on Broad Street / that I miss… My hippocampus tells me this.”) Scoville was less enamored: he’d seen the mental turmoil that hippocampus damage could cause. So in the early 1950s he started removing the hippocampi (you have one in each hemisphere) from a few psychotics. Although it was hard to be sure in people with such disturbed minds, they seemed to suffer no ill effects, and two women in particular showed a marked reduction in seizures. Unfortunately Scoville neglected to do careful follow-up tests until November 1953—after he’d convinced H.M. to try the surgery.

H.M.’s operation took place in Hartford, Connecticut, on September 1, 1953. Scoville peeled back his patient’s scalp, then used a hand crank and one-dollar drill saw from a local hardware store to remove a bottle cap’s worth of bone from above each eye. As cerebrospinal fluid drained away, the brain settled down in its cavity, giving Scoville more room to work. With what looked like an elongated shoehorn, he nudged aside H.M.’s frontal and temporal lobes and peered inside.

The hippocampus sits at ear level and has the rough shape and diameter of a curled thumb. Hoping to remove as little tissue as possible, Scoville first sparked each hippocampus with wires to find the origin of H.M.’s seizures. No luck, so he grabbed a long metal tube and began cutting and sucking out tissue gram by gram; he eventually removed three inches’ worth of hippocampus on each side. (Two nubs of hippocampal tissue remained behind, but because Scoville also removed the connections between those nubs and other parts of the brain, the nubs were useless, like unplugged computers.) For good measure, Scoville removed H.M.’s amygdalae and other nearby structures as well. Given how deeply all these structures are embedded in the brain, only a neurosurgeon could have destroyed them with such precision.

Post-op, H.M. remained drowsy for a few days, but he could recognize his family and carry on a seemingly normal conversation. And by many measures, the operation succeeded. His personality never changed; the seizures all but disappeared (two attacks per year at most); and when the fog of epilepsy lifted, his IQ jumped from 104 to 117. Just one problem: his memory was shot. Aside from a few small islands of recollection—like the fact that Dr. Scoville had operated on him—an entire decade’s worth of memories from before the surgery had vanished. Equally terrible, he couldn’t form new memories. Names escaped him now, as did the day of the week. He repeated the same comments over and over, verbatim, and while he might remember directions to the bathroom long enough to get there, he always had to ask again later. He’d even consume multiple lunches or breakfasts if no one stopped him, as if his appetite had no memory, either. His mind had become a sieve.

In light of modern knowledge, H.M.’s deficit makes sense. Memory formation involves several steps. First, neurons in the cortex jot down what our sensory neurons see and feel and hear. This ability to record first impressions still worked in H.M. But like messages scrawled on the beach, these impressions erode quickly. It’s the next step, involving neurons in the hippocampus, that makes memories last. These neurons produce special proteins that encourage axon bulbs to swell in size. As a result, the axons can stream more neurotransmitter bubbles toward their neighbors. This in turn strengthens the synapse connections between those neurons before the memory decays. Over months and years—provided the first impression was strong enough, or we think about the event from time to time—the hippocampus then transfers the memory to the cortex for permanent storage. In short, the hippocampus orchestrates both the recording and the storage of memories, and without it, this “memory consolidation” cannot occur.

Scoville couldn’t have known all this, but he’d clearly sabotaged H.M.’s memory, and he didn’t know what to do. So a few months later, when he saw that Wilder Penfield was about to publish a report on hippocampus damage, Scoville called the renowned surgeon and confessed.

Penfield had recently operated on two patients with hippocampal epilepsy. To be safe, he’d removed the structure on just one side, but unbeknownst to him, the seizures had already destroyed the other hippocampus in each person. So removing the one left both patients without a working hippocampus, and they developed the purest amnesia Penfield had ever seen. Although he was still puzzling through the cases, a graduate student was going to present them at a scientific meeting in Chicago in 1954.

When Scoville called, Penfield reportedly flipped out, berating him for his recklessness. After calming down, though, the scientist in Penfield realized (much as the beriberi doctors had) that Scoville had actually performed an invaluable experiment: here was a chance to determine what the hippocampus did. As part of its mission Penfield’s clinic in Montreal tracked the psychological changes that patients experienced after psychosurgery. So Penfield dispatched a Ph.D. student from the Neuro, Brenda Milner, down to Connecticut to investigate the hippocampusless H.M.

After his memory vanished, H.M. lost his job and had no choice but to keep living with his parents. He spoke in a monotone now and had no interest in sex, but otherwise seemed normal. To the neighbors, it probably just looked like he was loafing his life away. He took a part-time job packing rubber balloons into plastic bags, and did odd chores around the house. (Although his parents had to remind him where they kept the lawn mower every single time, he could actually mow just fine, since he could see what grass he hadn’t cut.) His temper did flare up occasionally: his mother tended to nag, and he cuffed her a few times and kicked her shins. Another time, when an uncle removed a few choice rifles from the family’s gun collection, he flew into a rage. (Despite his amnesia he retained a lifelong love of guns, and always remembered to renew his NRA membership.) But he whiled away most days peacefully, either doing crossword puzzles—working through the clues methodically, in order—or flopping in front of the television and watching either Sunday Mass or the old movies that, to him, would never become classics. It was like early retirement, except for the days Milner arrived to test him.

Milner would take the night train down from Montreal to Hartford, arriving at 3 a.m. and spending the next few days with H.M. Her battery of tests confirmed Scoville’s basic observations pretty quickly: H.M. had little memory of the past and no ability to form new memories going forward. This was already a big advance—proof that some parts of the brain, namely the hippocampus, contribute more to forming and storing memories than other parts. And what Milner discovered next redefined what “memory” even meant.

Rather than keep asking him questions he couldn’t answer, she started testing H.M.’s motor skills. Most important, she gave him a piece of paper with two five-pointed stars on it, one nested inside the other star. The outer star was about six inches wide, and there was a half-inch or so gap between them. The test required H.M. to trace a third star between the two with a pencil. The catch was, he couldn’t see the stars directly: Milner had shielded the diagram, and he had to look at them in a mirror instead. Left was right, right was left, and every natural instinct about wheren to move his pencil was wrong. Anyone taking this mirror test for the first time makes a mess—the pencil line looks like an EKG—and H.M. proved no exception. Somehow, though, H.M. got better. He didn’t remember any of the thirty training sessions Milner ran him through. But his unconscious motor centers did remember, and after three days he could trace the star in the mirror fluently. He even commented near the end, “This is funny… I would have thought it would be rather difficult, but it seems I’ve done pretty well.”

Milner remembers the star test as a eureka. Before this, neuroscientists thought of memory as monolithic: the brain stored memories all over, and all memory was essentially the same. But Milner had now teased apart two distinct types of memory. There’s declarative memory, which allows people to remember names, dates, facts; this is what most of us mean by “memory.” But there’s also procedural memory—unconscious memories of how to pedal a bicycle or sign your name. Tracing the stars proved that H.M., despite his amnesia, could form new procedural memories. Procedural memories must therefore rely on distinct structures within the brain.

This distinction between procedural and declarative memories (sometimes called “knowing how” versus “knowing that”) now undergirds all memory research. It also sheds light on basic mental development. Infants develop procedural memory early, which explains why they can walk and talk fairly quickly. Declarative memory develops later, and its initial weakness prevents us from remembering much from early childhood.

Another distinct type of memory emerged from Milner’s tests as well. One day Milner asked H.M. to remember a random number, 584, for as long as possible. She then left him alone for fifteen minutes while she had a cup of coffee. Contrary to her expectation, he still knew the number when she returned. How? He’d been repeating it under his breath, over and over. Similarly, H.M. could remember the words “nail” and “salad” for several minutes by imagining a nail piercing some salad greens and reminding himself over and over not to eat the impaled leaves. Any distraction during those minutes would have ejected the words clean out of H.M.’s mind, and five minutes after the test ended, even the memory of having to remember something had vanished. Nevertheless, as long as H.M. concentrated and kept refreshing his memory, he could hold on. This was the first clue that short-term memory exists; moreover, it showed that short-term memory (which H.M. had) and long-term memory (which he lacked) must utilize different brain structures.

After Milner’s discoveries, H.M. became a scientific celebrity, and other neuroscientists began clamoring to explore his unique mind. He did not disappoint. In April 1958, five years after the operation, H.M. and his parents moved into a small Hartford bungalow. In 1966 a few American neuroscientists asked him to draw the home’s floor plan from memory. He succeeded. He didn’t know the bungalow’s address, but walking through its six rooms over and over had tattooed the layout into his brain. This proved that our spatial memory systems, while normally reliant on the hippocampus, can circumvent it if need be (probably via the parahippocampus, a nearby navigation center).

Scientists also discovered that time worked differently for H.M. Up to about twenty seconds, he reckoned time as accurately as any normal person. After that, things veered wildly. Five minutes lasted, subjectively, just forty seconds for him; one hour lasted three minutes; one day fifteen minutes. This implies that the brain uses two different timekeepers—one for the short term and one for everything beyond twenty seconds, with only the latter suffering damage in H.M. Once again, H.M. allowed scientists to break a complex mental function down into different components and to link those components to structures in the brain. Eventually more than one hundred neuroscientists examined H.M., making his probably the most studied mind in history.

All the while H.M. got older, at least physically. Mentally, he remained stuck in the 1940s. He remembered not a single birthday or funeral after that time; the Cold War and sexual revolution never registered; new words such as granola and Jacuzzi remained forever undefined. Worse, a vague sense of uneasiness often bubbled up inside him, and he could never quite shake it. The feeling, Milner reported, was “like that fraction of a second in the morning, when you are in a strange hotel room, before it all falls in[ to] place.” Only for H.M. it never did.

In 1980, after H.M.’s father died and his mother got too sick to care for him, he moved into a nursing home. He walked a little gimpily by that point: years of taking heavy-duty epilepsy drugs had withered his cerebellum, and his wide, shuffling gait resembled that of kuru victims. He also got pretty portly after too many forgotten second helpings of cake and pudding. But overall he was a fairly normal patient and lived a (mostly) placid life. He loafed through the nontesting days reading poems or gun magazines, watching trains rumble by, and petting the dogs, cats, and rabbits the facility owned. He learned how to use a walker, thanks to his intact motor memories, and he even attended his thirty-fifth high school reunion in 1982. (Although he recognized no one there, other attendees reported the same problem.) When he dreamed at night, he often dreamed of hills—not of struggling up them, but cresting them and being at the top.

Still, the old, volatile H.M. did flare up now and again. He sometimes refused to take his meds—at which point his nurses scolded him, warning him that Dr. Scoville would get angry if he disobeyed. (That Scoville had died in a car crash didn’t matter. H.M. always fell for it.) He got into fights with other residents as well. One harpy at the nursing home would erase his bingo card midgame and taunt him. H.M. sometimes responded by running to his room and either banging his head on the wall or grabbing his bed and shaking it like a gorilla would its cage. One fit got so violent that his nurses called the police. These were moments of pure animal frustration—and yet in some ways they seem like his most human moments. For a few seconds a real person broke through the dull, bovine exterior. He was reacting the way we’d all want to if dealt his fate: he raged.

As soon as a nurse distracted H.M., he forgot his torment, of course. And aside from those flare-ups he lived a quiet life, albeit in declining health. He finally died in 2008, aged eighty-two, of respiratory failure—at which point scientists revealed him to the world as Henry Gustav Molaison.

The world of neuroscience mourned Molaison: his death led to numerous tributes about his patience and kindness, as well as scores of puns about his being unforgettable. And his brain is still providing insight today. Before his death, his nursing home had started stockpiling ice packs in preparation; when he passed, employees ringed his skull with them to keep his brain cool. Doctors soon arrived to claim the body, and that night they scanned his brain in situ and then liberated it. After two months hardening in formalin, it was flown cross-country in a cooler (which got the window seat) to a brain institute in San Diego. Scientists there soaked it in sugar solutions to draw out excess water, then froze it to solidify it. Finally, they used the medical equivalent of a deli slicer to shave Molaison’s brain into 2,401 slices, each of which they mounted on a glass plate and photographed at 20x magnification, to form a digital, zoomable map down to the level of individual neurons. The slicing process was broadcast live online, and 400,000 people tuned in to say goodbye to H.M.

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Excerpted from the book The Tale of Dueling Neurosurgeons by Sam Kean. Copyright © 2014 by Sam Kean. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company.

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The Skies Belong to Us: How Hijackers Created an Airline Crisis in the 1970s

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Brendan I. Koerner | The Skies Belong to Us | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,186 words)

 

‘There Is No Way to Tell a Hijacker by Looking At Him’

When the FAA’s antihijacking task force first convened in February 1969, its ten members knew they faced a daunting challenge—not only because of the severity of the crisis, but also due to the airlines’ intransigence. Having spent vast sums on Beltway lobbyists, the airlines had the political clout to nix any security measure that might inconvenience their customers. So whatever solutions the FAA proposed would have to be imperceptible to the vast majority of travelers.

John Dailey, a task force member who also served as the FAA’s chief psychologist, began to attack the problem by analyzing the methods of past skyjackers. He pored through accounts of every single American hijacking since 1961—more than seventy cases in all—and compiled a database of the perpetrators’ basic characteristics: how they dressed, where they lived, when they traveled, and how they acted around airline personnel. His research convinced him that all skyjackers involuntarily betrayed their criminal intentions while checking in for their flights. “There isn’t any common denominator except in [the hijackers'] behavior,” he told one airline executive. “Some will be tall, some short, some will have long hair, some not, some a long nose, et cetera, et cetera. There is no way to tell a hijacker by looking at him. But there are ways to differentiate between the behavior of a potential hijacker and that of the usual air traveler.”

Dailey, who had spent the bulk of his career designing aptitude tests for the Air Force and Navy, created a brief checklist that could be used to determine whether a traveler might have malice in his heart. Paying for one’s ticket by unconventional means, for example, was considered an important tip-off. So, too, were failing to maintain eye contact and expressing an inadequate level of knowledge or concern about one’s luggage. Dailey fine-tuned his criteria so they would apply to only a tiny fraction of travelers—ideally no more than three out of every thousand. He proposed that these few “selectees” could then be checked with handheld metal detectors, away from the prying eyes of fellow passengers. Most selectees would prove guilty of nothing graver than simple eccentricity, but a small number would surely be found to be in possession of guns, knives, or incendiary devices.

In the late summer of 1969, the FAA began to test Dailey’s antihijacking system on Eastern Air Lines passengers at nine airports.

When a man obtaining his boarding pass was judged to fit the behavioral profile, he was discreetly asked to proceed to a private area, where a federal marshal could sweep his body with a U-shaped metal detector. One of Dailey’s assistants secretly videotaped this process, so the FAA could ascertain whether travelers took offense at the intrusion.

Dailey pronounced the experiment a roaring success, noting that his profile selected only 1,268 out of 226,000 passengers; of those beckoned aside for a brief date with the metal detector, 24 were arrested on weapons or narcotics charges. More important, selectees rarely seemed to mind the extra scrutiny; when interviewed afterward, most said they were just happy to know that something was finally being done to prevent hijackings.

Satisfied with the subtlety of Dailey’s system, the airlines began to voluntarily implement the program in November 1969, right after Raffaele Minichiello’s highly publicized escape to Rome. Almost immediately, hijackings in American airspace dwindled to a handful—just one in January 1970, and one more the following month. Janitorial crews started to find guns and knives stashed in the potted plants outside airport terminals, possibly left there by aspiring skyjackers who lost heart after seeing posted notices that electronic screening was in force.

But there were two fatal flaws in how the FAA’s system was implemented.

The first was that pilots and stewardesses were not told which of their passengers were selectees. If a hijacker claimed to have a bomb, the crew had no way of knowing whether he had been searched prior to boarding—and thus no way of determining whether his threat was a bluff. All they could do was err on the side of caution and obey the hijacker’s every command.

The system’s more fundamental weakness, though, was the fact that it depended entirely on the vigilance of airline ticket agents. They, rather than professional security personnel, were responsible for applying Dailey’s checklist to every passenger they encountered. Over time the agents’ attention to detail was bound to flag as they processed thousands upon thousands of harried customers each day. It is simply human nature to grow complacent.

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Arthur Gates Barkley finally snapped after the Supreme Court gave him the cold shoulder.

He had been embroiled in near-constant litigation since 1963, when he lost his job as a truck driver for a Phoenix bakery. (He was fired for harassing a sales manager, who claimed that Barkley kept calling him to critique his job performance.) Barkley had initially sued his former employer for shorting him on nineteen days’ worth of sick-leave pay. He later turned his ire toward the IRS over a $471.78 tax bill, arguing that his wages had been miscalculated. After his federal lawsuit against the IRS was dismissed for lack of substance, he asked the Supreme Court to hear his appeal. He opened his petition with a memorable line: “I am being held a slave by the United States.”

Barkley was certain the nine wise men of Washington, D.C., would recognize the depth of his persecution and deliver the vindication he had been seeking for seven years. But as they do with 99 percent of the petitions they receive, the justices denied his request without comment. Barkley resolved to make them pay for their insolence. Over breakfast on June 4, 1970, Barkley informed his wife, Sue, that he would be flying to Washington, D.C., later that morning. The forty-nine-year-old World War II veteran had made the trip a few times before, to plead his case to indifferent bureaucrats at the IRS and the National Labor Relations Board. He promised Sue that this would be his very last visit to the nation’s capital. “I’m going to settle the tax case today,” he said as he kissed her goodbye.

When Barkley arrived at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, the ticket counter at his TWA gate was mobbed.

The airline’s lone metal detector was on the fritz, and the two overwhelmed ticket agents were unsure what to do if anyone fit the FAA’s skyjacker profile. They decided to avoid that dilemma by giving each passenger the most cursory of glances as they speedily issued boarding passes. Barkley, a ruggedly handsome man with slick blond hair and a pressed plaid blazer, did nothing to arouse suspicion as he checked in for Flight 486 to Washington, D.C.’s, National Airport.

As the Boeing 727 passed over Albuquerque, Barkley casually walked into the cockpit holding a .22-caliber pistol, a straight razor, and a steel can full of gasoline. In accordance with TWA policy, the pilots assured Barkley that they were willing to take him wherever he wished to go; they just hoped he was intent on Havana rather than some more exotic location.

But escape to another country was not Barkley’s plan.

He confounded the pilots by instructing them to head to Dulles International Airport in northern Virginia, about thirty miles from their intended destination. Aside from requesting this minor adjustment to Flight 486’s itinerary, Barkley had but one other demand: $100 million in small-denomination, nonsequential bills, to be taken directly from the coffers of the Supreme Court. If the money wasn’t waiting for him at Dulles, he vowed to splash gasoline all over the passengers and light a match.

TWA officials were blindsided by Barkley’s demand for ransom. They, like everyone else in the airline industry, had always assumed that skyjackers were interested solely in obtaining passage to a foreign land. It had never occurred to them that a skyjacker might try swapping passengers for money, like some garden-variety kidnapper. The airline had no procedure in place for dealing with this type of extortion.

TWA knew the Supreme Court didn’t have $100 million in cash, nor the capacity to pay even a fraction of that ridiculous sum. But the airline was scared to break that bad news to Barkley. TWA had to take his threat quite seriously in light of a violent episode that was still fresh in everyone’s mind: three months earlier one of that year’s relatively rare skyjackings had ended tragically when a man named John DiVivo had killed an Eastern Air Lines co-pilot near Boston, before himself being shot by the flight’s captain. Like DiVivo, who had ordered the Eastern pilots to fly toward Europe until the plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the Atlantic, Barkley appeared disturbed enough to kill: he kept transmitting radio messages in which he demanded that President Nixon, Secretary of Labor George Shultz, and the nine Supreme Court justices be informed that they were all “unfit to rule.”

With scant time to debate the pros and cons of giving in to Barkley, TWA made the fateful decision to try to mollify him with money. Airline employees were dispatched to two Washington-area banks to round up as much cash as they could on short notice. They returned to Dulles with a total of $100,750.

The airline assumed that Barkley would be reasonable and settle for this lesser sum. But the litigious former truck driver was in no mood for compromise. As soon as the canvas sack containing the money was delivered to the idling Boeing 727, Barkley pawed through its contents and realized that he had been shorted by a factor of a thousand. He made his extreme displeasure known by pouring the cash onto the cockpit floor. Up to his shins in hundred-dollar bills and his face purple with rage, Barkley ordered the plane to take off without delay.

As the jet ascended over the Virginia countryside beyond Dulles, Barkley radioed back an icy message that he addressed directly to President Nixon:

“You don’t know how to count money, and you don’t even know the rules of law.”

The plane circled Washington, D.C., as Barkley pondered his next move. The pilots tried to sell him on the idea of Cuba, but Barkley wouldn’t bite. He seemed suicidal at times and eager to take his fifty-eight hostages with him to the grave. “When you go, you shouldn’t go alone,” he told the pilots at one point. “You should take as many people and as much money as possible. Never go alone.” The North American Air Defense Command ordered four F-106 fighter jets to shadow the hijacked flight, in case Barkley tried to crash the plane into a populated area.

But after two hours Barkley decided to give TWA one last chance to deliver his $100 million. This time the chastened airline let the FBI take charge of the situation. At Barkley’s behest, FBI agents lined the runway with a hundred mail sacks, each allegedly stuffed with $1 million. (They were actually full of newspaper scraps.) As soon as the Boeing 727 landed and rolled to a stop, police marksmen shot out its landing gear. A panicked passenger reacted to the gunfire by kicking open one of the jet’s emergency exits and scrambling out over a wing. The other passengers followed his lead, collapsing into the grass beside the marooned plane—some out of sheer exhaustion, others because they had been drinking whiskey nonstop since the hijacking began.

Barkley peeked his head out of the cockpit to see that only a single passenger remained, a photojournalist who instinctively trained his Nikon on the startled hijacker. The man snapped five quick pictures before leaping onto the wing, just as Barkley aimed his gun to fire.

Moments later FBI agents swarmed up the aft stairs that dropped from the Boeing 727’s rear like a collapsible attic ladder; the pilot had stealthily lowered them while Barkley was preoccupied with the photographer. When he saw the agents running up the aisle, Barkley ducked back into the cockpit and shot the co-pilot in the stomach. The FBI responded with a hail of bullets, one of which perforated Bark ley’s right hand. He was handcuffed as he flopped around in a pile of cash, blood gushing from his busted nose.

Late that night reporters descended on Barkley’s shabby Phoenix home to get comment from his wife. Unlike most skyjacker spouses, who typically professed bewilderment regarding their husband’s exploits, Sue Barkley struck a defiant tone. “He believes in this country and the Constitution, he believes in what he was fighting for in World War II, but [the government] wouldn’t even listen to him,” she said while showing off her husband’s cartons of legal papers.

“He did it to get someone to pay attention to him. He was trying to help us! But he made it worse.”

* * *

Though his comically ambitious revenge had ended in failure, Arthur Gates Barkley was not without his fans. His novel demand for ransom had turned the skyjacking of TWA Flight 486 into one of the year’s most compelling media spectacles: dozens of cameras had captured the dramatic transfer of money from tarmac to plane, and Life soon ran a major spread on Barkley, featuring the blurry photographs snapped by his final hostage. The story was so enthralling because Barkley had lived out a common, if ignoble, fantasy: by briefly ruling the skies above the nation’s capital, an unemployed truck driver had forced the government to finally treat him with respect. Anyone who felt like an abject nobody could grasp the appeal of commanding such a powerful platform.

All too predictably, then, Barkley’s escapade touched off a new wave of skyjackings, one that laid bare the limitations of the FAA’s unobtrusive screening process.

A man armed with a bottle of nitroglycerin took a Pan Am Boeing 747 from New York to Havana, where Castro personally inspected the brand-new airplane and asked in-depth questions about its design; an Army private hijacked a Philadelphia-bound TWA flight to the Cuban capital by duping the pilot into thinking that he had a bomb-toting accomplice on board; a black AWOL Marine seized a Delta flight en route to Savannah, Georgia, claiming that he could no longer endure his commanders’ penchant for calling him “nigger.”

President Nixon at first paid little attention to the epidemic’s resurgence. He was too busy pressing Congress for anticrime legislation that would stiffen penalties for domestic bombings—an effort to end a spate of attacks on university campuses, where antiwar radicals were targeting laboratories with Pentagon ties. With the congressional midterm elections approaching that November, Nixon’s decision was smart politics: Republican voters were convinced that shaggy-haired students represented the Vietcong’s fifth column. Skyjackers did not yet elicit the same emotional response from the conservative “silent majority.”

But a coordinated series of hijackings in the Middle East forced the president to alter his priorities. On September 6, 1970, four teams of operatives from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine simultaneously hijacked four planes, three of which belonged to American carriers and were en route to New York. Among the hijackers was Leila Khaled, the female commando who had become a global fashion icon the year before. She managed to avoid preflight detection thanks to her new face, the product of multiple surgeries that had clipped her nose and stretched back her cheekbones.

Khaled and her partner were overpowered by passengers before completing their mission, but the three other PFLP teams succeeded.

One Pan Am plane was flown to Cairo and, after the hostages were released, destroyed with hand grenades. The other two planes were taken to a desert airstrip in Zarqa, Jordan, where masked gunmen paraded the weary passengers and crew past reporters; eighty-six of the hostages were American citizens. Five days after that humiliating display, the PFLP dynamited the planes in front of several Western film crews. Startling footage of the jets’ fiery obliteration led the evening newscasts on all three American networks; the nation’s major newspapers, meanwhile, ran front-page photos of jubilant guerrillas dancing on the planes’ blackened wreckage.

On the night of September 8, as the doomed planes sat on the tarmac in Zarqa, President Nixon called his top advisers to the Oval Office to formulate an emergency antihijacking plan. The PFLP operation had struck a nerve with the president, who recognized the danger of letting foreign militants believe they could take American hostages with impunity. Secretary of State William Rogers, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover were all at the meeting, as was Henry Kissinger, then serving as a special presidential assistant. They worked into the wee hours, brainstorming measures that could be implemented by executive order.

On September 11 President Nixon made a somber national address in which he outlined his advisers’ seven-point plan. “Most countries, including the United States, found effective means of dealing with piracy on the high seas a century and a half ago,” he declared in his gruff baritone. “We can—and we will—deal effectively with piracy in the skies today.”

Most of the plan’s directives were fairly dull, such as a promise to study the best security practices of foreign carriers and a vague commitment to develop “new methods for detecting weapons and explosive devices.”

But one of the president’s decrees was truly radical:

To protect United States citizens and others on U.S. flag carriers, we will place specially trained, armed United States government personnel on flights of U.S. commercial airliners. A substantial number of such personnel are already available and they will begin their duties immediately. To the extent necessary they will be supplemented by specially trained members of the armed forces who will serve until an adequate force of civilian guards has been assembled and trained.

The details of this sky marshal program did not emerge until five days later, when FAA chief John Shaffer appeared on a one-hour ABC television special devoted to the hijacking epidemic. Shaffer revealed that the United States planned to have four thousand undercover agents in the air by early 1971, at an initial cost of $80 million per year. The marshals, armed with .38-caliber pistols, would be instructed to shoot to kill; no man was supposed to qualify for the job unless he could fire twelve bullets in twenty-five seconds with enough accuracy to kill a hijacker from forty-five feet away. The force would be overseen by Lt. Gen. Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., whom President Nixon had appointed to the newly created post of Director of Civil Aviation Security. Davis, a retired Air Force general who had recently resigned as supervisor of Cleveland’s troubled police department, was essentially the nation’s first skyjacking czar.

The airlines dreaded the prospect of sky marshals. They worried that planes could lose pressure and crash if their bulkheads were punctured during midair shootouts. And they feared the legal fallout should a passenger be slain by a marshal’s errant bullet; a civil court might be sympathetic to a lawsuit alleging that an airline’s ticket agents should have flagged a skyjacker before boarding.

The airlines’ discontent turned to rage when they learned how the Nixon administration planned to pay for the armed guards: by increasing the tax on each domestic ticket by half a percent, and on each international ticket by two dollars. “The airlines see no justification for the imposition of these new taxes,” the head of the Air Transport Association of America, the industry’s primary trade group, told the Senate Finance Committee at an October hearing. “The taxes are discriminatory in their application because they would be levied on many persons who could not benefit from the purpose for why they are proposed to be imposed.” In other words, because only a minuscule percentage of flights would actually have sky marshals aboard, the industry thought it grossly unfair that all travelers should be expected to pay for protection they probably wouldn’t enjoy.

Several senators were swayed by this selfish logic, though perhaps more by the airlines’ threats to slash service should the tax be imposed. The Senate Finance Committee’s deliberations became bogged down in acrimony, with senators touting pet amendments that would exempt Alaska-bound flights from the tax or prioritize the hiring of unemployed pilots as sky marshals. The powerful American Automobile Association, meanwhile, became a major proponent of the tax, hoping the surcharge would convince many travelers to drive instead of fly.

By early December the so-called skyjacking tax was dead in the water, the victim of too much lobbyist meddling. Deprived of critical funding, the sky marshal program had to drastically scale back its ambitions. The manpower goal was slashed to twelve hundred guards, though high turnover meant that as few as eight hundred eventually ended up on duty at any given moment. The training regimen was trimmed to a mere one-week course at Virginia’s Fort Belvoir, a move that raised questions about the marshals’ marksmanship. “The program is a menace to the people who ride airplanes,” one marshal warned the Associated Press. The airlines instructed their ticket agents to bump marshals off full flights in favor of paying customers.

But even if the tax had passed, a full complement of well-trained marshals would have done little to curtail the epidemic. There were 5.1 million airline departures in the United States in 1970; even if four thousand guards were on the job around the clock, the odds of a sky marshal and a skyjacker winding up on the same flight were infinitesimal. The program was akin to placing a single sprinkler in a twenty-story office tower, in the vain hope that any fire would start right beneath it.

It was even more foolish to presume that skyjackers could be deterred by the remote possibility that one of their hostages might be a sky marshal. As Thomas Robinson’s father had observed back in 1965, after his son’s failed attempt to reach Havana, the rational calculus of risk and reward meant nothing to a skyjacker. These were lost souls bent on salvaging their self-worth, on seeking the transformative high of reigning supreme in America’s most distant frontier. As long as they could board aircraft with guns or bombs or jars of acid tucked inside their bags, they would gladly risk death for a chance to right their wayward lives.

And so the hijackings kept right on going as the calendar flipped to 1971.

A seventeen-year-old Alabama boy tried to hijack a National flight to Montreal, where he believed the large community of American draft dodgers would understand his adolescent angst; a former New York City police officer threatened to blow up an Eastern Air Lines Boeing 727 unless he was given $500,000, a plan foiled by an airline official who tackled the hijacker during the ransom exchange in the Bahamas; a fifty-eight-year-old West Virginia coal miner, suffering from a terminal case of black lung, demanded that a United Airlines crew fly him to Tel Aviv, where he hoped to curry favor with the Almighty by working on a kibbutz.

Convinced that the epidemic was only destined to get worse, Lloyd’s of London began to offer hijacking insurance to travelers in the United States. For a $75 premium per flight, a traveler could earn $500 per day of captivity, plus $2,500 in medical coverage, and $5,000 in the event of death or dismemberment.

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No one was surprised when the first passenger was killed.

With skyjackers striking nearly every week during the summer of 1971, and their demands consistently growing more outrageous, such a tragedy was inevitable. But to those who knew him well, Gregory White seemed an unlikely murderer.

The only remarkable thing about the twenty-three-year-old White was his unusually gangly physique, which he accented with a bushy goatee. He lived in a working-class Chicago suburb with his wife and two children, whom he supported as a six-hundred-dollar-a-month clerk for the Illinois Central Railroad. His sole vice was liquor, which he used to overcome an innate shyness that bordered on the pathological. He sometimes acted foolishly when drunk; his criminal record was marred by several charges for disorderly conduct. But nothing about White’s history suggested that he was capable of violence, or that he had any particular interests aside from keeping food on his family’s table and his bar bills paid.

Shortly after eleven p.m. on June 11, 1971, White showed up at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport carrying only a folded umbrella. He strolled through the terminal and onto the tarmac, where he queued to board a TWA flight to New York. He made it to the top of the Boeing 727’s stairs before a stewardess asked to see his boarding pass. Rather than comply with this polite request, White pulled a pistol out of his umbrella, grabbed the stewardess by the throat, and pressed the gun to her forehead.

“North Vietnam,” said White, his slurred speech revealing that his bravado was fueled by whiskey.

“We’re going to North Vietnam.”

A man who had boarded the flight immediately ahead of White, a sixty-five-year-old management consultant named Howard Franks, turned around and moved back toward the stairs. Perhaps he meant to help the imperiled stewardess, or maybe he was oblivious to the drama and just wanted to retrieve an item from his hanging coat. His true intent will never be known because the spooked White shot him twice—first in the head, then again in the back, as Franks’s limp body twisted to the jet’s carpet.

The murderous deed done, White whipped his gun back to the stewardess’s head; she could feel that the barrel was still hot. “You’re next,” said White.

Screaming passengers stampeded off the plane, pushing past the hijacker, his captive stewardess, and Franks’s corpse. When the chaos settled, White reiterated his demand to the pilots: North Vietnam. And he wanted $75,000, too, as well as a fully loaded machine gun.

After Franks’s body was removed from the nearly empty plane, the flight proceeded to John F. Kennedy International Airport, where White was told he could transfer to a larger jet capable of travel to Southeast Asia. While on the ground in New York, White stuck his head out the cockpit window to survey the scene. He saw something move in the darkness beneath the plane’s right wing—a man crouched low to the asphalt, creeping forward inch by inch. White fired once at the trespasser and missed; the man, an FBI agent who was working his second hijacking in as many weeks, fired back and pegged White in the left bicep. The bleeding skyjacker meekly surrendered at once.

Two days later, as White was wheeled out of the hospital by federal marshals, a reporter shouted out, “Why were you going to Vietnam?”

“I wanted to bring arms to help the people there fight,” yelled back White, who had never before expressed the slightest hint that he cared about the war.

In the days that followed, TWA was widely criticized over the security loophole that had led to Howard Franks’s murder: White had been permitted to walk onto the tarmac and ascend all the way to the plane’s entrance despite the fact he didn’t have a boarding pass. Because White was not a ticketed passenger no TWA agent had compared him to the FAA’s skyjacker profile.

But TWA rejected the notion of altering its security policies even one iota. “How far can the airlines go?” replied a clearly irritated TWA spokesman when asked whether his employer planned to make any changes to its boarding procedures. “Restrict everyone from the terminal except those who have a ticket? Stop everyone from entering the airport area except those who have a ticket?”

The Gregory White hijacking did, however, increase the airlines’ faith in the FBI. The agent who wounded White did so in the dark, firing upward from fifty feet away. His pinpoint accuracy under pressure convinced the airlines that the FBI could be trusted to use lethal force, though only if no passengers were present.

That was precisely what happened six weeks after White’s capture, when a former Navy aviation mechanic named Richard Obergfell hijacked a TWA flight as it departed New York’s LaGuardia Airport. Obergfell demanded passage to Milan, where he intended to propose marriage to a female pen pal. The Boeing 727 he had commandeered lacked the ability to cross the Atlantic, but Obergfell was promised a long-range jet if he released his hostages. He did so back at LaGuardia, keeping only a twenty-one-year-old stewardess as he boarded a maintenance van bound for nearby Kennedy Airport, where a Boeing 707 was waiting to take him to Italy.

As he walked toward the new jet with his gun pressed against the stewardess’s back, Obergfell had no idea he was being marked for death. An FBI sniper had climbed halfway up the ten-foot metal wall that stood behind the 707’s tail. Clad in tight white trousers that hiked up to his calves, the sniper balanced his high-powered rifle e atop the wall and peered through his telescopic sight. But Obergfell was too close to his hostage for the sniper to fire safely.

A few feet away from the Boeing 707’s stairs, the stewardess accidentally stepped on Obergfell’s toes. The hijacker momentarily lost his balance and staggered back a foot. The sniper took advantage of the split-second opportunity.

The stewardess heard two shots and thought, “I’m dead—he killed me.”

But then she heard the thump of a body hitting the tarmac and realized there was no longer a gun barrel lodged against her spine.

“I looked around, and [Obergfell] started to get up on his elbow,” she would later recall. “He looked a little dazed. When I saw he was still on the ground, I thought he was going to shoot me, and I started to run, run, run.”

But Obergfell never managed to pull his trigger. One of the sniper’s bullets had shredded his vital organs; he was pronounced dead at Jamaica Hospital thirty minutes later. TWA did not hide its elation over Obergfell’s demise. “TWA is grateful to the FBI for forestalling the further hijacking of a TWA aircraft to Europe, with all the potential tragedy that might result from an armed man in charge of a crew,” the airline wrote in an official statement. “The assurance of prompt and swift justice is the most certain method of discouraging acts of armed aggression against the passengers and crews of aircraft.”

For the first time since early 1970, when the debut of the FAA’s behavioral profile had coincided with a sudden downturn in skyjackings, there was genuine hope that the epidemic had entered its sunset phase. The publicity surrounding Obergfell’s death seemed certain to dissuade potential hijackers, since they now knew that the FBI had the means and the authority to kill at will. Perhaps the occasional hijacker could still get away with flying direct to nearby Cuba, where he would likely end up in a tropical gulag. But those with grander ambitions would always need to stop on American soil to obtain fuel or ransom. And the more time a skyjacker spent idling at an airport, the greater the odds that he would be felled by a sniper’s bullet.

But though the skyjackers may have been a delusional bunch, psychological illness does not necessarily interfere with raw intelligence. Those who aspired to commit the crime studied their predecessors’ failings and took away a vital lesson: the best way to avoid law enforcement was to avoid the ground.

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Paul Joseph Cini might have become a celebrated figure in criminal folklore if he hadn’t been so assiduous with his wrapping.

When the twenty-six-year-old Cini hijacked a Calgary-to-Toronto Air Canada flight on November 13, 1971, he did so carrying a brown-paper package bound tightly with twine. No one paid much attention to the parcel, for they were more concerned with the weapons that Cini was brandishing: a sawed-off shotgun and ten sticks of dynamite, one of which he rudely stuck into the mouth of an unfortunate flight attendant. Falsely claiming to be a member of the Irish Republican Army, Cini demanded $1.5 million and passage to Ireland. Air Canada scrounged up $50,000, which it delivered to Cini at the small airport in Great Falls, Montana. Unlike Arthur Barkley, who had freaked out when TWA shorted him by $99,899,250, Cini didn’t mind the lesser ransom.

The DC-8 was en route back to Calgary to refuel when Cini decided to spring his surprise: he told the crew to open one of the plane’s emergency exits, so he could parachute to freedom. In preparation for his jump, he started to unwrap his brown-paper package, which contained a parachute he had purchased from a Chicago skydiving shop.

Cini had been planning this stunt for over a year. In September 1970, while downing shots of vodka in his Victoria, British Columbia, apartment, Cini had seen a television news segment about a failed hijacking in California. His alcohol-fuzzed mind somehow managed to produce a eureka moment: a hijacker could escape with his ransom only if he jumped from the plane.

Cini initially had no designs on attempting this himself, for he was deathly afraid of heights. But the more he contemplated the risky caper, the more he became convinced that it represented his one shot at improving his lackluster life. “I wanted recognition,” he would later explain. “I wanted to stand up and say, ‘Hey, I’m Paul Cini and I’m here and I exist and I want to be noticed.’ “

Cini spent months preparing for the crime. He cased airports, studied aircraft design, and asked copious questions at a Calgary skydiving school. Worried that his red-and-yellow parachute would be too conspicuous in the sky, Cini dyed it dark blue and then paid a Canadian paratrooper to repack it properly. On the morning of the hijacking, he filled a suitcase with candy bars and survival gear, just in case he had to spend days wandering through the Albertan wilderness.

But one minor error was Cini’s undoing: he wrapped the parcel containing his parachute too tightly.

Unable to loosen the package’s twine, Cini asked one of the pilots to lend him a sharp instrument to cut free his parachute. When the pilot offered him the DC-8’s fire ax, Cini absentmindedly laid down his shotgun to accept it. Seeing that the hijacker was now unarmed, the pilot kicked away the shotgun and grabbed Cini by the throat. Another crew member took the ax and smashed it into Cini’s head, fracturing his skull. Paul Joseph Cini would be remembered not as the world’s first “parajacker” but as a fool.

The fame that Cini had so desperately craved would instead go to a man who called himself Dan Cooper.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Just eleven days after Cini’s misadventure, Cooper boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines flight in Portland, Oregon. Shortly after takeoff, he informed a stewardess that he had a bomb in his briefcase. He requested $200,000 in cash and four parachutes, all of which he received after the plane landed in Seattle. After releasing the hostages, Cooper asked to be flown to Mexico City, with an agreed-upon refueling stop in Reno, Nevada.

But shortly before the Boeing 727 reached the Oregon border, Cooper jumped from the aft stairs into a wicked hailstorm. He was never seen again, though tattered bills from his ransom were later discovered along the banks of the Columbia River.

Experienced skydivers scoffed at the notion that Cooper could have survived his jump. The man seemed to know virtually nothing about skydiving, as evidenced by the fact that he jumped without a reserve chute and didn’t ask for any protective gear. The plane was traveling at roughly 195 miles per hour when Cooper exited, a speed that even experienced parachutists consider unsafe; it is possible that Cooper was knocked unconscious immediately after jumping.

Even if he did survive the initial plunge through subzero air temperatures and pounding hail, the terrain below was lethal—nothing but hundred-foot-tall fir trees and frigid lakes and rivers. Like so many skyjackers before him, Cooper was probably too psychologically askew to have thought his plan all the way through.

But a massive search through the forests of southern Washington and northern Oregon turned up no trace of Cooper, dead or alive. The case’s lack of resolution gave the public free rein to mold the skyjacker into a folk hero, a quasi –Robin Hood figure who stole from the rich to prove the machismo of the average American male. “His was an awesome feat in the battle of man against the machine,” declared a University of Washington sociologist who pronounced himself a Cooper expert. “One individual overcoming, for the time being anyway, technology, the corporation, the Establishment, the System.”

Known to the public as D. B. Cooper due to a reporter’s transcription error, the mysterious skyjacker was celebrated in both art and commerce. A twenty-nine-year-old Seattle waiter made a small fortune selling T-shirts depicting a suitcase full of money attached to a parachute; a Portland lounge singer scored a minor hit with “D. B. Cooper, Where Are You?,” which featured the admiring couplet: “D. B. Cooper never hurt no one / But he sure did blow some minds.”

By now well versed in the contagious nature of skyjacking, the airlines and the FBI both braced for the inevitable post-Cooper outbreak. But they were still woefully unprepared for the utter mayhem of 1972.

* * *

Read the rest:

Skies Paperback Cover #1

From The Skies Belong to Us, published by Crown. © 2013 Brendan I. Koerner.

Top illustration: Kjell Reigstad

Why Do So Many People Pretend to Be Native American?

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Russell Cobb | This Land Press | August 2014 | 16 minutes (3,976 words)

This Land PressFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share a brand new essay from Oklahoma’s This Land Press, just published in their August 2014 issue. This Land has been featured on Longreads often in the past—you can support them here.
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* * *

Let’s take a voyage to a not-so-distant land and visit a strange tribe. Or maybe not so strange. In fact, you may even belong to it. Before we begin our expedition, a trivia question:

What do Bill Clinton, Miley Cyrus, Johnny Cash, and Elizabeth Warren all have in common?

Answer: All of them have claimed to be part Cherokee, but none have been able to prove it. Not that any of these celebrities are unique in this regard. Rare is the Oklahoma family that doesn’t think it possesses at least one-sixteenth Cherokee blood.

But here’s a fun fact: according to the Cherokee Nation, there are approximately 120,000 tribal members living in the state, which has a population of 3.8 million people. That’s only about 3 percent of Oklahomans. The tribe we’re going to visit, however, is bigger than the Cherokee Nation and perhaps even bigger than the entire state of Oklahoma—although that’s difficult confirm, since the Census Bureau doesn’t keep statistics on this subset of the population.

We are among the tribe of the Wannabes: non-Native Americans who insist on claiming Indian heritage. Why do Wannabes appropriate, fabricate, and invent a Native identity? Is it for pure financial gain? Is it part of a colonialist project to speak for the Other? College admissions? A highly subjective existential crisis? Examining the motives of the Wannabes is a fraught subject, one where good intentions rub up against old racist habits and where narrative embroidery easily morphs into self-delusion. It’s where the personal is political and politics get personal.

***

Jimmy_Carter_with__Iron_Eyes__Cody_WEB

Our voyage begins in earnest with the case of Iron Eyes Cody, a man better known to the world as “The Crying Indian.”

If you watched TV at any time in the 1970s, you’ll remember the Crying Indian. He debuted on television on Earth Day, 1971, in an event some people have called the birth of the modern environmental movement. The ad, produced by the pro-bono advertising group the Ad Council, is one of the most emotionally powerful one-minute spots ever produced.

It begins with a vague image of a man in a canoe barely visible through the leaves of a tree. He paddles gently down a river to a slow thud of drums. The fringe from his buckskin jacket, two braids of long hair, and a single feather in his headband come into view. We briefly glimpse the idyllic image of unspoiled America: pine trees, a glistening lake, and a Noble Savage in a canoe. Here is the natural man as Jean-Jacques Rousseau once imagined him: the human being at one with nature and freed from the shackles of societal conventions.

Now we are face-to-face with our stoic warrior. He paddles with more vigor as the tempo of the music picks up. The camera zooms in on two pieces of garbage in the water. A brassy soundtrack starts to blare, and the camera sweeps out to reveal a factory belching smoke into the air and more litter in the lake. Our Noble Savage drags his canoe to a shoreline littered with plastic cups and aluminum cans, his head bowed in sorrow.

He walks to a road filled with traffic, his once-stoic face now showing signs of a profound sadness as he watches garbage being tossed out of passing cars.

An off-screen baritone narrator intones the following: “Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. And some people don’t.” A plastic sack dropped by a motorist explodes at our Wise Elder’s feet, his buckskin now soiled by fast food.

The narrator pauses a beat, allowing a sense of collective shame to wash over the audience. The narrator starts back in again. “People start pollution, and people can stop it.” A single tear wells up and then rolls down the Indian’s cheek as the screen fades to black.

Many people have wondered about this tragic figure, and in his 1982 memoir, Iron Eyes: My Life as a Hollywood Indian, Cody purported to give a full account of his life. He tells us he was born and raised on a ranch in Oklahoma to family of Creek and Cherokee farmers, only finding fame years later as a character actor and consultant on Indian dress and sign language to famous directors such as Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford.

Iron Eyes traced his ancestry all the way back to the Trail of Tears.

During the Civil War, his Cherokee grandfather joined up with a bunch of Confederate outlaws known as Quantrill’s Raiders. This mixed-race posse terrorized Missouri, Kansas, and Indian Territory, pillaging Union forces and riding off into the Ozarks with their loot. They were indomitable, submitting neither to the Confederate military brass nor to the victorious Union army. They were, in effect, professional badasses—some wearing black sombreros with silver inlays and bullet bandoliers across their chests. Among their posse was a black man named Two Bits who acquired the name for his piano-playing in whorehouses. If this is starting to sound like a Sam Peckinpah or Quentin Tarantino Western, remember that Iron Eyes’ memoir is subtitled: My Life as a Hollywood Indian.

But Iron Eyes, well, according to his memoir, was just a regular old “Injun” who “wandered off the reservation into fame and fortune.” The fact there were no Indian reservations in Oklahoma and that the eastern portion of the state—which included the Cherokee area—was known not as Oklahoma Territory (as Iron Eyes calls it) but Indian Territory, and that statehood occurred when he was just two years old, might raise a red flag among literal-minded readers. But for the sake of our journey, let’s give him a pass. We’ll assume he is speaking metaphorically of “the reservation.” In any case, the narrative quickly shifts from an undisclosed location on an Oklahoma ranch to Hollywood, as Iron Eyes recounts a lifetime of work during the Golden Age of the Hollywood Western, and it is here we see the formation of the iconic American Indian take shape.

Most of the first half of the book is devoted to celebrity yarn-spinning, recalling Gary Cooper’s terrible horsemanship and incorrigible playboy vices. Or John Wayne’s terrible alcoholism and fear that his real name—Marion Morrison—sounded like a “fairy.” More importantly, however, the book reveals the solidification of the American imaginary regarding Native Americans. Iron Eyes recalls how he butted heads with the legendary Cecil B. DeMille, insisting that Indians be represented “authentically” in the filming of The Plainsman. On set, Cody assembled a cast of “Indians,” some belonging to local tribes but mostly white actors dressed in headdresses and war paint:

Everybody stood at attention while he walked up and down the ranks. “Okay, take that off,” he said, stopping at one end, pointing to a beaded vest. He stopped again, “Take that off, and that, and—” “Wait, wait a minute, C.B. You can’t take those things off. He’s gonna be a chief. Cheyenne chiefs wore vests like that. And he’s a warrior, they always wore leggings. That’s a medicine pouch on him. It stays.” “You’ve got too much clothes on them.” “Not for these Indians, C.B. We either do an authentic picture or I’ll walk off and the Indians will come with us.”[1]

Iron Eyes also taught actors a few rudimentary Plains Indian sign language gestures. Cherokees are not Plains Indians, but somehow Iron Eyes established himself as an authority on the subject. Some tribes have different gestures, but Iron Eyes created a fusion, an Esperanto of hand talk. In 1970, he documented this language in a book called Indian Talk: Hand Signals of the American Indians. The book was reviewed positively by one of the most prestigious scholarly journals in anthropology, American Anthropologist, in 1972.

As Hollywood moved from the era of pure spectacle and illusion to a politicized and realistic aesthetic in the late 1960s, Iron Eyes followed suit.

Working with the mercurial British actor Richard Harris on the 1970 A Man Called Horse, Cody began to insist on authentic portrayals of initiation rites and medicine rituals, often over the demands of the producer.

Although Iron Eyes played bit parts in dozens of Westerns over five decades, it is this film that may hold the clue to his transformation from a supporting actor into America’s most recognizable Indian. A Man Called Horse tells the story of an English aristocrat, John Morgan, who is captured by the Sioux and enslaved by them until his cunning and dogged determination wins the Natives over and he becomes a Sioux warrior. Unlike previous Westerns, however, A Man Called Horse spared the Armenian bole (a reddish-brown chemical often sprayed on white actors to make them look Native) and convinced many moviegoers that they were finally catching a glimpse of authentic Plains Indian culture.

Some Native American activists, however, saw the film as inauthentic. Among them was Ward Churchill, who wrote that the movie “depicts a people whose language is Lakota, whose hairstyles range from Assiniboine through Nez Perce to Comanche, whose tipi design is Crow, and whose Sun Dance ceremony and lodge in which it is held are both typically Mandan.”

Churchill’s critique hinged on a strident defense that “authenticity” is something that can only be defined from within a given culture. Churchill, like Iron Eyes Cody, claimed part Cherokee ancestry, and set about defining the parameters of Indian authenticity in books like Fantasies of the Master Race. Churchill himself, however, turned out to be more parts Wannabe than Cherokee.[2]

* * *

By the early 1970s, then, Iron Eyes Cody was not only simply a Native American character actor, but one of the most important figures in fashioning Americans’ ideas about the “authentic Indian.” The culmination of his long career was undoubtedly the “The Crying Indian.” The Ad Council, a pro-bono conglomeration of companies that creates public service announcements, sponsored the commercial. Rosie the Riveter, Smokey Bear, “Just Say No”: all public service announcements produced by the Ad Council. During the Cold War, the Ad Council turned to blatant U.S. propaganda, urging Americans to take an active role in promoting U.S. industry in the fight against communism. At the same time, the modern environmental movement was born and urged industry to promote recycling and reuse of materials. The Ad Council countered with its own “environmental” message, which stressed the responsibility of individuals—not corporations—to fight pollution.

One of the taglines of this Keep America Beautiful campaign was “People start pollution. People can stop it,” which seemed benign enough, but turned out to be part of a political attack on more progressive environmental groups such as the Sierra Club. Keep America Beautiful was a non-profit group supported by bottle manufacturers to prevent bottle deposit laws, and encouraging more and more consumption, according to investigative journalist Ginger Strand. Bottle deposit laws—most enacted with the birth of the environmental movement—were driving down demand for new glass and aluminum. The Ad Council’s “Crying Indian” spots tried to change the conversation, making the environmental movement a question of personal ethics, not corporate responsibility.

Iron Eyes initially declined the role as the Crying Indian.

He didn’t know how to swim and was afraid to be out in a canoe in San Francisco Bay by himself. The director promised to have a helicopter hover over him in case he tipped over. When it came time for the money shot—the tear rolling down the cheek—Iron Eyes was ready. He knew how to cry on demand for the camera, but there was a problem: His real tears did not show up well enough on camera. The director used glycerin to created one large tear that rolled down Iron Eyes’s cheek at the last minute.

In 1996, the journalist Angela Aleiss revealed that the man known to the world as “The Crying Indian” was born Espera Oscar de Corti in the small town of Kaplan, Louisana. Aleiss told me it was an open secret among Native American actors in Los Angeles that Iron Eyes wasn’t Indian, but no one had thought to figure out who he really was.

Aleiss consulted records from a small Catholic church in the town and found that de Corti’s father, Antonio, had been the victim of vicious anti-Italian sentiment in turn-of-the-century Louisiana. The decade before Oscar’s father came over from Sicily, more than a dozen Italians in the state had been lynched. To make matters worse, an extortion racket commonly referred to as the Black Hand Society (an early version of the Mafia) had sprung up in southern Louisiana. Antonio de Corti had to give up his small shop and flee to Texas, where his three sons eventually joined him.

Somewhere along the way, young Oscar de Corti saw a Wild West show and became enamored with all things Native, always playing the Indian in Cowboys and Indians. Aleiss wrote that the de Corti family remade themselves in Texas; the father slightly Anglicized his name to Tony Corti. Oscar made his way to Los Angeles in the teens, becoming Oscar Codey and finally Iron Eyes Cody. By the time Aleiss interviewed him in 1996, he had been widowed by his Native wife and brought up the two sons they adopted from a Navajo reservation. When he died in 1999, everything indicated that he convinced himself of his own lie.

* * *

Iron Eyes Cody may have been a Hollywood Indian, but there’s more to the tribe than show business.

There are many subcategories of Wannabes, but the most common member of the tribe we might call the Almost Native—the white person who claims one-sixteenth blood quantum, just enough to squeak by America’s arbitrary racial standards that designate who is and is not a minority.

The most famous and most controversial Almost Native of the moment is Oklahoma City-born Elizabeth Warren, who is rumored to be a candidate for president in 2016. During her 2012 campaign for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts against incumbent Senator Scott Brown, Warren frequently described “family lore” about her Cherokee forbearers as part of her hardscrabble, coming-of-age story. Conservatives mocked her for identifying herself as a “Native American” minority during two stints at law schools in the 1990s. While it appears that she never benefited from affirmative action for minorities and stopped listing herself as a minority lawyer by 1995, she has refused to back away from claims of Native ancestry.

When Warren’s claims to Cherokee ancestry were scrutinized closely by genealogists, no one could find her ancestors among those named on the Dawes Roll, which the government intended to be a master list of Cherokee surnames, finalized in 1906. (Although they did find one ancestor during territorial days who had actually boasted of killing a Cherokee.) Like many dubious narratives of whites passing for Native, Warren’s story takes many twists and turns, some of which receive a gloss in her new memoir, A Fighting Chance. In the book, Warren weaves her “Native American heritage” (specific references to the Cherokee have now disappeared) into a narrative of working-class struggle, with her “mamaw and papaw” handing down stories and recipes from their days in Indian Territory.

And then there’s Aunt Bee, who told Liz Warren that her papaw had inherited high cheekbones from his Indian ancestors but did not passed them down to the little girl. It’s all part of a home-spun narrative of authentic Americana: Daddy worked hard as a janitor, but had a heart attack and couldn’t pay the medical bills. Mama was devoted to her family, but sometimes didn’t have enough money to put food on the table for the four kids. Eventually, little Liz had to work, too, before she dropped out of college at age 19 to support her husband’s professional goals. Then she picked herself up by her bootstraps and put herself through law school in the wake of a divorce. It’s like a PG-rated Loretta Lynn or Tammy Wynette song with all the cheating and drinking purged from the storylines.

A lot of people scoffed at fair-skinned, blue-eyed Warren’s claim of Native American heritage. But, as an Okie myself, I instantly recognized the narrative. It has an undeniable pull and a certain degree of truthiness, as Stephen Colbert would say. The mythic Native ancestor in the white settler family lends a folksy, feel-good element to a narrative of colonization, exploitation, and plunder.

* * *

We still are left with a nagging question for the Wannabes: Why do they do it? Why do so many white people—from Elizabeth Warren to Miley Cyrus to Iron Eyes Cody—fashion a Native identity out of thin air?

I contacted Aleiss about her research to ask her if there was anything that united this unruly tribe. The one common denominator she cited was “financial opportunity.” Indeed, there are many instances of whites making a buck while trafficking in faux-Native identity, but I’m not totally convinced it all boils down to money. According to the 2010 census, more than a quarter of Native Americans live in poverty, contrasted to only 10 percent of whites. There’s more money to be made in the white world than on the reservation.

I suspect that the claim of Native identity bestows upon a prospective author a sort of symbolic capital that works in inverse proportion to white privilege. Fake Indian personae have allowed otherwise un-publishable white authors to achieve notoriety. There are many examples, including Forrest Carter, the author of The Education of Little Tree. Carter turned out to not be Cherokee, as he claimed, but a former Ku Klux Klansman from Alabama named Asa Earl Carter. The case of Carter’s memoir is laden with even more ironic twists and turns than that of Iron Eyes Cody, as Carter made a name for himself in the public sphere by becoming one of Alabama’s most vocal white supremacists. He is reputed to have written Alabama Governor George Wallace’s cri de guerre: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” Carter disappeared from public life only to remake himself years later as Forrest “Little Tree” Carter, an orphaned boy raised by his Cherokee grandparents, wise elders who taught the boy to live a simple, natural life until he confronts the racist system of an Indian residential school.

To this day, critics are divided about how to view Little Tree: Is the book an opportunistic play on white America’s hunger for the “authentic” Indian, or is it Carter’s secret confession of guilt for having been such a vocal racist for decades. The writer Sherman Alexie has summoned up this contradiction nicely: “Little Tree is a lovely little book, and I sometimes wonder if it is an act of romantic atonement by a guilt-ridden white supremacist, but ultimately I think it is the racial hypocrisy of a white supremacist.”

Perhaps racial hypocrisy explains the extreme case of Asa Earl Carter, but there’s undoubtedly something strange in the American psyche regarding the Wannabes, and I haven’t been immune from their truth-y allure.

* * *

I owe my rather unusual middle name—St. Clair—to a notable Choctaw artist named St. Clair Homer, a man I once understood to be my maternal grandfather. As a boy, I hated my middle name. Who would name their boy St. Clair?

“Isn’t that a girl’s name?” I asked my mom one day.

My mom told me I should be proud of the name because St. Clair Homer was a famous artist and somehow (I wasn’t quite sure how) a part of our family. Homer is known to the art world as Homma (the Choctaw work “homa” which means “red”—as in “Oklahoma”).

Let’s get this straight: Homma was no Wannabe.

He traced a lineage back to Pushmataha, a general who fought the British in the War of 1812; his grandfather had been Secretary of the Choctaw Nation. The thing was, I wasn’t quite sure if Homma was actually my grandfather because my grandmother started living with another man who wasn’t Native at all. When I was three years old, though, Homma won first place in the Oklahoma Bicentennial Indian Art Exhibition at Gilcrease Museum for a bronze sculpture called “Spirit Horse.” I was too young to remember the exhibit, but I saw it later during school field trips.

What struck me about Homma’s work was its stark defiance of much of the art in Gilcrease. He engaged in a playful mocking of Western mythology. There was none of the rugged individualism of the American West: the white cowboy facing down the harsh environment and the Indian savages. In 1976, for the centennial of the Battle of Little Big Horn, Homma declared that he was going on “full war-path mode” and made a series satirical postcards “commemorating” the event.

In the meantime, I had learned the truth of my connection to Homma. My biological grandfather had died shortly after my mother was born during World War II. Homma and my grandmother lived together off and on for decades, and he practically raised my mom. Later, they drifted apart and my grandmother remarried.

His presence in my life was still there, however, especially every time anyone asked me about my middle name. My first year of college, I met a group of exchange students from Great Britain. I told them I was from Oklahoma, a place they only knew from the musical and Westerns.

“You must be part Indian or something,” one of the Brits said. I thought about this for a minute. Yes, I must be part Indian. Not only am I named after one, I’m darker than most white people. The British exchange students really seemed interested. They clearly wanted to know an Indian.

“I think I’m part Choctaw,” I said. “But only, like, one-sixteenth, so I’m not on any tribal rolls or anything.”

There, I’d done it. I felt good to be part Indian, as if I belonged to something big. Something noble, wise, and timeless.

Now that I’d said it, it had to be true. After all, my mother’s family came from rural eastern Oklahoma, right on the dividing line between the Choctaw and Cherokee Nations. The family’s cemetery plot in Checotah was right next to the Indian section. And, like Liz Warren’s Papaw, we had high cheekbones.

So I would belong to the tribe of the Wannabes for a while, especially during my early 20s, when I actually didn’t know what the hell I was. The tribe gave me a sense of identity and it carried some instant prestige when traveling abroad. Europeans love Indians, I discovered. I never fully bought in, however. I knew plenty of people who tried to cash-in on some supposed Indian great-grandfather to qualify for a tuition break or minority status. That wasn’t me.

There was one small problem: The only Indians I knew in Tulsa were a lot like me. They grew up on the same ‘80s pop music and TV shows, followed the same sports teams (even the Oklahoma Sooners, who got their name illegally stealing Native land in the late 19th century). They didn’t ride horses and they didn’t even have cool names, like Iron Eyes. Most of them weren’t any darker than I was. So I didn’t want to be them. I wanted to be like that Indian in that commercial, stoically paddling his canoe through the American landscape, offering a rebuke to the crass commercialism of mainstream America. Oh, wait…

* * *

Originally published by This Land Press, August 2014.

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[1] Cody and Perry 1982: 194-195.

[2] Churchill continually cautioned readers that Wannabe or “Friends of the Indian”—such as the Richard Harris character—are almost always neocolonialist wolves in sheep’s clothing. The best white people could do, in his opinion, was to sit back and listen deeply to real Indians such as himself. In 2005, Churchill began to be hoisted on his own petard. Following academic misconduct allegations, the Cherokee Nation retreated from Churchill, saying that he only possessed “associate membership” as an honor, and that all associated memberships were rescinded in the 1990s. Like Elizabeth Warren, Churchill refused to back down, and presented evidence that may identify him as one-sixteenth Cherokee.

Photo: Kjell Reigstad

Call It Rape

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Margot Singer | The Normal School | 2012 | 23 minutes (5,683 words)

The Normal SchoolThanks to Margot Singer and The Normal School for sharing this story with the Longreads community.
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* * *

 

Still life with man and gun

Three girls are smoking on the back porch of their high school dorm. It’s near midnight on a Saturday in early autumn, the leaves not yet fallen, the darkness thick. A man steps out of the woods. He is wearing a black ski mask, a hooded jacket, leather gloves. He has a gun. He tells the girls to follow him, that if they make a noise or run he’ll shoot. He makes them lie face down on the ground. He rapes first one and then the others. He walks away.

It is September, 1978. Two of the girls are my classmates; the third is a friend of theirs, visiting for the weekend. As a day student, I hear the news on Monday morning. I am fifteen and, like most of us—good girls at an all-girls boarding school—my experience of sex so far consists of sweaty slow dances and a few nights of awkward groping and beery kisses with boys I never see again. At the special all-school meeting convened that morning, the headmistress informs us of the security guard that has been hired, the safety lights that soon will be installed. Another woman, a cop or counselor, steps up to the microphone. “Rape is a crime of violence, not sex,” she says. She repeats it, like a mantra, to make sure we understand.

I try to picture the girls out there in that ravine behind the dorm, dead leaves and pine needles and dirt cold against their skin. The porch light shining dimly through the trees. The man, the mask and gloves and gun. But there the tableau freezes. I simply can’t imagine it: the logistics of it, the lying there, the terrible anticipation, and then. Wasn’t there something they could have done, I can’t help thinking, three-on-one like that?

Still, the incident does not make me fearful. I’m not afraid to be home alone in my parents’ house, just a few miles down the road. I’m not afraid to walk home from my music lessons along the wooded path that winds around the pond behind my house or to take the T into Boston by myself. I don’t believe that what happened to those girls could happen to me. More precisely, it doesn’t even occur to me that it could. I can’t make any of it touch me: the powerlessness, the fear, the shame.

A few weeks after the rapes, a man is arrested, a tennis pro from a respected local family. Everyone is shocked, relieved. The girls stay in school. They get over it, or so we all believe.

The word rape comes from

The word “rape” comes from the Latin verb rapere: to seize, to take by force, to carry off. Rape, in its original sense, was a property crime, a form of theft. The early Romans famously seized and carried off the Sabine women, being short on wives. Poussin depicts the Sabine women flung over the Romans’ shoulders, abandoned infants wailing on the ground, fathers wrestling the soldiers to get their daughters back. But in the center of the canvas, in the midst of all the chaos, a slender, blue-gowned woman can be seen strolling off arm-in-arm with her assailant, her head tilted amorously toward his. The Roman historian Livy records that the Sabine women were advised to “cool their anger and give their hearts to the men who had already taken their bodies.” A happy ending for an imperial foundation-myth.

Other words come from the same Latin root as “rape”: raptureravagerapt, ravenousrapaciousravishing. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is filled with stories of ravishing nymphs seized and carried off by rapacious gods: Io, Daphne, Callisto, Europa, Andromeda, Leda, Persephone. (There are more than fifty sexual attacks in Ovid, by one scholar’s count.) Correggio paints Io in an erotic swoon, her head tipped back, her lips parted, her body one long, sensuous curve of flesh. You might be forgiven for forgetting that Jupiter has just chased her into the woods, whereupon, in Ovid’s words, “he hid the wide earth in a covering of fog, caught the fleeing girl, and raped her.” Titian pictures Europa in a similar state of rapture, sprawled blowsily across the back of a muscular white bull (Jupiter), her fleshy thighs parted, her translucent gown in disarray, a milky breast exposed. Inspired by Titian, Rubens depicts the abduction of the daughters of Leucippus by the twins Castor and Pollux as a Baroque spiral of rearing horses, gleaming armor, flowing golden hair, creamy female skin. The daughters, languidly reaching out for help, do not look exactly happy, but neither do they seem especially distressed.

I read Ovid and study Roman history in high school. For a fine arts course in college, I go to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and study Titian’s Rape of Europa and Botticelli’s Tragedy of Lucretia. I write essays on the aesthetic qualities and cultural contexts of the art. But as far as I can remember, I never consider the fact that these scenes are all depicted from the perspective of a man. It doesn’t occur to me to ask what it means to glorify sexual violence, to conflate rapture and ravishment and rape.

Cossacks

My mother stands before the bathroom mirror, putting on lipstick, brushing her hair. I am watching her get ready to go out, as I have done since I was a little girl—my beautiful mother, with her slender wrists and ankles and thick dark hair. She sprays on her perfume, Hermès’s “Calèche,” its blend of rose and iris, oak moss, and woods, even now the essence of my mother, a luxuriant, sexy smell. My father brings her gifts of perfume when he travels abroad for work.

My mother has hazel eyes, high cheekbones. She brushes rouge onto her cheeks, tilting her face before the mirror. They are a good-looking couple, my parents, romantic, although often enough, they fight. My father mutters curses under his breath when he is angry, hissed first syllables hinting at awful names: “fu—– cu–,” “stu— sh–.” He makes all the money and has all the power, my mother complains. She urges me to pursue a career, to be independent, not to marry young the way she did.

My mother inherited her high cheekbones from her mother, she tells me, whose parents emigrated from Czarist Russia at the turn of the century, fleeing the pogroms. My image of pogroms comes from Fiddler on the Roof’s horseback-riding, vodka-swilling Cossacks in their leather boots and belted tunics. Who squat and kick their heels out as they dance, their arms folded across their chests. Who rip their spears through Motel and Tzeitel’s down pillows and wedding quilts.

My mother takes a tissue and blots her lips, leaving a coral lip-print kiss. “The Cossacks had high cheekbones,” she says. “There must have been some Cossack blood back there, somewhere.”

Somehow I understand that she is talking about rape. About the vestiges of that history of violence, helixed like a secret in the DNA of every cell inside her body, and in mine.

Lois Lane

The summer after my first year in college, I get a job working as a reporter for a suburban Massachusetts newspaper, The Middlesex News. I am assigned to the Waltham bureau, a dingy storefront office on Moody Street. The editors and reporters sit at metal desks along one side of the room. The opposite side belongs to circulation, and every morning the delivery people (not boys on bikes, but shuffling adults in beat-up cars) file in to deposit their collections, interrupting the buzz and clack of our electric typewriters with the jangle of the coin-sorting machine. I write features on a diner-turned-Chinese restaurant, on neighborhood objections over a cut-down tree, on a museum of industry, on a summer camp for gifted kids. After a few weeks, I am promoted to editorial assistant and assigned the police and court beats.

I have never had a real job before. In the mornings, I sleep too late and arrive at the police station with my hair dripping down the back of my skimpy tee shirt or the summer dress my mother probably should have advised me not to wear to work. The cops hoot when I approach to read the blotter. When they learn my name is Margot, they call me Lois Lane.

“Hey, Lois! Howya doin’?” they shout when I walk in, their Boston accents thick. “Where’s Clark?”

On Monday mornings, they say, “Hey, Lois, you get married yet?”

I am embarrassed and a little offended but mostly flattered by the teasing. I squirm as I copy into my reporter’s notebook the previous days’ offenses: vandalized mailboxes, minor drug busts, stolen bikes, toilet-papered trees. Then in August there’s a rape. The victim, a single woman in her twenties, is awakened at five a.m. by an intruder (“a stocky, powerful man with an Italian accent,” I improbably report) who climbs in through her ground floor bedroom window with a white sack over his head. He holds a knife to her throat and threatens to kill her if she makes a sound or tries to run for help. It’s an August heat wave: oppressive, muggy, East Coast heat. Fans whir in the windows of the station house. Sweat trickles down my chest as I stand in the police chief’s office, pen in hand, the cover of my notebook flipped back.

Deputy Chief Rooney leans back in his desk chair and sighs. He is a heavy man, his collar tight around his ruddy neck. He says, “It’s hot. People get crazy, you know, when it’s hot.”

I know only enough to roll my eyes, afterward, when I tell people what he said. I do not know that this was the third rape in less than three weeks in Waltham. That the only female rape counselor on the Waltham force was laid off in the last round of budget cuts. That an average of 1.5 women are sexually assaulted in Boston every day. At seventeen, I consider myself a feminist, but I have not read Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book, Against Our Will. I have not heard of the slogan “Take Back the Night.”

I am Lois Lane. “Wednesday I had a big story—rape!” I write in my journal at the end of the week. “My story made the front page on Thursday. It was all very exciting. Went out to dinner with Mom and Dad.”

Denial

Not long ago I read a memoir, Denial, written by a terrorism expert named Jessica Stern. Stern was fifteen in 1973 when she was raped, along with her fourteen-year-old sister, at gunpoint in her Concord, Massachusetts, home. In 2006, at Stern’s request, the Concord police reopened the case files and connected her assault to forty-four other similar rapes in the Boston area. Eighteen of the rapes occurred within an eight-block radius in Harvard Square; victims included the thirteen-year-old daughter of Harvard Law School’s dean. Other rapes occurred at nearby boarding schools. Two girls were raped in their dorm at Concord Academy. Two girls were raped at a private school in Natick. Two girls were raped at my high school, Dana Hall.

Whoa, I think. I know this story. That guy— the tennis pro?—raped forty-something other girls as well? But the details do not add up. I remember three girls being raped, not two. Moreover, the man who police say assaulted Stern and her sister was arrested in 1973 and spent the next eighteen years in jail. In 1973, I was ten, not in high school. Have I misremembered what happened? Or did the police make a mistake? Finally, searching the Boston Globe archives, I find an article detailing the rapes that I remember, dated November, 1978. It opens with this lead:

Lt. Victor Maccini has been a Wellesley policeman for 32 years. His memory faltered the other day when he was asked when his department had conducted its last intensive rape investigation. He gazed out of his office window and shook his head slowly before answering. “Gee . . . a rape case? I don’t remember,” he said. “We’ve had them, though, but they’ve always been on the outskirts, like Needham or Newton.”

But buried a dozen paragraphs down, the same article states:

Police concede, however, that the case is almost identical to a case in 1971 in which two Dana Hall students reported that they were raped at gunpoint by a masked gunman. That case was never solved.

It takes a minute before I comprehend that we are talking about two different incidents, both at my high school, just seven years apart. Until now, I’d never heard of the 1971 rapes. I can’t find a single mention of them in the press. Thirty-three years later, I am stunned. So many girls, raped, not “on the outskirts,” not in the crazy heat of August, but in their homes and dorms, in the tony Boston suburbs where I grew up. I was right there, but I had no idea.

In an op-ed piece published in the Boston Globe in 2010, Amy Vorenberg reveals that she is the girl Stern refers to in her book as “Lucy,” the daughter of the Harvard Law School dean, raped in 1971 by a masked gunman in an upstairs bathroom of her mother’s house while her family and friends talked and laughed downstairs. The police issued no warning. The next night, the same man raped two more girls just down the street. No one said a thing. “I have been silent long enough,” Vorenberg writes. “Although 40 years have passed, respected institutions still suppress information about sexual assault, and rape remains the most underreported of violent crimes.”

The tennis pro, as it turns out, was not the rapist. He was acquitted after a short trial at the end of November, 1978. The case was never solved.

Red running shorts

It is the end of exam period of my senior year in college. I am finishing a thirty-five-page paper, and I have stretched it right to the end. I sit at my desk, chewing on my pencil, riffling through my stacks of notes, the scribbled pages of my draft. The paper is due at five p.m., and it is already mid-afternoon, and I have not yet finished writing, have not yet begun to type.

I phone my professor to ask for an extension. Just until the morning, I plead. Just for time to type. I expect him to be sympathetic. I’m a senior, a good student, a hard worker. I’ve already turned in my honors thesis, passed my orals, won a prestigious scholarship to graduate school. There is a faint buzzing on the line. I wait.

He says, “If that paper is not at my house by nine o’clock tomorrow morning, I’m giving you an F.”

Right.

I pull an all-nighter finishing the paper. In the morning, I walk across Harvard Square to the address the professor has given me. It’s a long walk; I don’t have a car. I haven’t showered or changed my clothes. My eyes are gritty, my hair greasy. People are strolling along the sidewalks, new leaves fluttering on the trees, but in my fatigue, nothing feels quite real. I climb the steps and ring the bell.

He comes to the door wearing bright red running shorts and nothing else. He is bare-chested, barelegged, barefoot, practically naked, except for those red shorts. He is square-jawed and blond-bearded and runner-thin. He motions for me to come in.

I step into the living room. He picks up a telephone that is lying on the table off the hook and, cradling the receiver between his shoulder and his cheek, continues whatever conversation he was having before my arrival. He flips rapidly through the pages of my paper, the one I’ve worked so hard on, the one I stayed up all night to type. He is skimming, making a show of disinterest, I think. He flips the pages, murmuring into the phone. I perch on the edge of the couch and wait. A clock ticks in the kitchen, which I can see through an open door. There is no one else in the house, as near as I can tell. After a little while, he hangs up the phone and fixes me with a look.

“I would have given you an A,” he says, “but the paper is late. So I’m giving you a B instead.” He comes around the table to me. My heart is beating hard. I’d like to protest—I wrote a thirty-five-page paper, after all, and it’s good!—but I do not, cannot, speak.

He writes something on a card, slides it into an envelope. He holds it out to me. “I want you to go over to University Hall now,” he says, “and turn in my grades.”

Grades are not due for several days, I am quite sure. He has no right to make me run his errands for him. But he is giving me an order, not an option. He stands there in his red running shorts, bare-chested, practically naked, holding out that envelope. It’s clear that he would have no compunction about ripping it open and changing the B to an F if I refuse. It’s clear he could do anything he wants.

He could, for example, push my head down to those red running shorts and make me suck his dick.

He does not do it, but he could.

I take the envelope and walk back across the square and turn it in.

Oleanna

Anita Hill is on the radio, promoting her new book. It has been twenty years since the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings in which Hill accused Judge Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. People are calling in to thank her: women and men who admire her bravery, mothers whose daughters have grown up taking it for granted that it’s not okay to tell lewd jokes in the workplace, to touch a woman without asking, to hold out rewards in exchange for sex. I’m thinking of my teenage daughter, what she will encounter soon at school or work. How much has changed?

David Mamet’s play, Oleanna—which I saw at its Harvard Square premiere in 1992, just seven months after the Thomas hearings— dramatizes a power struggle between a college student, Carol, and a young professor, John. Carol is on the verge of failing and desperate to pass John’s course. John patronizes Carol’s lack of understanding, interrupts their conversation to talk to his wife on the phone, then tells Carol that if she comes to his office for private tutorials, he’ll give her an “A.”

In a gesture that might or might not be paternal, John reaches out to touch her shoulder. Carol files a sexual harassment complaint. John’s tenure bid is put on hold. When John tries to talk Carol into dropping the charges, he grows angry and grabs her arm, and she raises the charges to attempted rape. In the play’s final scene, John loses control and beats Carol with a chair. “Oh, my God,” he says, realizing what he has done. From where she cowers on the floor, Carol looks up at him and says slowly, “Yes, that’s right.”

Mamet complicates the narrative of sexual harassment, giving Carol the power to destroy John, making John both a monster and a dupe. Watching the play, I find that I am shocked that Carol has such power. It has not dawned on me until now that in my own run-in with my red-running-shorts-clad professor, six years earlier, I had power, too. (Like John, my professor did not have tenure. All I would have had to do was file a complaint!) Yet I can’t help feeling that John, for all his smugness and paternalistic hypocrisy—or, for that matter, my professor— does not deserve to be destroyed. Does power necessarily corrupt? Or are we more complicit in protecting privilege than we’d like to think?

Campus watch

I am now a college professor, the one with power (such as it is) over deadlines, extensions, grades. Since the eighties, of course, things have changed. I keep my office door open during student conferences, watch my gestures and my language, encourage students to engage with questions of power, privilege, race, gender, class. College is no longer a boys’ club. These days, in the classroom, the women outperform the men. They raise their hands and voice opinions. They are diligent, articulate, and bright.

At the college where I teach, as elsewhere, kids drink, hook up. Here, as elsewhere, girls get drunk at parties, black out, and wake up to discover they’ve been raped. Girls are assaulted walking across campus and in their dorms, by strangers and by friends. A study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice estimates that one in five female students will be raped during their college years. But over eighty percent of victims do not report the crime.

A former student of mine is one of the few who does speak up. Almost nothing about her case is clear. She says she did shots before going to a party and can’t remember anything that happened after that. The boy in question says she came on to him aggressively at a party and clearly wanted sex. She says she only discovered she’d gone back to his room when she heard the gossip the next day. People who were at the party confirm they saw her grinding with him on the dance floor. After a disciplinary hearing, the boy is suspended for the year. She receives vicious messages, calling her a slut, accusing her of ruining his life.

I don’t know what to think. My mother says, “Why should the boy take all the blame? In my day, as a girl, you knew you had to take responsibility for yourself.” My husband says, “It’s not that complicated. You just don’t mess around with a girl who’s drunk.”

When we meet for coffee, my student says her parents are planning to appeal the verdict; his parents have filed suit. She’s looking into transferring to a different college, although so far this semester, her grades are not so great. “It’s been pretty rough,” she says. She shakes back her long hair and fiddles with her coffee cup. “You are not a victim,” I want to tell her, but we both know it is too late. You become a victim once you call it rape.

The morning after

In the late 1980s, after graduate school, I go to work for a consulting firm in New York. It’s the kind of job that, not even a generation ago, was the sole domain of men. But the group of associates I am hired with is nearly forty percent women, and we’re sure the senior ranks—scarcely four percent women—will catch up soon enough. We’re well educated, well paid, and young enough to believe that you can have a high-powered job like this and still get married and have kids. I want it all and I want it now, reads a button I’ve tacked up on my bulletin board.

Office romance is officially against the rules but common nonetheless. At an off-site meeting in Arizona during a business trip, one of the partners—I’ll call him Rick—approaches me after dinner on the final night. He invites me to skip the party and go out for a drink with him instead. He is a few years older than me and more senior in the firm, but I don’t work with him directly, and he’s not my boss. He is single and athletic and not bad looking and has a reputation for being really smart. I say sure.

The bellman calls us a taxi. As soon as we leave the irrigated grounds of our hotel, the Sonoran Desert opens up, a bleak expanse of sand and scrub grass cooling beneath the evening sun. The cab driver takes us to a bar on the outskirts of Scottsdale, a converted bunkhouse with a row of dusty Harleys parked out front. We settle at a picnic table, and Rick fetches himself a nonalcoholic beer and me an Amstel Light. He is fun to talk with, and I like his blue eyes and his smile. The possibility, even the likelihood, of sex flares between us like the distant heat lightning forking over the ridge of the McDowells.

I go back with Rick to his hotel room of my own free will. I am not drunk. I let him take off my clothes and lead me to the bed, filled with the strange attraction of a stranger’s body touching mine. We enter such situations with certain expectations. We expect intelligent people to behave intelligently, colleagues to behave collegially, people with whom we have a lot in common to think the way we think. So when I ask if he has a condom, I don’t expect him to laugh and say, “Oh, I don’t do condoms.” I don’t expect that he won’t stop. We are two bodies in motion, and momentum exerts its force. My mind whirls, but no words come out.

Very quickly, it is over. He sighs and rolls away. I phone my doctor the next day and ask for the morning-after pill. I hear only what I take for disapproval in her voice as she gives me instructions, her tone clinical and clipped. I don’t remember if she asks me about what happened. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t use the word consent. Anyway, I consented, didn’t I? I could have said no, could have tried to stopped him, but I didn’t.
 I fill the prescription, swallow the pills, and for the next twenty-four hours, I throw up. I don’t talk to Rick. I tell my friends I must have caught a stomach bug. The wretchedness of my secret feels like the punishment I deserve.

What is it about no means no

Jury duty, Salt Lake City, 2004. At the courthouse, people wait in rows of plastic chairs, mumbling into cell phones, as a film plays overhead about the civic importance and personal rewards of jury service. Finally, a few of us are called up to the courtroom for the voir dire. We stand in turn and answer questions printed on a laminated sheet. One of the questions asks what kinds of things we read. A number of people say “only religious material.” I’m an East Coast liberal, working toward an English Ph.D.; I tell them: The New Yorker, literary fiction, Derrida. I’m thinking that I’ll be dismissed.

After the questioning, the judge informs us that the criminal trial we’re being selected for is a rape case. The defendant, who is married to the victim, is being tried on five counts of rape. The judge asks if anyone feels they cannot be objective in this kind of case. She asks if anyone has a problem with the concept that the defendant is innocent until proven guilty. Several people raise their hands and are excused. I’m in.

Spousal rape has been against the law in Utah, as in most states, since 1991, but the concept is still not so easy to digest. The wife and husband in this case are young and poor and have two small kids. She works in a gas station convenience store. He is out of work. We’re told they fight over child care and who gets to use the car. We watch a video of him being interrogated by a detective who appears to be coercing him to confess. We watch as the wife takes the stand and starts to cry, her waist-length brown hair hanging in her face, as she says she loves her husband, has always loved him, loves him still.

We understand that the law says you don’t have to kick and scream or struggle for an unwanted sexual act to be considered rape. That you don’t have to be physically threatened or forcibly pinned down. That you have to be capable of consent, and that you can withdraw that consent at any point. That rape is not the victim’s fault. We understand all this and yet. We struggle, listening to the testimony, with the fact that this man did not use force, that his wife did not fight back. We sit around the table in the jury room and argue for hours, conflicted and confused:

“What bothers me is that she didn’t do anything to stop him.”

“Come on, what could she have done? She said she knew she couldn’t stop him no matter what she did.”

“She told him, ‘Stop, you’ll wake the kids.'”

“But was she like, ‘Oh, we really should stop, honey,’ or like, ‘You need to stop right this minute?’ How can you tell?”

“Look, it’s not as if he hurt her. Bad sex isn’t a crime.”

“It doesn’t make any difference whether or not he hurt her. She didn’t want to do it. That’s her right.”

“Haven’t we all done things we didn’t want to do? That’s called life.”

“She got up there on the stand and said she loves him.”

In the end, we can’t agree to call it rape. They’re both young and foolish, we rationalize. None of us wants to be responsible for ruining a young man’s life.

After we deliver our not-guilty verdict, the prosecutor comes storming back. She is furious, her red hair ablaze.

She says, “What is it about ‘no means no’ that you all don’t understand?”

Antipodes

Traveling in New Zealand, I strike up a conversation with an American in a Queenstown café. He’s thirty-something, my age as well, a high school science teacher who, like me, has taken a leave of absence from work. His accent is appealingly familiar. He seems like any number of the fellow travelers I’ve met while on the road alone: friendly, companionable, polite. After we finish eating, he invites me to walk back with him to his hostel to watch a movie on the common room TV. It’s a pleasant, early autumn evening—March in the antipodes—and I have nothing else to do, so I agree. We meander across town, chatting about Wanaka and the Milford Sound, our hikes along the Franz Josef Glacier, the sea-eroded rocks at Hokitika, the seals basking on the beach at Jackson Bay.

At the hostel, the common room is deserted and nothing good is playing on TV. I look around for the proprietor of the hostel, other guests, but there’s no one else in sight. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead. Sitting beside him on the couch as he clicks through the channels, I feel the energy between us shift. After a bit, he puts his arm around me and pulls me to him. He tries to kiss me, but I shake my head, pull back. “I’m sorry,” I say, feeling like a jerk. I didn’t mean to lead him on. It really didn’t occur to me this is what he had in mind.

He stiffens, but instead of backing off, he presses closer, fumbling with the zipper of his pants with one hand, pushing my head down with the other, angling his pelvis toward my face. He does not hurt me, but there is nothing but aggression in his actions. For a moment, I consider giving in. It’s just a blow job, after all. But instead I pull free, stand up. His anger radiates toward me, hard and petulant, like a child’s, only he is no child.

“I’d better go,” I say.

He says, “You fucking bitch.”

I leave him sitting on the couch. Outside in the darkness, fear catches me by the throat. It is quite a long distance back to where I’m staying, and I’m not sure I know the way. I walk as quickly as I can without running, scanning the dark streets for a taxi, for attackers, my room keys threaded through my fingers, adrenaline vibrating through my limbs. I am less angry with him than with myself.

I thought I knew how to take care of myself, but I fucked up.

In my journal, I write only: “Met F. at dinner. Took a walk back to his hostel.” I edit out the details but not the shame, which lingers, even after all these years.

Rape is rape

Rape happens behind closed doors, between the sheets, in locker rooms, in prisons, in churches, in refugee camps, in dorms, in back alleys, in three-thousand-dollar per night luxury hotel suites. It happens between the powerful and the weak, between men and women, men and boys, husbands and wives, adults and children, strangers and lovers, between ordinary people like you and me. You might say you’re just having a little fun, horsing around, hooking up. Sometimes there’s a knife or gun. Sometimes there’s a kiss. It isn’t so easy to tell lie from truth, intention from mistake.

After a Toronto cop tells a group of college women that they shouldn’t dress provocatively if they don’t want to get raped, women around the world take to the streets dressed in bras and camisoles and fishnet tights, the word SLUT scrawled in Sharpie across their bare arms and backs. Bloggers rail against rape culture. Activists wage campaigns for better information and awareness, trumpeting the slogan “rape is rape.” All this talk gives me a bit of hope. I’d like to think my children will grow up to a world where girls are not attacked at gunpoint in their homes or dorms or taken advantage of when drunk, where threats or accusations of rape are not used to gain political advantage, where women can express their sexuality without being shamed as sluts, where men and women understand that no means no and yes means yes. But I’m not so sure.

Maybe anatomy is destiny; maybe Freud was right. The language of desire is the language of violence, after all. Sexy women are knockouts, bombshells, stunning, dressed to kill, femmes fatales. Love is an abduction: your heart is stolen. You’re smitten, hooked, swept off your feet. Cupid’s weapon is an arrow. Sex and violence, violence and sex, twine together in a knot that cannot be undone.

* * *

Originally published in The Normal School, fall 2012. Subscribe to the magazine.

Photo: Kjell Reigstad

Falling: Love and Marriage in a Conservative Indian Family

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Debie Thomas | River Teeth | Summer 2013 | 17 minutes (4,194 words)

River TeethFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share an essay from Ashland, Ohio’s narrative nonfiction journal River Teeth. Longreads readers can receive a 20 percent discount off of a River Teeth subscription by going here.
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* * *

On my mother’s twenty-second birthday, her parents told her she was engaged. She had met her fiancé once before, when my dad, accompanied by his dad, visited her home and spoke to her for about fifteen minutes. Two months later, they held hands for the first time and exchanged their wedding vows in a tiny village church in South India.

My father, then twenty-five years old, left the country to enroll in seminary in Europe, leaving his new bride with her in-laws. She joined him some months later, and they immigrated to America in 1971. They had me, their first child, three years after that. In 2014, my parents will celebrate their forty-fifth anniversary.

This is not a story. It’s a lesson. An example. A standard to live up to. And like all of the story-lessons my parents sprinkled into their childrearing—“We walked three miles to school each day in the Kerala heat. We had chores from sun-up until sundown. We did our homework by candlelight”—this one is unadorned. There are no addendums, intrigues, or controversies I can add to spice things up, though God knows I have tried.

“But what did you feel when your parents first told you? What did you think?” This to my mother, who raises her eyebrows at my twelve-year-old foolishness.

“I didn’t think anything. I had completed college, and it was the right time for marriage. That’s all.”

I try multiple choice. “But were you scared? Excited? Sad? Did you think Daddy was handsome, average, ugly?”

She doesn’t give me an inch; everything is a moral. “I trusted my parents to make the best decision for my future. Parents know best about such things.”

I scrutinize her face as she says this. I want a flutter, a twitch, any betrayal at all. But she’s seamless. I fall back on facts.

“What did you say to him when he came to visit you? What did you talk about?”

“I didn’t talk. He asked me some questions, and I answered them.” “What questions?”

She squints her eyes, trying to remember. “He asked if I was willing to be a pastor’s wife. If I could make the sacrifices his profession requires. Money and things like that. And he asked if I would go with him to America.”

“And you said?”

“I said yes.”

“Just like that?”

“Of course.”

“But … wasn’t there anything you wanted to ask him first?”

“Like what?” She waves me away disdainfully. “What would I ask, Debie? We weren’t married yet. What could there be to ask?”

I give up and turn to my father, but he is only slightly more forthcoming. “I had one proposal before your mother, but I said no to that girl right away.”

This fascinates me. “Why? What didn’t you like about her?”

He gets awkward. Busies himself with the sermon notes on his desk. “I just didn’t want to marry her.”

“But why not? Because of something she said? Did she answer your questions wrong?”

“No. We barely spoke. I just knew she couldn’t be my wife.”

I see from his face that we’re reaching the limits of what’s sayable.

“You mean, you weren’t attracted to her?”

“Attracted” is an English word my father doesn’t know what to do with. It embarrasses him. I retranslate. “You didn’t think she was pretty?” He thinks about this for a minute before he answers. “When I looked at her, I thought of her as a sister. Or an aunt. Not a wife.”

I nod smugly; he wasn’t attracted to her. I’m both pleased and disoriented by the fact that my father understands this about himself. “But when you saw Mummy?”

“I thought right away she could be my wife.”

“Because she was beautiful? That’s how you decided? By her looks?” He doesn’t like the criticism implicit in the question. He gets defensive. “She was a godly, well-educated girl from a decent family. That’s what’s important.”

It’s time to end the conversation, but I can’t. I ask the next question fast, before my courage gives out. “Did you fall in love with her?”

For conservative Indians like my parents, “falling in love” is an American illness, a condition to avoid as one avoids warts or gonorrhea. But I need Daddy to confess that he felt something for Mummy when he married her, and this is the only way I know to ask. But he doesn’t answer. He gives me a vocabulary lesson instead.

“Indians don’t ‘fall,’ Debie. We don’t marry by accident. We choose. Choose to marry, choose to love. We’re not powerless like Americans.”

By age twelve, I’m attentive enough to words and their precise meanings to be shaken by Daddy’s explanation. It hasn’t struck me until that moment that “falling in love” is a passive activity. That it can’t, by definition, involve choice or volition. Nothing in my careful dichotomizing of American freedom and Indian oppression explains this upending, and my twelve-year-old self protests. What does Indian culture know about choice? What could epitomize choicelessness more than an arranged marriage? Falling?

The possibility stumps me. It stumps me still.

* * *

I don’t watch soap operas with Mummy. She shoos me away from the television like any proper Indian mother must, even snapping the set off at the first hint of a scandalous bedroom scene. But during the hot summer afternoons I spend with her in our kitchen, I manage to watch her favorite soaps, anyway. I persist. I hover. I spy. While Mummy peels garlic and chops green chilis to the accompaniment of All My Children, One Life to Live, The Young and the Restless, or Santa Barbara, I peek around doorways and fall into those glamorous, chandeliered worlds, too. By the time I’m eleven, twelve, thirteen years old, I am as invested in the love-drenched dramas of Erika Kane, Bo Brady, and Eden Capwell as I am in the preteen crushes of my middle-school friends.

Mummy’s running commentary on Western shamelessness notwithstanding, she watches these shows faithfully throughout the years of my growing up. As do my conservative aunties. When I ask my mother, years later, what she found so compelling about soaps, she looks embarrassed and shrugs me off. “Crazy Americans—it was amusing to watch them,” she says. As if Susan Lucci, with her ageless skin and inexplicable lingerie, was a newly discovered species of grasshopper. Or a Martian.

For me, the draw is unreservedly romance. Though I pay attention to the soaps’ convoluted storylines involving miscarriages, amnesiacs, evil twins, and terminal illnesses, what fascinates me are the love stories. The couples. The falling. Cruz Castillo and Eden Capwell. Bo Brady and Hope Williams. Erika Kane and … more men than I can keep track of. In short, the holy ground of desire, pursuit, affection, and seduction that elevates lovers into another realm altogether—a strange, beautiful realm my teenage self inflects both racially and culturally.

Growing up, I don’t live in a world where husbands and wives hug, kiss, hold hands, or say, “I love you.” I don’t grow up hearing my father or my uncles call their wives “honey,” “sweetheart,” or “darling.” If these terms of endearment have Indian equivalents, I don’t hear those, either. In fact, I witness nothing that would positively distinguish a married couple from a brother and his sister, or a pair of cousins, or two cordial acquaintances. No flirtation, no secret looks, no surreptitious caresses. I have no childhood memories of my parents planning date nights, weekend getaways, or anniversary celebrations. When my little brother and I occasionally dared my parents to kiss, on Valentine’s Day, say, or on one of their birthdays, the awkward peck my father gave Mummy’s cheek always disappointed us both.

Inevitably, then, soap operas open up a distinctly American realm, a realm almost embarrassing in its excess, its sentimentality, its raw, naked hunger. It is a realm where lovers are immediately recognizable as lovers. A realm that clashes in every conceivable way with the pragmatic and decidedly non-sentimental world I inhabit as an Indian girl.

I’m well into high school before it dawns on me that what Mummy and I watch on TV during our summer afternoons is not quite American reality. That Erika’s perfect makeup and roller-coaster love life bear little resemblance to the marriages of my white schoolmates’ parents. And yet some similarities persist, and I pay attention to them. My white schoolmates’ parents say, “I love you.” They kiss on the lips. They share secret glances and affectionate nicknames. In other words, they exist as couples, apart from their communal roles as parents, neighbors, friends, relatives.

The things that linger from my soap-watching years are so American-obvious, so conspicuous, that it feels silly to name them. But for me, they are world-changing. In America—on-screen and off—falling in love is neither dishonorable nor criminal. Falling in love is good. In families, it offers an occasion for celebrations, toasts, best wishes, hugs. Even in cases where the falling is inconvenient—because it happens too early, or too late, or between lovers whose lives are too messy to bode well for their futures—even in those cases, the falling itself is respected as a legitimate experience, entirely within the realm of the human and the normal.

If anything, it’s the failure to fall in love that elicits sorrow in America. The unluckiest people aren’t the ones who fall and fail, who love and find their love unrequited, who risk everything on romance and suffer heartbreak. The unluckiest people are those who never experience the magic at all, even fleetingly. Theirs are the blunted lives, the lives we pity. The contrast between this view of romance and the view I learn at home could not possibly be starker.

By the time I graduate from high school, my soap-opera heroines have “fallen” so many times, I’ve more than lost count. But their highs and lows don’t leave me jaded. Their reckless belief in an ideal that compels them to fall and fall and fall again, despite pain and grief and loss, exhilarates me. More, I’m exhilarated by the world these lovers live in. It’s an unfathomable world. A world that lets them love.

* * *

It’s a late Saturday afternoon in March, and I am wandering from room to room in my crowded house. I’m fourteen years old, and itching for news. The wait is intolerable.

I’m waiting because my parents have facilitated an “arrangement,” the first I’ve ever witnessed. Beena, a young woman who attends our church, has received a marriage proposal from a family my father knows in Dallas. The prospective groom’s family has come to Boston to meet her, and the two sides have arranged a meeting at a nearby restaurant. After receiving prayer here at the house, the would-be bride—decked out in a sari and an updo—has left for the restaurant, accompanied by her parents, a couple of aunts and uncles, and my father. A few family members and friends have lingered at our house to wait for an outcome. My mother—whom Daddy has promised to call as soon as he has news—hovers by the phone.

I am dying to talk, but there’s no one to talk to. My mother and my aunties are hardly opening their mouths as they sip coffee around the kitchen table, exchanging nothing but whispered requests for more sugar or another piece of jackfruit halva. They look dignified and solemn, as if the weight of the huge and wonderful something that is happening at that restaurant right now depends on their maintaining a strict decorum.

I share nothing of their restraint. I am hungry to chat, to exchange notes, to imagine out loud every possible version of what might be happening to Beena as we sit here, maddeningly out of the loop. Though by now I’ve attended several arranged weddings, this is my first time experiencing the process that precedes the vows and rings and cakes.

I’ve seen Beena before at church events, but we’ve done little more than smile at each other; she’s in her early twenties, and rightly considers me a kid. But she is also what I call “Indian Indian”—a new arrival, fluent in Malayalam, conversant in English, adept at cooking, and skilled in all the feminine gestures and graces which render her, in my mother’s approving parlance, a “modest and godly girl.” All of which means I can’t handle her presence for long without feeling loud-mouthed, ashykneed, and unattractively American.

But today this Indian Indian has my empathy. I want to know a hundred things about her predicament, a hundred things Western television has failed to teach me. How is Beena feeling at this very moment? What is her prospective fiancé noticing when he looks at her? Is he looking at her, or are they both too shy to make eye contact? Are they speaking, or are the parents doing all the talking? Is Beena’s heart pounding? Is her mouth dry? Is she falling? Is he?

In other words: what exactly is transpiring between these two human beings as they meet for the first time to do nothing less than make the biggest decision of their lives in just a matter of minutes? I ache to know.

When I’m sure I won’t survive another moment of suspense, the phone rings. The house grows even quieter as my mother answers. She nods as my father tells her something I can’t make out, and by degrees her face softens into a smile. She hangs up nearly laughing and exclaims, “They have agreed!”

My aunties stand up and beam with pleasure. They take collective breaths of relief. “I knew it all along” they say. “I had no doubts.” “God is good.”

The energy in the house changes as everyone prepares to receive Beena and her now-betrothed at our house. Mummy makes fresh coffee. The aunties assemble snack trays. I’m instructed to straighten up the living room. I do so impatiently, my hands barely feeling the sofa cushions I fluff, the empty cups and saucers I gather. I can’t wait to see Beena’s face. To read it.

They arrive twenty minutes later. My father ushers the families in, and we make special room for the groom’s family to sit first, on one of our couches. Beena and her parents sit across from them on the loveseat, our coffee table separating Beena from her fiancé. The rest of us crowd around the doorway while Mummy serves coffee and snacks.

I don’t know what I’m expecting. The conversation—mostly between the men—is warm and polite. Beena’s fiancé is chatty but respectful as he talks about his career plans, Beena’s good chances of landing a nursing job in Texas, and the weather down south. When Beena stands up to show her new mother-in-law where our bathroom is, a couple of aunties squeeze her hand and pat her arm, and she smiles. Later Beena passes a plate of biscuits to her fiancé, and he nods his thank you. Before the families leave, Beena’s father asks Daddy to take a group picture, and we all squeeze together in front of the fireplace, with Beena and her fiancé at our center. The two of them are more than close enough to press into each other, but they don’t. They don’t touch at all, or even look at each other’s faces. When the two families say goodbye on our driveway, Beena and her fiancé part with shy smiles. No words.

An older, kinder version of me would read nervousness into the whole of this interaction. Nervousness, fear of offending elders, a deeply ingrained sense of propriety and modesty. But at fourteen, I am neither old nor kind. I am appalled. By that age, I’ve come to think of love as an immersion experience. A tsunami. The love my Americanized self associates with marriage is not staid, not polite, not domestic, not communal. It is not about aunties patting my arms. Not about my career prospects in Dallas. In-love couples are supposed to float a few transfigured feet above the rest of the mundane world, oblivious to its dull concerns, their eyes and imaginations trained powerfully on each other.

By contrast, Beena’s happiness—if it even is happiness—strikes my adolescent self as passionless, platonic, cautious, and boring. In fact, it strikes me as impossible. By what definition of love could she already “love” this man she’s just met? On what basis could her heart have chosen him? In the thirty minutes I spend scrutinizing Beena’s face, I don’t see a woman who has just experienced a tsunami. At best, I see a girl who has politely dipped her big toe into an inch-deep pond, found some tentative comfort in the warm, brackish water, and decided to stay right there, one toe in, the other four out. If she’s happy, it’s because she has earned the warm approval of her extended family and friends. Because now she has joined the circle. Grown up. Become a true Indian woman. Good and well, I tell myself. I’m sure approval is nice. But why would anyone get married for that?

* * *

In the months that follow Beena’s engagement, I obsess over love and choosing. I struggle to hold together my father’s vocabulary lesson, my soap-opera education, and Beena’s very Indian marriage-by-choice. I wrestle to the point of getting headaches and stomachaches, my body succumbing to an anxiety I can hardly name. At fourteen, it’s not that I’m afraid of my own marriage as yet; adulthood is still too fuzzy and far away for that. My anxiety is more immediate, more concrete. I need coherence. I need the pieces of a crucial, complicated puzzle to fit together. I need the seams to disappear, but they won’t. They stubbornly won’t.

Eventually, I make a jagged peace. I decide that it is possible, for most people most of the time, to act lovingly towards just about anyone: a bratty toddler, an ornery grandfather, a new fiancé. But I also decide that this is not the same as choosing to love. It is choosing to act kindly in the absence of love. It is an intellectual assent, maybe even an ethnical one. But it’s got nothing to do with passion and romance.

My parents raise me on the conventional Indian wisdom that emotions are at best a nuisance and at worst a landmine. But they also emphasize that good feelings will follow naturally from good actions. Act lovingly towards a person, they say, and you will eventually feel love for them.

I’m taught this truth right alongside my American soap operas, so I sit in front of The Young and the Restless and ponder it. Can obligation really have so much power? How many years’ worth of “right actions” would it take to keep Victor and Nikki from breaking up again? How many times will Beena fold her husband’s laundry, cook his breakfast, and submit to his caresses before she wakes up one night and knows she loves him, body and soul? What if that knowledge never comes? What then? Perhaps filial love can bloom so dutifully, I decide. But romantic love? Erotic love? How is that possible?

Only years later will I realize that what Daddy inadvertently admits to me through his own courtship story is that attraction—physical attraction—is beyond human control. The girl he meets before Mummy doesn’t attract him, so he rejects her. Years later, when my parents show me photographs of would-be grooms, and ask if one man looks more appealing than another, what they’ll really be asking is “Are you sexually attracted to this guy? Can you respond to him physically?” The apparent assumption will be that I’ll either feel attracted, or not, because choice has no place in the equations of desire. Unlike love, attraction is uncontrollable, even for Indians. Maybe the mistake Americans make, I conclude, is that they confuse attraction for romance. They do fall, because all of us fall, but what they fall into isn’t love.

Like my parents, I’m doomed to reduce the complexities of my host culture, often to the point of absurdity. As a child, as a teenager, it doesn’t occur to me that on-screen romance is wholly filtered, polished, packaged. I don’t notice that American love stories generally end right where love—sustained love, the volitional kind—ought to begin—at the first kiss, on the wedding day, on the morning after the first heated night in bed. I never imagine Erika Kane minus her lipstick, or Victoria Newman ten years into a marriage. I don’t want to. At thirteen, I’m not a cultural critic looking for nuance; I’m a kid with an insatiable sweet tooth, standing outside the world’s biggest candy store. The door I call “American Love” is locked tight tight tight, but I’m so hungry, I can’t care. In fact, I’m starving, and my fists are more than ready to smash glass.

* * *

Falling, loving, arranging, choosing: it’s taken a long time to forgive myself for being stumped. Longer still to decide that understanding is impossible. I’ve been married now for almost seventeen years, to a man my parents chose for me soon after I graduated from college. The decision to submit to an arranged marriage wasn’t really a decision; my parents’ wishes were absolute, and I knew they’d suffer terribly in our conservative immigrant community if I refused. In the years since our wedding, Alex and I have loved and not loved, chosen and not chosen, fallen and not fallen. I’ve almost quit the marriage many times, but something as deep and unchangeable as my skin color, my DNA, my ancestry, has held me back. Here’s what I comprehend now:

I cannot know this essential thing I long to know. It’s not that there’s a graspable thing out there, just waiting for me to reach far enough, waiting for me to find the right English words that will unwrap its great mystery. The truth is, I still look at arranged marriages—even my own—and find all of my linguistic, cognitive, and emotional faculties failing. What I’m looking into is a void. Something uncrossable. An inchoate ground my feet cannot travel without sinking.

For years I thought this was my fault. A fault of my intellect, a fault of my heart, an imaginative stinginess that wouldn’t allow what looks avuncular or platonic or filial to transform itself into something passionate or romantic.

So I tried. I pressed in, taking arranged marriage stories chapter by chapter, line by line:

My father looks at my mother. He thinks, “She’s pretty.” She brings him tea. He asks her questions. She answers them. He looks away. She looks away, too. They sit together. Minutes pass. They need to make up their minds. They … look at each other one more time? They … tremble? They … sweat? They … pray? They decide to spend the rest of their lives together.

Beena walks into that restaurant. She catches her first glimpse of the boy from Texas. She sits down and says hello. He says hello in return. She … likes his eyes? His career prospects? His voice? He … notices the dimple on her cheek? The stray curl that falls across her forehead? The way she pronounces her r’s? They … tremble? Sweat? Pray? They decide to spend the rest of their lives together.

I’ll struggle as long as I try to see the un-seeable. As long as I try to create a possibility for it inside of myself.

I wonder fairly often now what my life with Alex would be like if I had no interpretive frame to measure him against. What kind of wife would I have become if America, with its green cards and transit lounges, its border crossings and trespasses, had never happened to our family?

What if I had never been introduced to steamy date nights and ribbon-wrapped chocolates? What if my vocabulary never included words like “sweetheart” or “soul mate?” What if I had been trained from birth to associate romantic desire with the things I now consider nice but mundane: a stable career, a comfortable home, a good reputation?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. As much as I try and try and try, I cannot know them. All I can know is the tension of trying. Of holding matter and anti-matter close, knowing they might annihilate each other. And me.

During the only other childhood conversation my father and I have about falling, I ask him about interracial marriage—a huge, huge taboo in our family. In my memory—which is probably inaccurate here—I am very young. Seven, maybe. Or eight. Young enough to ask without getting in trouble. “What if an Indian person falls in love with a white person, Daddy? Why shouldn’t they be allowed to marry?”

He can’t know it, but the answer he gives me is a gunshot. It crackles. It rips and ricochets over my life, explaining me—my divided, uncomprehending heart—to myself: “A bird might fall in love with a fish, Debie. But where would they live?”

* * *

Originally published by Riverteeth, Summer 2013.

* * *

Illustration By: Laura McCabe


Where the Spirit Meets the Bone: A Memoir by Lucinda Williams

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Lucinda Williams, with Benjamin Hedin  | Radio Silence | March 2014 | 11 minutes (2,690 words)

Radio SilenceFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share a first-time-ever memoir by the great Lucinda Williams from Radio Silence, a San Francisco-based magazine of literature and rock & roll. Subscribe, and download the free iOS app.

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* * *

Lucinda Williams recently turned sixty-one, and on the whole she feels pretty good about it. “I was so young, so sweet and tender,” she says when shown a photograph of herself at thirty-five. “I wish I still looked like that. But as an artist I’m better. My voice is better than it’s ever been; my range is better than it’s ever been.” This is quite a statement, considering that for the past twenty years Williams has been regarded as one of America’s finest living songwriters. Of her eleven studio and live albums there are a handful—Sweet Old World (1992), Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998), Little Honey (2008)—that offer little if any room for improvement. We don’t normally think of the seventh decade as being kind to popular musicians, but Williams is convinced she is in the middle of a sustained period of creativity and achievement. Lucinda Williams (1988), her third record, long out of print and sought after by collectors, was reissued in January, and she recently founded her own label. Later this year she plans to release a double album of new material.

All of this activity, you might say, evens the scales, makes up for time lost earlier in her career. As she reveals in this memoir, which was recorded late one night in her home overlooking the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, Williams never considered a profession other than songwriter. Yet she did not begin to be widely recognized for her talents until middle age. Her songs were too eclectic for scouts in the music industry to place in a single category, and labels such as Sony and Rounder passed on the opportunity to sign her. “Nobody knew what to do with me,” Williams says.

There is something parable-like about the story, though, for over time Williams’ weakness, her point of vulnerability in the marketplace, was gradually shown to be her major strength.

The greatness of her songs, as with those of Charley Patton and Bob Dylan, lies precisely in the way they defy customary notions of genre or style. After listening to a playlist of her songs, words like “country,” “rock,” and “folk-rock” seem fairly abstract, even arbitrary. From the twelve-bar blues of “Righteously” to the formal perfection of “Fancy Funeral”—a tune any hired songsmith in Nashville would kill to have written—to the classic existential plaint expressed by “Passionate Kisses,” a song whose catchy incantation and effortless concision are reminiscent of a Broadway showstopper, Williams has shown the ability to unite in her songs America’s many musical forms and to remind us of their ultimate similarity and perhaps indivisibility.

Williams’ father, the esteemed poet Miller Williams, commemorates this quality in the liner notes to Lucinda Williams. In the first grade, he reports, Lucinda wrote a poem when assigned a project and sketched a few designs around it on the paper, frustrating the expectations of her teacher, who had set aside two tables for her students’ work, one marked “collections” and the other “crafts.” Lucinda’s card went on a table of her own, and “all these years later,” Miller writes, “the world still doesn’t quite know what table Lucinda’s work belongs on. She doesn’t fit neatly into any of the established categories. She’s still a genre to herself, and always will be.”

While Williams’ art bears the trace of many forbears, the most important influence has always been that of her father, a subject she returns to often in this piece. Miller taught at several colleges in the South while Lucinda was growing up—in Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas. Her husband and manager, Tom Overby, likes to stress that her wit and literary flair are of a piece with the character and habits of that region. From an early age she acquired a familiarity with the great Southern storytellers of the last century, with those writers and singers engaged in a tradition that—like Williams’ music—is notable for its mysteries and peculiarity, for the way it stands outside the mainstream and resists the reductions of formula.

-Benjamin Hedin

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Photo: gwen, Flickr
 

* * *

My dad, when he was a younger writer, always had a mentor. Flannery O’Connor was one. We lived in Macon, Georgia, and she was in Milledgeville. So my dad took me. I can’t remember if my brother and sister went or not, and this is what’s so beautiful about the story: O’Connor—unlike me—was very disciplined. She had a certain time that she would write. She would get up at eight in the morning and write till three in the afternoon, and if the shades were down, that meant she was writing and you couldn’t come in. We showed up, well, she was still writing, so we had to sit out on the front porch until she was done. And she raised peacocks; my memory is of chasing her peacocks around the yard.

When I was about fifteen and sixteen I discovered her writing and read everything I could get my hands on, which wasn’t that much. But I read everything, and I also devoured Eudora Welty’s stuff. But for me, Flannery O’Connor was to writing what Robert Johnson was to blues. That might be the best way to say it. There was something about her stuff that was just a little more crooked, a little more weird, a little more out there. My song “Get Right With God” and my song “Atonement,” I got a lot from her novel Wise Blood. I was sleeping on a bed of nails. Wise Blood is about this guy who befriends this preacher who pretends to be blind. He’s a total con man, and this kid befriends him. At the end, the kid decides he’s got to be like Jesus Christ and suffer. He fits this barbed wire on his bed.

I have fond memories of the sound of my dad’s typewriter, which you don’t really hear anymore. I always knew when my dad was on the typewriter, something good was going on. As soon as I could read and write, I started writing little poems and short stories. I was six years old. I was always one of those kids who could entertain myself for hours sitting and writing or drawing. I don’t know if it happened that I became a writer because I wanted to please my dad, or if it just came naturally to me. Maybe it was a combination.

I just remember enjoying creating—writing and creating—from a young age, and eventually that spilled over into music and wanting to learn some kind of instrument. My mother is a musician, and there was always a piano in the house. Probably most of it was genetic, or part of it was genetic. We don’t really know why we’re drawn to certain things, you know?

* * *

had all these heroes when I started out, like Joan Baez and Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, all these traditional folk singers. And later Judy Collins and Bob Dylan. Highway 61 Revisited was the first Bob Dylan album I heard. A student of my dad’s came over to the house one day with a copy of that album, just raving about it, and I put it on the turntable and started listening. I was only twelve, so I didn’t understand everything on it, but I went, wow, this is a culmination of the two different worlds that I’ve come out of, the literary world and the traditional folk music world. I just fell in love, then and there; I fell in love with Bob Dylan. There was some part of my twelve-and-a-half-year-old brain that went: This is what I want to do.

In college—my dad wanted me to get a degree so I would have something to fall back on—when they asked me to put down what I was going to major in, I put cultural anthropology. I didn’t put music. I wasn’t interested in studying music formally. And then my parents split up. My mom was still living in New Orleans and it was the summer, and I went to stay with her, and I ended up getting this job on Bourbon Street at a little folk club. Smack in the middle of Bourbon Street. At the time it was a big deal. It was just for tips, but you could do pretty well back then in tips. And I remember calling my dad and I said, “Instead of going back to school, I want to stay here and do this.” And he said okay. To me, I felt like that was the turning point, because I wanted to please my dad. I didn’t want to disappoint him. I don’t know what would have happened if he had said, “No, I want you to come back.” But because he had been a struggling young poet, he understood the need to follow that path, so he supported me.

During the seventies, I was hanging around Houston and Austin, Texas, playing gigs in clubs. It was a different time than it is now. I wasn’t like, “Oh my god, I’ve got to get a record deal.” I didn’t know anything about the music business. It was just me and my guitar, playing in clubs. There was no music-business mentality. I think that proved to be a good thing. Some people might go, “Well, you could have made it sooner,” but I had this group of other musicians, like a support group, and no one was thinking about record deals or the music business. We were just writing songs.

I went out to L.A. at the urging of a friend, late 1984. He said, “Come out and I can get you some gigs.” And I remember when I left Austin everybody said, “Oh, they’ll eat you alive out there. You’ll come back to Texas with your tail between your legs.” And I said, “We’ll see.”

I came out here with this guy I was living with at the time, and in the back of my mind, I think I knew I was going to stay. I wasn’t going back. We ended up breaking up, and I found this place in Silver Lake for like four hundred bucks a month. Cute little duplex. I started playing, and eventually this guy who was the head of A&R for the West Coast for Sony said, “I want to try to convince everybody else at the label.” They gave me what they used to call a development deal. They would give you enough money to live on for six months, and you would write songs, and then the label would listen to it and decide if they wanted to sign you or not.

Well, I’m in seventh heaven at this point. I don’t have to work a day job. I was free to sit and write. I did a demo tape, and they passed on it. Sony in L.A. said I was too country for rock, and Sony in Nashville said I was too rock for country. This is before alternative-country, alternative-rock, Americana, all that stuff. None of that had happened yet. I fell in the cracks. It took this European punk label, Rough Trade Records; they weren’t worried about marketing like the American labels were. They were based in England but had an office in San Francisco. I got a call from their A&R guy Robin Hurley one day, and he said, “I heard this demo tape. We love your songs; we love your voice. Do you want to make a record?” And I remember thinking, wow, this will be cool, I’ll have an album to give people. This is really the album that broke me, the one where everybody went, where’s she been all my life?

I never got bitter. There’s no place for bitterness. That’s a waste of energy. I always figure, okay, if it’s not going to happen now, it’s going to happen at a certain point. I always had this thing that was pushing me and driving me, and I don’t know what that thing was. People ask all the time, “Do you feel bitter because you didn’t make it sooner?”—and the answer is always no. When I was in my twenties, I was not ready. Happy Woman Blues [Williams’ first album to feature original material], I was getting a taste of being a songwriter. Although there’s songs off Happy Woman Blues that people still want me to play; there’s a certain innocence in all of it. I guess I’m saying is the older I get, the better I get. I identify more with the jazz world and the blues world and the poetry world. My dad once said to me, “In the poetry world, nobody’s even considered until they get into their fifties and sixties.” All the classic poets were older. There are very few younger famous poets, or younger famous writers for that matter. Kerouac was kind of younger. A lot of the jazz artists didn’t look perfect. They weren’t beautiful. The rock world, on the other hand, is youth obsessed. The blues world, nobody worries about the age thing. Look at Honeyboy Edwards. Tom and I went to see him at Cozy’s in Sherman Oaks. I was sitting there at the table going, This is a living link to Robert Johnson. The guy was unbelievable, like a young rock guy. When was the last time you saw a fucking rock musician playing at the age of, what, he was ninety-what? It blows my fucking mind.

He does two long sets, takes a break. I go up to the bar and introduce myself. He’s drinking a big glass of beer and a shot of whiskey. He’s got these incredibly beautiful hands. And I said something like, “Are you married or….”

And he goes, “I’ve got a girlfriend. She’s forty-five.”

“Really?”

“Yep. And you know what?”

“What?”

“She treats me just like a baby child.”

To him, forty-five is young. So that’s what he was saying: “I got a younger woman and she treats me like a baby child.” I’ll never forget that. He was fucking sexy. I’m serious. This guy was hot. He’s like ninety-something years old and, you know, sowin’ his oats! And I went back and told Tom and I never forgot that. That was something I wrote down in my notebook. I’ve been trying to fit it in a song ever since.

My mind’s always going, just like my dad’s was. He had these index cards in his pocket and would write something down, then put it back in his pocket. I can remember him mumbling to himself, and I do that. When Tom and I go out and I think of something, I grab a napkin. I should probably put out a book called Cocktail Napkin because I have all these napkins with lines of things, something somebody will say or I think about. And when I feel compelled, I sit down and get all those notes out.

I don’t work at it every day. I’m not really disciplined, but I’m definitely not lacking in inspiration. To me, that’s the secret. It’s not about the discipline of getting up every day and writing, it’s about staying inspired. When I feel like it, I feel like it, and work. It’s not a mathematical thing. If I knew how to explain it then I probably wouldn’t be the artist I am. I don’t mean to sound flippant.

I think a lot of it maybe is having listened to all the right people when I was growing up. Like Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn and Ray Charles and Bob Dylan and all his wonderful melodies, like “Ramona.” That song, you know: “Ramona, come closer, shut softly your watery eyes.” That to me is one of the greatest lines. “Shut softly your watery eyes.” Not just shut your eyes, but shut softly your watery eyes. And that melody. What about Leonard Cohen and “Suzanne”? And Nick Drake. The Doors. “Come on, baby, light my fire.” It doesn’t even have to be a complicated line. It could just be the right melody sung in the right way.

It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve been able to branch out and take on different characters, like writing a short story. “Memphis Pearl,” that song, I wrote about this woman I saw digging through a garbage can, and I kind of imagined who she might have been. Writing about myself came naturally to me. My fans are concerned because my songs are so autobiographical that when Tom and I got engaged—I’m serious—I did interviews and they would ask, “What are you going to write about now? You’re not searching for Mr. Right anymore. Now you’re in a relationship and you’re happy.” Well, here’s the thing about misery. I had a lot of misery when I was growing up. I have enough misery to last me for the rest of my lifetime. The misery is like a well, and I just dig into the thing and pull it out anytime I want. I have misery and then some. I don’t need to create any more. I can write about other stuff, other stories, other peoples’ lives. A lot of the songs on Blessed are like that, like “Born to Be Loved”: They’re not necessarily about me, even though everything I write has some of me in it. The hardest thing is not looking like you’re pointing the finger and blaming someone, like, “You fuck-up, you piece-of-shit fucking drunk fuck-up!” Not making it sound like that. Being empathetic but also pointing out a flaw in the character at the same time. “Lake Charles” was like that, about a guy, Woodward, who was basically a total fuck-up. He was a beautiful person—soulful and all the rest, but doomed.

* * *

This involves my dad, and it’s a true story. Apparently when I was about four years old I had befriended this little caterpillar in the backyard. I went to bed and woke up in the middle of the night to go see about the caterpillar. My dad heard me get up and followed me outside. The caterpillar had died. I was quite distraught, and my dad tried to console me, so he wrote this poem:

 

The Caterpillar

Miller Williams

 

Today on the lip of a bowl in the backyard

we watched a caterpillar caught in the circle

of his larval assumptions

My daughter counted

half a dozen times he went around

before rolling back and laughing

I’m a caterpillar, look

she left him

measuring out his slow green way to some place

there must have been a picture of inside him

After supper

coming from putting the car up

we stopped to look

figured he crossed the yard

once every hour

and left him

when we went to bed

wrinkling no closer to my landlord’s leaves

than when he somehow fell to his private circle

Later I followed

bare feet and door clicks of my daughter

to the yard the bowl

a milk-white moonlight eye

in the black grass

It died

I said Honey they don’t live very long

In bed again

re-covered and re-kissed

she locked her arms and mumbling love to mine

until turning she slipped

into the deep bone-bottomed dish

of sleep

Stumbling drunk around the rim

I hold

the words she said to me across the dark

I think he thought he was going

in a straight line

 

That should explain to you why and how I became a writer, because my dad always credited me with that line. He has Alzheimer’s now, and he told me he couldn’t write anymore. It just crushed me, because that was my whole connection with him. We were sitting in the sunroom drinking wine, and very matter-of-factly he goes, “I can’t write poetry anymore.” I said, “What?” He goes, “I can’t write poetry anymore.” Can you imagine? It was like somebody said “I can’t walk anymore” or “I can’t talk anymore.” And I just sobbed and sobbed. I still can’t believe he said that. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard, since I was fucking born. I love my dad so much.

* * *

Originally published in Radio Silence. Subscribe, or download the iOS app

* * *

Lucinda Williams is a singer and songwriter whose style incorporates elements of rock, country, and blues. Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1953, Williams has been recording and performing for nearly forty years. She is the recipient of three Grammy Awards, and in 2002 TIME magazine named her America’s Best Songwriter. She lives with her husband in Los Angeles.

Benjamin Hedin, a contributing editor for Radio Silence, has written for The New Yorker, Slate, Chicago Tribune, and other publications. He is the editor of Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader (Norton). His nonfiction chronicle, In Search of the Movement: The Struggle for Civil Rights Then and Now, will be published in 2015 by City Lights Books.

Illustrator George Pratt’s work is in private collections around the world and has been exhibited in the Houston Museum of Fine Art. He has won the coveted Eisner Award for Best Painter, as well as Best Feature Documentary at the New York International Independent Film Festival.

‘Mango, Mango!’ A Family, a Fruit Stand, and Survival on $4.50 a Day

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Douglas Haynes | Orion | Summer 2014 | 22 minutes (5,391 words)

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Morning

“It’s like this here every day,” Dayani Baldelomar Bustos tells me as her dark eyes scan the packed alley for an opening. People carrying baskets of produce on their heads press against our backs.

It’s seven a.m., and we’re stuck behind a cart hauled by a man named Carlos, whom Dayani has hired to bring fifty pounds of mangos, a crate of bananas, and several watermelons to her fruit and drink stand in Managua’s Mercado Oriental. Behind the cart’s metal tow bar, Carlos tugs and twists his body, but he can’t turn straight into the bottleneck of pedestrians because the alley is too tight with vendors on both sides. The cart blocks the entire alley. Impatient whistles pierce the heavy air.

Occasionally, an unseen force behind us ripples through the crowd and pushes us forward. I almost step on a silver-haired woman stooped by her basket, crying out, “Mango, mango, mango!”

Just when Carlos can finally inch the cart ahead, it catches on a vendor’s basket on the ground. He says nothing; he does this every morning. After a few minutes of fierce maneuvering, Carlos frees the cart, and Dayani and I rush ahead of him to set up her stand before he arrives with the fruit.

Having accompanied Dayani many times in the market over the past six years, I’ve learned that it’s impossible to talk while she’s leading me through the maze of stalls and carts. I struggle to keep up with her, despite the fact that she’s wearing high-heeled, open-toed sandals and I’m wearing sneakers.

As we sidestep puddles and potholes, we pass piles of cell-phone cases, stacks of bras and panties, hanging pig heads, and women waving red pompoms over slabs of raw meat to ward off swarming flies. A stew of smells hangs in the half-covered alleys: wood smoke, soapy graywater, frying pork skins, rotting cabbage. We pass a man wearing a surgical mask sorting through a small mountain of wood charcoal. Video game bleeps and the sound of fingers pounding plastic buttons emanate from an arcade.

You can buy everything in the Oriental, from a pound of rice to the service of a prostitute to a pet iguana. If it’s not for sale there, Nicaraguans say, then you can’t buy it anywhere. They say to leave your jewelry and phone at home, though. The market is supposedly Nicaragua’s most dangerous place.

It’s also the largest commercial center in Central America. Fifty-three Walmart Supercenters would fit inside its roughly 225 acres. Seventy-some streets wind and intersect through it with no apparent order. No signs help you navigate. In many alleys, you can’t see the sky. Nicaraguan newspapers regularly refer to the Oriental as a “labyrinth” and a “monster.” Every day, the market pulses with around eighty thousand customers and fifty thousand workers, many of them self-employed like Dayani and Carlos.

dayaniPhotos by Elizabeth Kay

Dayani, thirty-three, has sold fruit and drinks from a wooden table by a bus stop for about eleven years. Before that, she worked as an ambulatory vendor, beginning at age six, when her mother sent her out to sell tortillas and cornbread door-to-door after school to help the family make a living. This was in the countryside, before she moved to Managua when she was nine and began selling fruit from a basket on her head, walking miles through the city every day.

Dayani has only held a wage-paying job once, as a twenty-one-year-old, when she cut fabric for nine months in a Korean-owned sweatshop. She worked twelve to fifteen hours a day and earned the equivalent of forty to seventy-five dollars a month, depending on how much overtime she worked. She never knew when the boss would let her go home. Her mother watched Dayani’s three young children six days a week. “The two youngest ones didn’t know me,” she told me. “When I wanted to hold them, they didn’t want me.”

So Dayani quit her job and started making plantain chips in her parents’ house to sell on the streets. About a year later, she borrowed sixty-five dollars from a microfinance nonprofit called Pro Mujer to start her fruit and drink stand. Now, she earns roughly twice as much as she did working on-the-books in the sweatshop. But her income still puts her and her sons—along with roughly 43 percent of Nicaraguans—below Nicaragua’s poverty line of two dollars a day.

Dayani’s stand occupies a prime spot in the Oriental, a place known as El Gancho de Caminos (The Roads’ Hook), where five Managua arteries meet in front of an entrance to the crammed inner market. “If chaos had a face, it would be el gancho de caminos,” writes Nicaraguan journalist Génesis Hernández Núñez. To an outsider, the seemingly unpredictable swirl of people, buses, taxis, and carts looks forbidding. But for Dayani and the hundreds of others who work there, El Gancho de Caminos embodies opportunity.

At Dayani’s vending spot, we meet a man she had hired to haul a cart full of her supplies and table. The cart is too heavy for her to pull the quarter mile from the lot where she pays ten córdobas a night—about forty cents—to store it. Dayani unties a tarp draped over the cart and sets up her rough-hewn wooden table. She erects a makeshift cloth and plastic umbrella above it for shade.

Dozens of other stands extend on both sides of Dayani’s, parallel to the busy bus stop. Behind the stands, garbage and rubble collect at the base of a high, concrete wall enclosing a police station. The words se prohibe orinarse (“urinating is prohibited”) are painted on the wall in large white letters. This doesn’t stop men from ambling up against the wall and unzipping their pants.

In the parking lot of a gas station across the road, the cell-phone company Movistar blasts promotions through a pair of giant speakers in the back of a minivan, interspersed with salsa hits, REM’s “Losing My Religion,” and 50 Cent’s “In da Club.” A red pickup truck loaded with flip-flops from Panama blares the refrain “Grab them! Grab them! Twenty-five for flip-flops! Twenty-five!” Buses roar past, belching black exhaust. When they stop to let passengers on and off, vendors with sacks on their shoulders full of half-liter plastic bags of water surround the buses, shouting, “Agua! Agua! Agua!

After setting up her table, Dayani fills plastic Coleman coolers with ice, glass bottles of soda, beer cans, and plastic bags of juice and water. Carlos arrives with the fruit, and Dayani pays him about a dollar. She piles a mound of bananas in a basket perched on a tower of empty soda bottle crates. The case of two hundred bananas cost her $7.20; if she sells every banana, she will profit roughly $1.70.

By eight-thirty a.m., the stand is set up, and Dayani slips her pink-painted toes out of her heeled sandals into flip-flops, which she keeps in the cart with her supplies. She takes a white apron embroidered with a frilly, pink heart out of her purse and puts it on over her blue blouse and tight, flared jeans. Most of the female vendors in the market wear an apron with a deep pocket to keep bills and coins in. They also usually keep their hair pulled back in a tight bun to keep it out of their faces as they work.

As she slices a watermelon and puts halved plastic baggies dipped in water over the slices to keep flies off, Dayani asks me if I could do what she does every day.

“No. For one thing, I’m not as strong as you,” I say, thinking of her twelve-hour days on her feet in the tropical heat.

“This work is very hard,” Dayani says. “I don’t want my kids to have to do it. That’s why I tell them they need to study. You said I’m strong. Right now I am. But I’m not going to be this strong forever and won’t be able to do this work. I want my children to have something better.”

Dayani’s sons—Edwin, fourteen, and Gabriel, thirteen—help their mother with her business when they’re not in school. Her first son, Jader, died of leukemia in 2009 at age twelve. Both of her sons’ fathers have left her. Dayani supports her children on the roughly $4.50 a day she makes in the market.

“Enough for food,” she says. A pound of rice costs around forty cents, and a pound of red beans about fifty cents. The remainder of Dayani’s daily income typically goes for fruit and a few vegetables, cooking oil, sugar, soap, and, if she’s feeling flush, some cheese, which costs almost two dollars a pound. When the prices of these items and the fruit she sells rise, as they often do because of Nicaragua’s increasingly extreme weather, both Dayani’s income and her buying power shrink. She tries to adjust by charging more at her stand, but then sales inevitably decline.

A man stops to buy a slice of watermelon and comments on the price of it (about thirty cents). Dayani smiles—the gold rims around her front teeth gleaming—and explains that the price of watermelon has gone up recently, so she has to charge more. She removes the plastic for him and strews a pinch of salt over the melon. After he leaves, she tells me he’s a regular client so she knows what he wants without asking.

“My work requires creativity, organization, and good math skills,” she says. “I have to know which fruit is in season, how much each fruit is going to cost during different seasons, and how much I can charge for it.”

Though Dayani’s business may appear improvised, her skills and concerns are similar to any entrepreneur’s. Augusto Rivera, the general manager of the Mercado Oriental, told me in August 2012 that he sees unlicensed street vendors like Dayani as “small businesspeople” engaged in “a form of earning a living, and above all honorably.”

In the early 1970s, British anthropologist Keith Hart coined the term “informal economy” to describe the unregulated trade of street vendors in Accra, Ghana. Since then, sociologists and economists have debated definitions of the term and proposed others: shadow economy, extra-legal, illegal, underground economy, system D. Most agree, though, that participants in the informal economy share at least some of the following characteristics: they are unregistered, unregulated, untaxed, and/or unprotected by governments. They also comprise a rising percentage of the world’s workforce.

The vast majority of workers in the Mercado Oriental receive their salary under the table, pay no taxes, and get no government social security, and about a quarter of the vendors are unlicensed. They represent a small portion of the 70 percent of Nicaraguan workers who earn a living in the informal economy. These Nicaraguans make up an even smaller fraction of the almost 1.8 billion people laboring off-the-books worldwide. By 2020, two out of every three workers on the planet will be informally employed, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

At the same time, the world’s population is rapidly urbanizing. In the past decade, the number of people living in cities surpassed the number living in rural areas for the first time, and the count of city dwellers is forecast to nearly double by 2050, reaching 6.3 billion. Nicaragua’s demographics reflect this trend. Nearly a quarter of its growing population now crowds Managua, the capital, and migrants continue arriving there from the impoverished countryside. One of their first stops—to find work, a place to sleep, or cheap food—is often the Mercado Oriental.

 

* * *

 

Midday

At lunchtime, Dayani leaves a neighboring vendor in charge of her stand and leads me deeper into the market to her parents’ home. We wind through row after row of stalls and a covered hall where many of the estimated 100,000 meals purchased daily in the market are cooked and served.

“We’re almost there,” Dayani reassures me. Though I’ve been to her parents’ home many times, I’d be hard-pressed to find it on my own. We slip between metal walls over a cement channel brimming with graywater and turn down a damp alley into a warren of dark hovels. In a sheet-metal shack open on one side, Dayani’s father, César Baldelomar Mercado, stands shirtless over a cast-iron vat of boiling oil. A TV behind him flickers with cartoons, which two small boys watch from a bed supported by stacked soda bottle crates.

The oil burbles and pops. Sweat glosses César’s temples beneath a backward, khaki baseball cap half covering a mop of black hair. He’s waiting for the oil “to be silent,” which indicates the right temperature for frying thinly sliced plantains into platanitos.

Every day, César fries plantains and cassava with two or three of his sons and his daughter, Johana. They sell the chips, which they bag and carry on metal rings, in and around the Mercado Oriental every afternoon. One bag of chips sells for twenty-five cents. On a good day, each of them profits about five dollars. The good days are few and far between, and even five dollars spread among children and spouses amounts to just enough to eat well three times a day.

Cesar in the Mercado Oriental

Smoke billows from a concrete wood stove below the vat and rises against one of the house’s sheet-metal walls, blackened with soot. Some of the smoke leaves through a crack between the wall and the ceiling. The rest spreads in a haze over the room and into the adjoining alley. The muddy alley, about four feet wide, is crowded with sacks of plantains and cassava and baskets lined with newspapers, ready to be filled with chips. A pile of brown cassava peels rises to the bare ankles of César’s wife, Carmen, who sits peeling the long tubers on a white plastic chair.

Carmen, sixty-two, and César, fifty-eight, are among the fifteen to twenty thousand people believed to be living in the market. Like many families from the mountains south of Managua, they moved there in stages. About twenty-five years ago, Carmen began selling firewood in the market that César, her two oldest sons, and Dayani gathered on the slopes of the Masaya volcano near their home. Carmen would leave her house in the dark with three bundles of firewood to catch a bus to Managua at two a.m. She would arrive in the market at four a.m. and sell the firewood in the notoriously dangerous Callejón de la Muerte (Alley of Death), a hidden passage teeming with thieves and prostitutes.

Not long after Carmen started selling firewood, a friend of hers gave her the idea to buy a large quantity of fruit in the middle of the market with the money she made selling firewood, then resell the fruit in an area where there were no vendors. After selling her firewood, Carmen would buy oranges, tangerines, and bananas and sell them in the afternoon in El Gancho de Caminos. Over time she saw that she made more money selling fruit than firewood and decided it wasn’t worth it to keep returning to the country every night. She, along with César and the couple’s oldest and youngest children, came to live in the market. Dayani remained at home and quit school, having finished third grade, to take care of four of her younger siblings. Her parents returned every weekend to bring the children food for the week. After a year, they brought the whole family of nine to live in the market. 

There, the family slept on a sidewalk walled in with cardboard, plastic, and bed sheets under the eaves of a pool hall. The youngest, Johana, slept in a fruit basket. The family woke before dawn to prepare for the day because the pool hall owner arrived early to clean his business. By six in the morning, they were back out on the street. This lasted about two years, until officials from COMMEMA, Managua’s municipal market corporation, discovered the family’s living situation.

According to Dayani, “They told my mother that she couldn’t be there because it was the entrance of the pool hall. So they relocated her to where she now has her shack. But for her this was wonderful because she came to have a place to be, to sleep peacefully.”

COMMEMA granted Carmen and César a spot just outside of the market in an empty wasteland of rubble from the earthquake that destroyed central Managua in December 1972. They built a shack with scraps of metal and lived alone in the ruins, but for the young men who gathered there to do drugs behind a concrete wall. In time, other families arrived. The market continued to grow in every direction and eventually surrounded Carmen and César’s home.

“I won’t leave my market,” Carmen told me. “I feel happy, happy because, look, if I want to eat soup, I make it fast. I go out and buy corn meal, peppers, onion, tomato, and done.”

Carmen grew up eating rice and beans, foods that Nicaragua’s rural poor typically eat three times a day and often grow themselves. When she moved to the market as an adult, she was suddenly surrounded by all kinds of food and even had cash in her pocket. Now, like a growing number of Nicaraguan women in her generation who were raised in extreme poverty, Carmen has diabetes. After not seeing her for a year, I was struck by how difficult it was for her to rise from her chair to greet me.

Still, Carmen works every day, buying sacks of wholesale plantains and cassava trucked in from the countryside, peeling them, and bagging the chips for César and their sons to sell. She also babysits her daughter Teresa’s two sons while Teresa sells water and soft drinks from a shopping cart in the market. Virtually all of the family works in the market. As market manager Augusto Rivera told me, “There are generations here. So the mother came, the kids grew up, now the grandkids are here. The families grow, and they’ve stayed here, working.”

Whether César and Carmen’s children and grandchildren will stay remains to be seen. Their youngest son, Juan, twenty-seven, took private English classes on Sundays for more than two years, and he is always eager to practice when I see him. While he’s waiting with his father to fry plantains, he tells me that he has graduated from the English academy but needs to improve his accent, because he wants to work in a call center.

“To work in a call center, they have to believe you are an American,” he says.

When the oil reaches the right temperature for frying, Juan grabs a wooden grater in one hand and a peeled plantain in the other. He deftly slices each fruit lengthwise into the vat of oil, finishing half a dozen plantains faster than I can slice one. After a couple of minutes, when the slices are fried crisp, César pulls two wood-handled sieves fashioned from china bowls from the wall and scoops the chips from the oil. He gently shakes the oil from the chips, then flips them into the newspaper-lined baskets.

Watching this home business from my seat on a plank in the alley, I find myself thinking this family lives a world apart from the global economic network of factories, shipping containers, and stock markets. Yet the money that passes through their hands emanates from all over Central America. And the goods being sold around them come from all over the world: bales of secondhand t-shirts imported from the U.S., mounds of Nissan car parts from Japan, towers of Acros stoves made in Mexico, glass cases full of Finnish Nokia phones—not to mention all of the raw materials in each of these products and their far-flung origins.

According to Augusto Rivera, sales in the Mercado Oriental amount to at least $100 million a month, with every shopper spending, on average, between sixteen and twenty-eight dollars per visit. “It’s a market that supplies practically the whole country. People come here from all of the regions to buy. People come from Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador,” Rivera told me.

The Oriental is popular for the same reason Walmart is popular: you can buy everything cheaper there than anywhere else. But in the market, poverty and pollution aren’t concealed by pressed blue Walmart vests and sparkling floors. The Oriental provides a far more authentic picture of the inequality and ecological costs associated with international commerce.

 

* * *

 

Afternoon

After lunch, the overhead sun on Dayani’s umbrella makes her stand swelter. Sales ebb. Dust clouds roll over the rows of vendors, and a malinche tree loaded with scarlet blossoms shivers above the roof of the gas station across the road. Plastic bags rise from the gutter, swirling like Hitchcock’s birds around the heads of people waiting for buses.

Garbage cans are almost nonexistent in the market. Dayani puts all of her trash in a plastic crate under her table, then dumps it in the gutter at the end of the day. So do the other vendors. To carry away all of this garbage, the market corporation hires sixty street sweepers who walk the market early every morning and fill handcarts with the previous day’s trash. The sweepers then transfer the waste to the market’s three garbage trucks. In all, twenty-five to thirty garbage trucks full of trash are removed from the Oriental every day.

I met a street sweeper once when he stopped to talk with Carmen and Johana outside their shack. He wore a blue shirt that said COMMEMA above the left breast pocket, dirty blue jeans, and black rubber boots.

He works from six a.m. to noon six days a week and makes $165 a month. “It’s a hard job,” he said. “I clean up one area and come back in a little while, and it’s full of trash again.” He told me he has worked in the market more than twenty years. “The market was much smaller then. There were no stands at Gancho de Caminos. Over there, it was a normal barrio,” he said, pointing to the south.

The Oriental began on the outskirts of Managua after an earthquake leveled the city in 1931. By the 1940s, two covered vending halls were built, and by 1965—as the city engulfed the market—there were four. Thereafter, two catastrophes sparked the market’s massive expansion. The 1972 earthquake killed at least six thousand people, flattened Managua’s two other principal markets, and left as much as 50 percent of the city’s workforce unemployed. Scrambling to survive, many Managuans set up businesses in and around the Oriental. By 1976, the market had grown to almost seventy acres of stalls, shops, diners, salons, arcades, bars, and warehouses.

In the early 1990s, the market again experienced rapid growth, devouring adjoining neighborhoods. A series of neoliberal governments reduced and privatized public services under pressure from the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank, causing unemployment and underemployment in the city to reach over 60 percent. Former engineers, nurses, accountants, and teachers turned to running small businesses in the Oriental.

“The market grew without planning, in a disorganized way,” explained Augusto Rivera. For this reason, only 60 percent of the stalls and stores have running water and only about 40 percent have legal, safe electric connections. Thousands can’t be reached by emergency vehicles. This poor infrastructure contributed to a major fire that destroyed twelve acres of the market in 2008. Several smaller fires have erupted since. To make the market less vulnerable to disasters, you would have to make it “disappear and make a new market,” Rivera said.

In his 2011 book Stealth of Nations, journalist Robert Neuwirth calls the informal economy “System D” in an effort to define it by what it is—a viable economic alternative—rather than what it’s not. He appropriates this term from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean, where unlicensed entrepreneurship is called l’economie de la débrouillardise, or Systeme D.

“The global economy may be contracting, but System D is providing jobs,” Neuwirth writes. “There’s no multinational, no Daddy Warbucks or Bill Gates, no government that can rival that level of job creation.”

Take the job of Orlando Ocampo. For nine years, this lanky thirty-four-year-old has worked at the bus stop in front of Dayani’s stand calling out the numbers of buses for passengers. Each time a bus stops, the driver gives Orlando twenty cents.

Managua’s bus stops are unmarked, and the buses only have a small sign with the route number in the front window. In the crowd of vendors, pedestrians, and people waiting for buses, it can be hard to find the route you want. Orlando makes it easier.

While stealing a moment’s rest on a concrete block in the shade, Orlando tells me that he makes about $10.50 a day, more than most Nicaraguan police officers and teachers. Few professionals would work his hours, though. “I work from six to six, six days a week. I rest on Sunday or sometimes take another job,” Orlando explains. “I’m a mason and electrician. But those jobs aren’t steady like this one. They come and they go.” 

He makes a point of telling me that he doesn’t smoke or drink. “If you drink, your life goes down.” In the market, it’s common to see alcoholics passed out on the ground. Orlando points at my gray New Balance sneakers and asks me how much they cost. I tell him forty dollars, and he shakes his head. His own second-hand pair of gray New Balances, tearing in the seam between the upper and the sole, cost $10.50, a day’s earnings.

“They’re good shoes, but yours are even better,” he says, reaching out to rub the gray suede on my sneakers. Then he abruptly rises, shakes my hand, and returns to the street, shouting “La una, la una, la una!”

I ask Dayani if it’s true that Orlando doesn’t drink. She says it is, and that he’s trustworthy. In the market she’s surrounded by people she trusts: the neighboring vendors who watch her stand when she has to run an errand, the cart men who haul her belongings and purchases, the wholesale fruit sellers she buys from, and even the thieves who leave her alone.

What appears at first glance to be a chaotic, survival-of-the-fittest kind of place is really a multilayered, self-organizing community. People depend on personal relationships to get things done in the informal economy, services that would otherwise tend to be provided by the impersonal institutions and infrastructure of the formal economy. The social networks that arise in the market provide a sense of security.

At the same time, Dayani’s business is always insecure. Since she lacks a license, municipal authorities could force Dayani to move from her selling spot any day. The flip side of lacking tenure is that she can choose to move whenever she wants to. Because she is self-employed, she can show up to work or not. She can wander the streets selling through holiday crowds when there’s an opportunity to make more money that way. The informal economy allows individuals to adapt and evolve with the conditions around them. The downsides are that Dayani has no paid sick leave, no paid vacation, no health insurance, no social security benefits, and no worker’s compensation if she’s injured on the job.

When her son Jader was sick for five years with leukemia, Dayani’s income dwindled. She was only able to work in short stints, going back and forth between the market and the free public hospital where Jader received treatment. While Jader’s health deteriorated in a hospital with too few doctors and too little medicine, Dayani’s business fell apart.

Perhaps if Dayani had worked a wage-paying job with sick leave and private health insurance, Jader’s illness wouldn’t have pushed her family further into poverty. But few such jobs exist for a woman without a high school diploma. And since the 2008 financial crisis, even Nicaraguans employed in the formal economy have seen their buying power decrease, because wages haven’t kept up with the skyrocketing cost of living.

In the global North, too, the formal economy has recently proven to be much less secure than previously thought. Millions have lost their jobs in the U.S. and Europe, creating a growing underclass of long-term unemployed people seeking ways to get by. In a widely cited 2011 study, economists Richard Cebula and Edgar L. Feige found “strong evidence” that high unemployment is contributing to the expansion of untaxed economic activity in the U.S. The value of what Cebula and Feige call the underground economy—which includes both licit and criminal activities—has surged in recent years to an estimated $2 trillion.

Meanwhile, formal sector jobs are becoming more temporary and insecure, with fewer benefits and increasingly poor working conditions. One-fifth of all U.S. jobs added since the end of the recession in June 2009 have been temporary, leading to a record number of 2.7 million temporary workers. People in the global North are being forced to recognize what laborers like Dayani already know: security comes from relationships close to home, and few are immune to the fragility of global markets.

The Oriental’s vendors may have found ways to survive with limited resources in constantly changing conditions, but their struggles point to the need for an economic system that promotes social equity and ecological responsibility. As Robert Neuwirth writes in Stealth of Nations, “Given its size, it makes no sense to talk of development, growth, sustainability, or globalization without reckoning with System D.” In other words, making the labor and environmental practices of corporate monoliths such as Walmart more just and less harmful is not going to be enough to reverse the inequities and ecological devastation of the global economy. The Mercado Orientals of the world have to be considered, too.

Making public marketplaces more just and sustainable means reducing poverty, improving infrastructure, and providing self-employed workers with greater social protection, better working environments, and access to resources for small business owners. With such support, vendors like Dayani and her family could focus on making their businesses more profitable and less vulnerable to personal and community crises. Creating more economic security throughout poor countries like Nicaragua could also help slow the unmanageable growth of markets like the Oriental.

In Nicaragua, Augusto Rivera told me, the Sandinista government is “trying to provide development to the countryside in order to prevent emigration from the countryside to the city” through microloans for small businesses, agricultural programs, creating export markets, and attracting foreign investment. These efforts have helped reduce extreme poverty in rural areas, but six out of every ten rural Nicaraguans still live on less than two dollars a day. When agricultural commodity prices fall or a crop fails due to weather, they often have little choice but to join the tide of emigrants from places like the mountain village where Dayani grew up.

 

* * *

 

Evening

By four-thirty p.m., the market day is winding down. Dayani slices the last of her mangos to try to sell before heading home. Her son Gabriel, who came to the stand after he got out of school, puts unsold bottles of soda back in crates to store for the next day. His brother Edwin tips dark vinegar from a plastic bottle into a bag of sliced mangos, dashes them with salt, then hands the bag to a customer in exchange for a silver, five córdoba coin. As vendors dump their day’s garbage into the gutter, a faint rotting-fruit smell blends with diesel fumes. At dusk, two bare incandescent bulbs come on above the blue and white Comex paint ad on the metal shack next to Dayani’s stand.

Dayani tells Gabriel to go home to feed the family’s chickens, ducks, and dog and tells Edwin to help her clean up. I decide to catch a bus with Gabriel, which requires crossing rush hour traffic in El Gancho de Caminos with no stop sign or traffic light. We get halfway across the road and freeze between buses and taxis roaring by. Gabriel steps into oncoming traffic, holds out his hand, and a red taxi stops to let us through.

Across the road, we pass furniture salesmen shuttering their stalls. In an empty lot, homeless people lay down cardboard to sleep on. Whistles and car horns pierce the twilight. We slosh through puddles, doll heads, peels, and lost shoes, joining the throngs of shoppers and vendors leaving the market. At dawn, the crowds will come pouring back in.

* * *

Originally published in Orion, summer 2014

* * *

Douglas Haynes’s essays have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Boston Review, North American Review, and many other publications. He is currently writing a book about rural to urban migration and the reinvention of Managua, one of the world’s most disaster-prone cities, and he teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

Illustration: Kjell Reigstad

Longreads Member Pick Named Finalist for Pen Center USA 2014 Literary Awards

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We are very excited to announce that Jessica Wilbanks’ essay “On The Far Side of the Fire” has been named as a finalist for the Pen Center USA 2014 Literary Awards. Wilbanks’ essay was honored in Pen Center USA’s journalism category. The piece was first published in the Fall/Winter 2013 issue of Ninth Letter and later made its online debut as a Longreads Member Pick in January 2014. You can read more Longreads Member Picks here.

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Photo: Jessica Wilbanks

How to Spell the Rebel Yell

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Elena Passarello | The Normal School | 2010 | 14 minutes (3,470 words)

The Normal SchoolOur latest Longreads Member Pick is a deep dive into the sounds of history, from Elena Passarello and The Normal School. The essay also is featured in Passarello’s book, Let Me Clear My Throat.
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“Yee-aay-ee!” “Wah-Who-Eeee!” -Margaret Mitchell

 

“Wah-Who-Eeee!” -Chester Goolrick

 

“Rrrrrr-yahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip!”

-H. Allen Smith

 

“More! More! More!” -Billy Idol

First Manassas. In the 90-degree heat, the Union fords Bull Run and then busts through line after line of Confederate troops, aiming for the railroad to Richmond. Under the grassy shield of Henry House Hill’s western slope, the Confederates scramble for reinforcements. Somebody overhears General Bee comparing Colonel Jackson to a “stone wall.” This either compliments Jackson’s steadfastness or jeers the corporal’s languor. No one will ever know for certain, since Bee is shot dead shortly after the quip leaves his lips.

The voices of war can turn gossip into nicknames, dialogue into mythology. And Lord only knows what parts of any war story are actually true. At Manassas, folks just take what they think they overheard Bee say and run with it.

“Stonewall” Jackson runs as well. He turns away from Bee and charges up Henry House Hill with the Fourth Virginia Infantry, pausing before reaching the top. His whole brigade is about to come nose-to-nose with the Union, but he turns back to them, raising a hand to God. Pipe down, the troops tell each other. He’s going to say something to us. The Corporal opens his mouth.

CivilWar
Image: Wikimedia Commons

 

* * *

To hear Walt Whitman tell it, a war can begin and end with voices. Whitman’s first memory of the secession is walking down Broadway in the early hours of April 13, 1861, as the cries of the newsboys precede their physical approach. First yells, then young footsteps, then their words in soprano: “tearing and yelling up the street, rushing from side to side even more furiously than usual.”

Later that night, under the gas lamps of the Metropolitan Hotel, only a few patrons, Whitman included, carry a copy of that Extra in their vest pockets. Voices hush to murmurs as one person reads the facts of the war aloud: “All listen’d silently and attentively,” Whitman says. “No remark was made by any of the crowd, which had increas’d to thirty or forty, but all stood a minute or two, I remember, before they dispers’d.”

It is a careful business, wrapping words around these kinds of moments—moments of unintelligible volume, or of silence, or of lost dialogue. All three are charged with an emotion that can’t be recounted from a seated position, but Whitman does it. He quotes neither the newsboys nor the voice reading the papers, but, in his account, both feel audible. We force his words, which stand as both a buffer and a conduit, to carry added sound.

There is sound, obviously, in the words Whitman uses, like “loud” and “cries.” Sound in “crowd” and sound in “silently.” And even sound in words that aren’t about noise—verbs like “rushing,” nouns like “midnight,” proper nouns like “Broadway,” adverbs like “furiously.”

This is the sound of “furiously”: little heels spinning circles in the dirt, pivoting between pedestrians, changing directions.

* * *

‘Yell like we practiced!’

On the back side of Henry House Hill, Stonewall Jackson’s low growl carries. He tells his men to hold fire until they’re close enough to bayonet, and the lot of them lurches upward. Shelby Foote imagines Jackson then telling his men to “yell like furies,” but legend implies that he says something closer to “yell like we practiced!” This command would support the theory that the collective sound erupting from the mouths of the Stonewall Brigade is a dictated, spellable thing. A line to memorize, like “Attack!” or “Hut, hut, hike!”

It would also confirm that, somewhere between mustering up at Harpers Ferry and crossing the bridge at Bull Run, the Fourth Virginia had rehearsed their war cry, their world famous polar opposite to the “hip, hip, huzzah!” Jackson learned at West Point. It would prove that there was method to the unexpected sound that some say shifted this battle’s advantage to the Confederates. It would validate the notion that, yes, a soldier’s throat hits specific notes when it sings of brutality, and Stonewall Jackson—silent, biblical, obsessive—was just the man to score them into a particular order and cadence.

Muskets quiet, they crest the hill, bridging the gap between the enemy and themselves with sound. It is the first major battle of the first and only War Between the States—and the first recorded appearance of the yell. About the time Jackson’s men run down the hill, the remaining Union troops—exhausted, confused and ill-informed—back the hell away from that sound and from its corporeal presence.

The Union retreat is called the “Great Skedaddle.” The Southern war cry is called “the pibroch of the Confederacy.”

Or, if you are Indiana Lieutenant Ambrose Bierce, “The ugliest sound that any mortal ever heard.”

Or, if you are Stonewall Jackson, “The sweetest music I ever heard.”

* * *

Four years later, Whitman hears tell of Sherman’s troops, after the fire, hanging a left at Savannah. When they receive the news of Appomattox, these Union soldiers yell for miles; they yell across two Carolinas, necks straining toward the Mason-Dixon like horses that can see the barn. Whitman rewords the sonic moment twenty years after the fact: “at intervals all day long sounded out the wild music of those peculiar army cries.”

No one cared to investigate the exact shape of this joyful Union yell—the placement of the palate, the vowels involved, the pitch or the rhythm. We’re happy to hear from Whitman that, just like his newsboys or his hotel recitation, voices sounded, and those voices eventually stopped.

Sometimes, however, a vocal moment is not so lucky.

Why can we let some parts of history live locked in the figurative while insisting others be specified? Why can we hear The Shot Heard ’Round the World without spending centuries wondering what it sounded like, desperate to know for certain whether Charleston shook with a “Boom,” a “Thud,” or a “Ker-blam”?

* * *

The Southern soldiers cannot cheer,” writes a London Times reporter named William Howard Russell in 1861. “What passes muster for that jubilant sound is a shrill ringing scream with a touch of the Indian war-whoop in it.” Russell is one of the five hundred civilians, dozens of them politicians, who plan a picnic on the banks of Bull Run to watch what was forecast to be a swift Union victory. They watch their picnic morph into a long, loud battle with a panicked finale. Over the course of this hot day, fifty or so of the group make their way even closer to the battlefield, so that, when the bridge falls, they are trapped on the wrong riverbank alongside the fleeing Union soldiers. Russell and four senators are among these fifty, all of whom are probably within earshot of that first concentrated Confederate yell.

Shortly thereafter, descriptions of the yell begin appearing in British newspapers, publishing houses, and women’s magazines. It is the English, not the Americans, who give the yell its first mythic punch. Englishwoman Catherine C. Hopely publishes an account of First Manassas, noting that a particular “shout of triumph” caused the Union soldiers to be “overpowered by terror. One frightened company infected the rest, and the result is known.” Officer Fitzgerald Ross tells Blackwoods Magazine that the cry is a “terrible scream … a real Southern yell which rang all the way down the [Confederate] line.” Bell Irvin Wiley takes a recipe approach:

“It had in it a mixture of fright, pent-up nervousness, exultation, hatred and a bit of pure deviltry.”

The Brits are even the ones who give the yell its name. British officer and military reporter Arthur Fremantle notes in Three Months in the Southern States that “the Rebel yell has a particular merit, and always produces a salutary and useful effect upon their adversaries.” To him, the Yell of the Rebels sounds more like an expression of “delight.” Other dispatches treat the newly named Yell as if it is a novel kind of modern weaponry, a technological advancement on par with the Williams breech-loading rapid fire gun or Professor Thaddeus Lowe’s Enterprise, the hot air balloon commissioned by the Union for scouting. Other times, the Yell is apprehended like rare birdsong, at Chancellorsville, at Brandy Station, at Kennesaw, at Second Manassas.

Several dozen of these later reports use words suggesting a high pitch to describe the cry, calling it “shrill” or “shrieking” or “womanish.” Some compare it to the sound of a rabbit in mortal peril. More specifically, the cry reflects the particular perils of marching in a Confederate line. Lumped into companies with mismatched uniforms, their soldiers haven’t the luxury of standing in Academy ranks and learning how to plant their feet. How to grip with the diaphragm and let loose an earthy “Huzzah!”

The West Point huzzah that the Union still carries is much more rightfully called a yell: forceful, loud, and well-supported. It ends on a stretchable vowel, the mouth open, relaxed, haughty. But the Yell, at least in the eyes of the descriptive Brits, is wilder—why else would they compare it to funeral mourners, defenseless bunnies, or the “weaker sex”? Perhaps the sounds are those of victimhood. How might you attack an adversary who approaches, bayonet at the ready, while screaming like you have already wounded him?

In a way, screaming is biologically designed to support this muddled expectation.

In order to be effective, a huzzah-like yell must speak of a planted, specific, confident place, but a scream must appear out of place. In fact, the violent rush of a scream’s terrified air finds unexpected pockets of the throat and mouth to inhabit. Fear lifts the palate and quickens the speed of exhalations, making victims hit pitches higher than their “natural” voices. This seriousness is a reflection of the body’s strained and frantic state, carried across distances, cutting through the noise of cannon fire and horses to locate help. It is, essentially, the sound of the self trying to move when its body cannot run away.

* * *

Imagine watching Jackson’s men emerge from the smoke, zooming toward you as if pulled on dollies. Their mouths and teeth are black from biting off the tops of gunpowder cartridges, and those smeared black mouths are wet and open, singing like very frightened things, underscoring their fight with the sounds of flight. As they devour the distance between you and them, you know that this is the moment you should devote to firing or running. Instead, you find yourself staring, thinking.

Lord in heaven, you say to nobody in particular. How does a body go about attacking a bunch of freaks like this?

And then, to your left, there is William Russell on the crumbling bridge, pen in hand, watching your unwounded Union soldiers leap into hospital carts and cower. Perhaps he, in turn, wonders, “How can I possibly put this on paper so that no one will forget it?”

* * *

When the nineteenth century rolls into the twentieth, Rebel Yell detectives become less interested in describing the Yell and more interested in spelling it. This happens concurrently with the publication of many Confederate veterans’ memoirs and also with the Civil War becoming a go-to setting for popular fiction and film. There is a spelled-out Yell in Gone With the Wind. The mad preacher in Light in August hears one. Retired Colonel Harvey Dew spells it “Woh-who-ey! who-ey! who-ey,” offering step-by-step instructions in Century Illustrated magazine: “Sound the first syllable short and low, and the second ‘who’ with a very high and prolonged note deflecting upon the third syllable ‘ey.’” There is no record of Century Illustrated’s subscribers practicing the Yell at home.

In 1952, Yankee humorist H. Allen Smith drives south on The Saturday Evening Post’s dime. Once he crosses the Mason-Dixon, he begins asking “experts” in several states to Yell for him, hoping to land on a unified, spellable sound to add to the American lexicon. The war is almost a century old, barely a shadow in the living memory. Many aspects of both this war and the whole of the pre-Reconstruction South have already dissolved into paraphrase, or worse, into the funhouse mirror of hyperbole. “On the brash assumption that there is going to be a posterity,” Smith writes, “I believe that posterity will be immensely curious about this matter.”

Commonalities of spelling aren’t easy to come by. According to Smith, the Yell of the Charleston lawyer (“Yuhhhhhh-wooooo-ooooooo-eeeeeeeeeeeeee-UH!”) is spelled differently from that of the Virginia historian (“Yeeeeeeee-ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”) or the Chapel Hill salesman (“Whooooooooooooooo-wow!”).

Perhaps then, there never really was a unified Yell, just a few million Southern troops opening their mouths and letting rip the loudest sound they could (literally) stomach. This would render the Rebel babble more like Babel. But Smith presses on, adapting his short article into a book, refusing to admit that no one real sound ever existed. Because where’s the fun in that?

A newspaperman in Virginia Beach offers Smith another take on the Yell, that of the universal battle cry: “The Persians yelled the Rebel Yell at Thermopylae and the Spartans yelled the Rebel Yell right back at them. The British grenadiers yelled it at the Balaklava and the Russians screeched it right back. The communists in Korea today are yelling it at us, and we are not answering with mumbles. And you know very well that if a wave of our boys came charging across the fields, shrieking the Rebel Yell, the Yankees didn’t greet them with silence.”

* * *

Back at Bull Run, the Union troops are dehydrated and exhausted from their twenty-mile walk. It’s already four o’clock, and they haven’t won yet. Many of them were told this war wouldn’t last more than two months. Now they’re knee-deep in cannon smoke, shooting their own men because they can’t distinguish between the color of their enemy’s uniforms and the color of their own. They stand on the other side of Henry House Hill, yelling.

“Betrayed!” they say, shooting the sound toward their fellow officers, at God, at the rich picnickers they spot in the distance. A few hours later, they break formation and run back to Washington, yelling together once again. William Russell calls them “a shouting, screaming mass of men on foot, who were literally yelling with rage.” One would presume that this kind of rage also cannot be spelled. But for some reason, these yells are much less famous.

* * *

Three years after the death of the last Civil War veteran, linguist Allen Walker Read publishes an article in American Speech that extensively outlines the Rebel Yell as a “linguistic problem,” one that looks so ugly in written form because it lives outside the conventional parameters of language. “The syllables found in words like ‘hip,’ ‘huzzah,’ ‘hooray’ clearly fall within the pattern of English,” Reed says. “The same can be said of the college yells of the present day, as in ‘Bocka-wocka-choom; bocka-wocka-cha; bocka-wocka, chocka-wocka, sis-boom-bah.’”

The Yell, however, while just as nonsensical as a fight song, doesn’t mimic any established consonant-vowel pairings. This is only one of the reasons why no standardized Yell can ever be decided upon. In a five-part proof of the Yell as an anomaly, Read calls it “a total organismic response,” one involving more body parts than just the voice box. The ability to Yell “completed the full involvement of the whole soldier,” Read posits. “I believe,” he says, “that the true rebel yell occurred only under the excitement and tension of the battlefield, and therefore the real thing has not been heard since 1865.”

Read’s treatise, however, doesn’t stop historians, reenactors, and linguists from trying to capture the Yell. They vow to trap it—an auditory lightning bug in a jar—and transport it straight into the digital age.

* * *

Of the three known recordings of Confederates Rebel Yelling, two now live online.

Of these, one sound bite is at least partially the work of several reenactors, who, after a few jovial “Hoot-hoo-hoo-hoos,” giggle at each other. “’At’s uh Ribble Yill! Hee, hee, heee!” says a voice close to the microphone. He sounds more like a cartoon prospector than a soldier. No one would ever turn tail for this uninspired whooping. Still, this is the same clip that appears in Ken Burns’s documentary on the war, and for that reason, many take this Yell as gospel.

Its competitor is a single-voiced Yell by Thomas Alexander, a veteran of the Thirty-seventh North Carolina, who removes his dentures before yelling in a Charlotte radio studio in 1935. This sound, high in pitch and very un-spellable, is much weirder—but decidedly fiercer: a kelpie having a 100-decibel asthma attack.

Regardless of their direct experience of Yelling on the battlefield, none of these geriatric veterans, with their stringy diaphragms and arid larynges, can make the same sound as a pink-lunged boy in 1863. Further, no resting body reverberates in the same way as an active body—hopped up on adrenaline, barreling downhill, heart bursting, tongue rotting in powder—carrying both itself and the nation into a different kind of warfare for the first time.

* * *

Perhaps, however, it’s neither the spelling nor the actual sound of the Yell that holds people’s interest. Maybe the sound of the phrase “Rebel Yell” is what compels us to keep it around. Maybe we owe our debt not to Jackson, but to Arthur Fremantle, who left Manassas, went home, and wrote a perfect piece of speech to describe a cry that can’t be typeset. “Rebel Yell” has proven consistently fun to say—it hasn’t left the pop-culture vocabulary in 150 years. Now it is most often mentioned in contexts miles from any battlefield.

Just reading the phrase “Rebel Yell” is a little thrilling. One’s eyes leapfrog from vowel to vowel, hurdling the tall stems of each consonant. When voiced, those consonants pool air and tone in the front of the mouth. They are revved by the opening “R,” volleyed back by the “b.” The “Y” boomerangs that last, perfect short “e” to the lips, and the low-growled double “ll” coaxes it right back, cocking the mouth. The phrase has the rhythm of Mozartian themes and galloping hoofbeats. Does any gibbered war cry deserve a name that’s so fun to say?

Or maybe the sound, whatever it was, did beget such a perfect piece of prose for its title. Perhaps the Union was licked at Manassas by style rather than sound. What if the Yell, more than being shrill, or wild, or womanish, actually rocked? After all, Bob Marley pooled some of the best noises he could make into an album called “Rebel Music.” It can’t be a coincidence that the Hamburglar, the coolest character ever to peddle fast food, says “Robble Robble.” And who in their right mind wants to imagine Billy Idol singing about a “babe” who, “in the midnight hour,” cried “more, more, more” with a “Yankee Huzzah?”

Once entirely pejorative, American culture now embraces the term “rebel.” The phrase “Rebel Yell” now comes with an extra century-and-a-half of music in front of it, a hypertext of alternate meanings between the words and First Manassas.

When I imagine a rebel on the banks of Bull Run, James Dean is there—a civilian redcoat.

David Bowie’s “hot tramp” rides the Bull Run bridge in a torn and tacky dress, drinking a glass of bottom-shelf gutter bourbon, and screaming along with thousands of soldiers.

She yells, “He’s a rebel and he’ll never, never be any good.” She yells, “Hey, hey, hey! I was born a rebel! With one foot in the grave and one foot on the pedal.” She yells, “A cell is hell; I’m a rebel so I rebel.” For fifty years’ worth of pop music, she yells and yells and yells. And with that second word of the perfect phrase, “yell,” comes an even larger army.

jeams-dean

Cresting Henry House Hill, behind Jackson’s men, behind the screaming, resurrected General Bee, comes Diomedes of the Loud War Cry, his armor ringing out in sounds fifteen syllables long. Shakespeare’s Troilus chases him, shouting a war cry of his own: “False Cressid! False, false, false!” And behind them come epochs of soldiers—bleeding, yelling, running, firing, misunderstanding each other.

The Kamikazes yell, “Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!” in the roar of the word “Tora,” and their countrymen fill “Banzai” with the sound of ten thousand years. A celestial army evokes the name of their dragonslayer, “He Who Resembles God,” but the noise is heard as “Michael.” The Cavalry, never ones for subtlety, just yell, “Charge!”

The Fins yell, “Cut them down!” as the Fyrds yell, “Out, Out, Out!” and their syllables are nearly identical. A wall of Turks yells, “Ura!” while the Russians yell “Oruh”; the English yell, “Hoo-rah,” and our Marines counter with “Ooo-ruh,” all prompting an enemy body to rid itself of the life in its lungs.

And the Athenians shout, “Eleleu,” which is how Greek owls like to hoot. Because, whether “cocorico” or “cock-a-doodle-do,” the sun might not rise on them the next morning.

And when wounded, they all yell Ow! Joj! Array! Oof! Aix! Au! Auwa! Ack! and ¡Uy! before they hit the earth. Because, “Mayday” or M’aidez, theirs are the planes most likely to tip downward.

* * *

Originally published in The Normal School, 2010.

The Prodigal Prince: Richard Roberts and the Decline of the Oral Roberts Dynasty

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Kiera Feldman | This Land Press | September 2014 | 34 minutes (8,559 words)

This Land PressWe’re proud to present a new Longreads Exclusive from Kiera Feldman and This Land Press: How Richard Roberts went from heir to his father’s empire to ostracized from the kingdom. Feldman and This Land Press have both been featured on Longreads many times in the past, and her This Land story “Grace in Broken Arrow” was named the Best of Longreads in 2012.
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* * *

The fall of the first family of televangelism came swiftly.

Two Oral Roberts Ministries employees crouched on a desk on their hands and knees, their heads sticking through a hole in the wall. The voices of the Oral Roberts University Board of Regents on the speakerphone conference call one floor below carried up through the thin ceiling panels. Patriarch Oral Roberts was urging Richard, his successor, not to go on Larry King Live that evening.

“I think I should,” they heard Richard tell his father. Oral thought Larry King would eat Richard alive.

A week earlier, a lawsuit hit the front pages of the Tulsa World, alleging that Richard and Lindsay Roberts, ORU’s president and first lady since 1993, treated the university as a personal ATM. The university’s finances were inadvertently cracked open by three professors who claimed they’d been fired for questioning Richard’s efforts to involve ORU in campaigning for Senator Jim Inhofe’s chosen candidate in Tulsa’s mayoral election. What’s more, the suit claimed Lindsay sent hundreds of text messages to “underage males” between the hours of 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. on cell phones expensed to the university.

ORU’s Board of Regents agreed: Larry King was a terrible idea. John Hagee, Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, Creflo Dollar—ORU’s board was a who’s who of televangelists. Oral was the original pioneer of television ministry. He trained up a whole generation of jet-setting mega-church pastors who preached the prosperity gospel: Plant a seed—meaning, send a check—and God will reward you with health, wealth, and happiness.

The eavesdroppers could tell Richard saw the writing on the wall. “There was no exonerating himself at that point,” one remembers. “He just thought it would be cool to go on Larry King.”

Richard had been like a moth to the limelight since childhood, when he began singing in his father’s tent crusades. In the 1970s, at the height of Richard’s celebrity as a Christian singer, he was starring in prime-time television specials with the likes of Johnny Cash and Robert Goulet, reaching tens of millions of viewers. With his signature streak of white hair and big, telegenic smile, Richard was most in his element when the cameras were rolling. If anyone ever asked if Richard was ready to perform, he’d fire back, “I was born ready.”

And so Richard and Lindsay boarded the ORU jet and flew from Tulsa to New York. In the October 9, 2007, broadcast, Larry King listed just a few of the many allegations against the Robertses: remodeling their ORU-owned home 11 times in 14 years at university expense; forcing employees to do their daughters’ homework; bestowing over a dozen ORU scholarships upon the children of their wealthy friends; the $39,000 Lindsay expensed in clothing at Chico’s in a single year; the stable of horses ORU maintained for the Roberts daughters’ exclusive use.

“Does it concern you that your excesses are so obvious that most people don’t appear to be shocked to hear of them?” Larry King read aloud from an ORU alum’s email. “I have not done anything wrong, Larry,” Richard answered.

Off camera, Richard tried to rally the extended Roberts family in his defense. “We’re all going to hang,” Richard said (according to a niece’s deposition). “We can either hang together or we can hang separately.”

Meanwhile, the school was $52.5 million in debt. Campus was in shambles. The tiled steps leading up to the library were missing most of their tiles. Even the 200-foot-high Prayer Tower at the center of campus—the very symbol of the university, wrought from steel and tinted glass and resembling a gold-plated Space Needle—was rusting.

Still, hardly anyone knew just how bad things actually were. At this rate, in less than a fortnight the university would have to declare bankruptcy.

Oral, having retired to a condo in Newport Beach, returned to Tulsa for the first time in years. He moved back into “the compound”—the Roberts’ six-house, nine-acre gated estate overlooking campus. At a chapel service, the much-beloved 89-year-old patriarch addressed students.

“The devil is not going to steal ORU,” Oral promised.

The phone call came for Richard on Thanksgiving. Televangelist and ORU Regent Kenneth Copeland was on the line, according to a source who was present. That morning, another regent, Billy Joe Daugherty—one of Oral’s protégés—faxed Copeland the receipts for the ORU jet. There was no denying Richard had been taking his family on lavish vacations and calling them “healing crusades,” says the source.

“You’re a damn fool. You should’ve paid the money,” Copeland[1] told Richard, according to the source.

“I’m not supporting him,” Copeland said to Oral. “Your son’s out.” (Copeland did not respond to a request for comment.)

Richard hung up the phone. He and his family were to be evicted from the compound—Richard’s home of nearly five decades—his ties to ORU severed forever.

These were the terms: Mart Green, heir to the Hobby Lobby franchise of craft stores, would bail out the nearly bankrupt school with a pledge of $70 million—on condition of Richard’s ouster. Richard would take with him his inheritance: the name Oral Roberts Ministries, where the checks get sent. In this way, the kingdom was divided.

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* * *

“Success without a successor is failure,” Oral often said. He dreamed that his brilliant first-born son, Ronnie, would succeed him. Yet, Ronnie refused the mantle, unwilling to play a role in the succession drama into which he’d been born. The eldest child, Rebecca, and the youngest, Roberta, were not considered suitable heirs: Only the sons would carry on the family name. It was Roberta alone among the Roberts children who was enchanted with the mythology of her father, the faith healer, and it was Roberta, a deeply studious child, who so loved the namesake school he built in South Tulsa, near the Arkansas River. But the house that Oral Roberts built had no room for daughters. That left Richard.

“Something Good Is Going to Happen to You” was Oral’s slogan on TV. But a life lived on camera takes its toll.

Born in 1918, Oral Roberts was the son of an itinerant preacher in the Pentecostal Holiness Church—“Holycostal Penniless,” kids in the church called it. When Oral’s father was off preaching from town to town, sometimes the family would run out of money, and Oral and his mother would have to beg food from friends and neighbors. In the first half of the 20th century, Pentecostals were farmers, preachers, janitors, and rural teachers. Indelibly shaped and scarred by poverty, this was the movement that birthed the prosperity gospel in the latter half of the century.

In Pentecostalism, Oral is considered the godfather of the charismatic movement, which emphasizes divine miracles and ecstatic experience. Beginning in the late 1940s, Oral held crusades across the country and all over the world, his 10,000-person tent overflowing with those desperate for his touch to heal their suffering bodies and—often—finances. In the decades that followed, Oral turned faith healing into a wildly profitable enterprise. He hired top-notch admen and direct-mail consultants who perfected a method for using targeted mailings to solicit donations. The rate of return was so high that Oral’s ministry had to get its own zip code.

Oral longed for middle-class respectability. Being a traveling faith healer and direct-mail mogul would never get him there. But brick and mortar would. When tent crusade audiences began to wane in the early 1960s, Oral switched gears and built a Pentecostal university, the first of its kind. From gold-tinted windows to golden latticework to the Prayer Tower’s royal blue stripes and cherry red overhang, the entire campus glittered under the Oklahoma sun. “Nothing second-class for God,” Oral liked to say.

Wayne Robinson, a former aide, grew up “Holycostal Penniless” as well. In his 1976 memoir, Oral: The Warm, Intimate, Unauthorized Portrait of a Man of God, Robinson depicts a fundamentally insecure person who spent a lifetime “constructing edifices which, once they are built, must be replaced by new structures—each time larger. Over and over again, these monuments declare, ‘I ain’t poor no more!’ The nouveau riche tone of the ORU campus speaks of the poor boy who made it big. The gleaming gold is a reassuring renouncement of empty pockets and an empty stomach.”

Oral was an absentee father, always off traveling the world on the tent crusade circuit. The few days a month when he actually was home, anything the family did or said was liable to end up incorporated into a television script. It was all “grist for the mill,” remembers Robinson.

Of the four siblings, it was Richard who won his father’s attentions, because Richard could be put to use: He could sing and he loved the stage. Plus, he was a jock; Oral needed a golf companion.

Richard never was much of a student. “He’s allergic to books,” Oral once explained. Richard began getting singing gigs at parties and pizza parlors around Tulsa, much to his parents’ dismay. He idolized Frank Sinatra and Pat Boone and dreamed of heading to the nightclubs of Las Vegas or the stages of Broadway.

Richard spent the summer after high school at Interlochen, a prestigious performing arts camp on Lake Michigan. In the Interlochen production of Annie Get Your Gun, Richard landed the lead. He didn’t talk much about being Oral Roberts’ son—although everybody knew it. Once, a kid quoted Oral derisively, recalls Elliott Sirkin, another camper. “But that’s not what he said,” Richard responded quietly, clearly a little hurt. Otherwise, Richard seemed rather “cynical” about his father’s ministry, remembers Allan Janus, another camper. But evidently Richard enjoyed the perks, like Oral’s jet. “He would brag about how he could fly wherever,” Janus recalls. Handsome, friendly, talented—Richard seemed to live a charmed life.

In the fall of 1966, Richard, dead-set against attending the newly opened ORU, headed for the University of Kansas instead. It was the best rebellion he could muster against his father. Out from under his parents’ roof, he could smoke, drink, and chase girls—a tale of wayward youth that he has deployed again and again during his adult life, calling himself “the prodigal son.” Home from college one break, father and son went golfing, according to Richard’s well-worn account. Oral asked Richard to sing for him in an upcoming crusade.

“Look, Dad, just get off my back and get out of my life,” Richard barked. “And don’t you ever mention God to me again.”

As Richard tells it, one day while taking a nap in his dorm at KU, he heard a voice that he assumed to be his roommate playing a joke on him. “You are in the wrong place,” the voice said. Not once, but thrice. Richard checked under the bed, in the closet, everywhere. Nothing. Then he realized it was the Lord. “The Holy Spirit said to me, ‘You are supposed to be at Oral Roberts University,’ ” Richard writes in a 2002 memoir, Claim Your Inheritance. “ ‘That’s where your destiny is.’ ”

A former ORU student recalls hearing Richard’s mother, Evelyn, tell a slightly different version of that story: She and Oral went up to Kansas and summoned Richard back to the nest, wanting to keep an eye on him.

Richard’s college rebellion proved to be short-lived. He flunked out. Singing, however, was different. His voice instructor, Harlan Jennings, remembers him as a highly disciplined and serious student, “one of the best I have taught over a long career.”

The summer of 1967, between his freshman year at KU and his sophomore year at ORU, Richard successfully auditioned for a spot on the chorus at the Kansas City Starlight Theatre, an 8,000-seat venue on the regional circuit for Broadway stars. They put on The Sound of Music and My Fair Lady and West Side Story and more—77 shows in all, rehearsing all day and performing all night, seven days a week, with an extra 12 a.m.–5 a.m. rehearsal early Sunday morning. Richard worked like a dog, just like everyone else.

“I rented an apartment and lived like the devil all summer,” Richard writes. It was, he says, “one last fling.”

Starlight dancer Kitsey Plavcan was Richard’s date to a party where Broadway singer (and later Partridge Family star) Shirley Jones made an appearance. Richard drove Plavcan home, and as she tells it, the evening did not end well. “He got drunk, and I was hanging out the door of the car, trying to find the line on the side of the road,” she says. Just a few years later, she’d turn on the television, and there was Richard singing about Jesus on the Oral Roberts television show. “I used to sit there and laugh my fool head off at how wholesome he was,” Plavcan remembers.

But in 1967, 18-year-old Richard found himself at a crossroads. Late at night, after a good deal of drinking, he’d say things like, “I’m not 100 percent sure about who I am, what I believe, what I believe about my father, is he real, is he all a fraud, is religion itself all a fraud,” fellow chorus member Joe Warner recalls. In Christendom, everything would always be handed to Richard. The world beyond his father’s kingdom was the great unknown.

Richard seemed resigned to his lot. He’d stay a Preacher’s Kid forever—and not just any PK, but the son of Oral Roberts.

“Every PK has their own curse,” says Warner. “But I think Richard’s was greater than most.”

or-universityPhoto: Oral Roberts University, Wikimedia Commons

* * *

Oral always conceived of his namesake university in opposition to the counterculture, an institution that would churn out clean-cut men and women in a time of middle-class anxiety over campus rebellion. Arriving on campus in 1965, the inaugural class of ORU students was united by a deep sense of purpose: Their job was to take Oral’s vision of a healing God out into the world.

“It wasn’t anything like going to college,” writes Patti Holcombe. “It was more like founding a country.”

Richard arrived at ORU in 1967 without that pioneering spirit. But he was soon drawn to Patti, a poised, feisty co-ed from Oregon with high cheekbones and a strong jaw line. They began to date, taking long walks, according to Patti’s memoir, Ashes to Gold. “I’d like to sing on Broadway but only if it’s God’s will for me,” he’d tell her. “All my life I’ve been Oral Roberts’ son, but what about me? What about Richard? Why can’t I have a life apart from my dad?”

Such a life apart would have to be wrought. “It all had to come to him, or Richard wasn’t interested,” remembers former ORU Regent Harry McNevin.

To join Oral’s ministry, Richard needed a suitable wife. A good Christian girl, Patti fit the mold, although not quite as well as Richard’s mother, Evelyn, who was even-tempered, graceful, and endlessly supportive of her husband’s ambitions. “Patti has a mind of her own,” people said, with varying degrees of admiration.

Shortly after the wedding, Oral called Richard and Patti into his study, sat down in an armchair by the fire, and began to cry. Oral said he’d had a dream: If either of them backslid—the term for leading an unchristian life, especially one outside Oral’s domain—they’d be killed in a plane crash.

“It never occurred to us that maybe it wasn’t God who had spoken,” writes Patti, “but Oral trying to manipulate us to protect the ministry.”

On the first night of their honeymoon, Patti wore a frilly lace nightgown, a gift from Evelyn. According to Patti, Richard looked up and said, “You know, you look fatter with your clothes off.” They consummated their marriage in a coin-operated bed. Afterward, Patti says Richard put a quarter in the “Magic Fingers” contraption, making the bed vibrate and shake. Richard fell right asleep. The Magic Fingers kept Patti up for hours. They ate Thanksgiving dinner in the hotel. After a few days, they got bored and came home early from their honeymoon. So began their lives as “professional newlyweds,” writes Patti.

Back at ORU, plans were soon underway for Contact, the first Oral Roberts prime-time television special. Oral was determined to make his telegenic son into a modern Christian celebrity. Contact (and its later incarnations in the 1970s) was a wholesome variety show with singing and dancing from the World Action Singers, a group of ORU students led by Richard. The show had flashy sets and costumes, solos by Richard and Patti, and a sermon from Oral. He had admen coin upbeat catchphrases like “Something Good Is Going to Happen to You.”

Richard assumed the role of spoiled crown prince. Oral’s men were instructed to give Richard small responsibilities to create the illusion of power. “Executive decisions,” writes former producer Jerry Sholes in Give Me That Prime-Time Religion, “were made by other individuals who knew they were really reporting to Oral.” Once, impatient with a television director, Richard turned to Sholes and snapped, “Is he a director or a pussy?” Sholes groaned. Richard didn’t seem to care that ORU students—strict Christians—were within earshot. Richard had a golf date he wanted to get off to.

It was a struggle to get Richard to work a full day, say Oral’s former aides. Richard was often MIA, and it was anyone’s guess whether he was at the Tulsa Country Club or Southern Hills Country Club or elsewhere. “Sometimes we all had assignments to go get him to come home,” remembers Al Bush, a close adviser of Oral’s for decades. (“Richard was raised on a country club golf course,” Bush once told the Tulsa Tribune. “If he’s ever been hungry, it’s because he overslept.”)

According to Richard, he quit school after his junior year to work full-time for his father. According to Wayne Robinson, Oral’s aide, the future ORU president flunked out of ORU. Either way, Richard was on the move. In March 1969, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson was the featured guest on the first Contact special, and 10 million people tuned in. Pat Boone, Richard’s hero, followed as the featured guest on the second prime-time special.

“The golden age, we called it,” remembers World Action Singer Larry Wayne Morbitt. They were reaching millions of the unchurched on prime time. ORU was swimming in cash in the 1970s, new campus buildings were going up, and the World Action Singers got to travel the world in luxury. For all his successes, however, Richard could not anticipate that he would face competition for his father’s attentions.

A young black Pentecostal named Carlton Pearson, another World Action Singer, became Oral’s protégé.

“[Richard] wanted to be perfect. He wanted to impress the people and to please his father,” says Pearson. “More than God, I promise you. It wasn’t about God,” Pearson laughs.

In 1971, Oral brought Pearson into his office, where Richard was seated.

“Twenty-five percent of my income comes consistently from African-Americans,” Oral said, according to Pearson. “Richard has the indispensable name of Roberts. He’s my biological son. There’s nothing you can do about that. But I need a black son. You are my black son.”

Soon, Oral hired Pearson as associate evangelist, in large part to help groom Richard to take over the empire, Pearson says.

“I knew what Oral was thinking,” says Pearson. “I want my son to succeed me like God’s son pleased him. ‘ This is my beloved son, in whom I’m well pleased.’ ”

Richard still hadn’t graduated college—he didn’t get his BA from ORU until 1985, nearly 20 years after he began. But Oral added him to the ORU Board of Regents in 1971, at age 23. When fellow Regent Harry McNevin criticized Richard’s plans to use the ORU jet for junkets, Richard declared that he would no longer attend any more meetings with him, according to McNevin. Before long, Oral made Richard vice president of Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association, the ministry.

As the years went on, Patti and others noticed Richard was becoming a clone of his father: how he spoke onstage, how he styled his hair. He recycled Oral’s sermons verbatim. Oral had even given the couple their marriage bed.

“We slept in his bed,” writes Patti, “and, in many ways, he slept in ours.”

Patti readily admits she enjoyed the fruits of seed-faith ministry: glamorous vacations, expensive cars, shopping trips, jet-setting. But, according to her memoir, she grew increasingly uncomfortable with the resemblance seed-faith bore to the selling of indulgences prior to Martin Luther and the Reformation.

At an event in the mid 1970s, Patti happened to meet young Frank Schaeffer, son of the famous Christian philosopher and anti-abortion coalition builder Francis Schaeffer. Talking with Frank, Patti was relieved to find that they “were both angry with the superstar system of American religion,” she writes. In her mind, Christian celebrity culture was pure idolatry. Frank heard Patti’s concerns about her marriage and then counseled the couple.

Looking back, Frank remembers telling the couple that he eventually planned to make his own life, away from his paternal legacy, and they should too. This life, Frank said, was “poisonous.” Richard nodded. “You’re right, you’re right, this is terrible. We need to get out,” Richard said, according to Frank.

Oral’s prophecy about Richard and Patti would prove to be slightly misdirected.

In 1977, Rebecca, Oral and Evelyn’s eldest child, and her banker husband, Marshall Nash, were killed when, returning from their newly purchased condo in Aspen, their private plane went down over the cornfields of Kansas. Oral took his grief and made it into a television episode.

* * *

At first, Richard and Patti weren’t able to conceive, and so they adopted a daughter. But soon Patti became pregnant. When she gave birth, she called Oral from the hospital. She apologized for not having a boy. “That doesn’t matter,” Oral assured her, according to aide Wayne Robinson. He would be proud of his granddaughter regardless, Oral said. He hung up the phone and turned to Robinson. “But it does matter,” Oral confided.

To be on television with his father, Richard had to have it all—the lovely wife, the kids. People had to want to be them, as any adman knows. They were selling their image. It was “a corporate marriage,” Patti writes, “designed not to upset the flow of dollars into the prized ministry.”

Patti’s ambitions began to exceed the family role into which she’d been cast: She wanted to have a singing career of her own. Oral warned Richard that he needed to get her under control, Patti recalls.

“I did not build this university or this ministry for you,” Oral once told Patti, she recalls in Ashes to Gold. “I built it for Richard. You will never get to the top. It’s not yours; it’s Richard’s.”

Patti had become an unsuitable wife. One day, Richard came back from a fishing trip with his parents and announced they had given their permission to end the marriage. (Oral had a strict policy against employing divorcés, but he bent the rules for Richard.) After the divorce was finalized in early 1979, Patti writes, “Richard came into the bedroom and said, ‘I’m so sorry our marriage didn’t work out,’ and extended his hand for me to shake.”

With turmoil erupting in Christendom over the divorce, 30-year-old Richard quickly set about the business of finding another wife. Within a year, he married Linda “Lindsay” Salem, a 23-year-old Christian of Lebanese descent from Florida, who was attending ORU’s law school. She had black hair and a heart-shaped face, cute but not regal like Patti.

Lindsay kept having miscarriages. Finally, she carried a baby to term. In 1984, Lindsay gave birth to a male heir. They named him Richard Oral Roberts. So much was riding on that baby. “Oh, how I wanted a son,” writes Richard. “Richard Oral was the fulfillment of that dream.” Born with a lung defect, the infant lived for just 36 hours.

Oral led the family in prayer before the funeral. They huddled together in the green room of ORU’s Christ Chapel, backstage at a funeral.

After Richard Oral, Lindsay gave birth to three daughters.

* * *

Not long after his daughter and son-in-law died in a tragic plane crash, Oral had a vision of a 900-foot Jesus who told him to build a Christian medical center. This led Oral to build the City of Faith, a $250-million medical center that opened in 1981. Three sparkling gold towers arose on the south side of ORU’s campus: a 294-bed hospital, a 60-story clinic, and a 20-story research facility.

The problem was that Tulsa already had more than enough hospital beds. Oral predicted—wrongly, it turned out—that believers would flock to Tulsa for a hybrid of modern medicine and faith healing. Instead, City of Faith hemorrhaged cash.

Around the same time, Oral decided that he needed a Beverly Hills home. (“The old idea that religious people should be poor is nonsense,” Oral once said in a TV broadcast.) According to Harry McNevin, the former regent, Oral diverted another $7 million from ORU’s endowment: $2.4 million to buy the house (as reported by the Tulsa Tribune) and the rest on renovations. “The entire ordeal was kept very quiet,” remembers Carlton Pearson, who was a regent at the time. McNevin says he couldn’t even get any of the other regents to tell him the address of the house. He resigned from the board.

Strapped for cash, in 1986 ORU shuttered both the dentistry and the law school. (Michele Bachmann graduated from ORU’s law school the year it closed.) Things reached a new low in 1987. Oral claimed he had raised the dead. Richard backed him up, recalling a boyhood memory of Oral resurrecting an infant who’d died “right in the middle of my dad’s sermon.”

To great national ridicule, Oral announced that God had told him he’d be “called home” if he didn’t raise $8 million for medical school scholarships. “Let’s not let this be my dad’s last birthday!” Richard wrote in a fundraising letter.

Ultimately, a dog-track owner in Florida cut a check for the last $1.3 million, and Oral was not called home. But, regardless, the medical center closed in 1989. Then, the rest of City of Faith closed in 1991. ORU’s unpaid bills were piling higher and higher.

Oral was growing old. He became even more fixated on his problem of succession, worrying whether or not “Richard could carry it,” says Pearson. Sure, Oral racked up debts, but he could also bring in the big money. Richard hadn’t proved he could raise funds.

Oral turned to his board of regents for reassurance. “What do you think about Richard? How do you think Richard did last night? What do you think about the future? Do you think he can handle this?” Oral asked the mega-pastors. Pearson remembers, “I kept saying we’ll be there for him. Billy Joe [Daugherty], myself, Larry Lea—anybody. Kenneth Copeland, all the preachers on the board. Because all those preachers understood they would want their son to succeed them.”

There was a time when Oral planned to divvy up responsibilities, Pearson says: Richard would lead the ministry, and Roberta, a graduate of ORU’s law school, would lead the university. Oral told Pearson and Billy Joe Daugherty, “I want you to buttress both of them at either end to support them.” That idea was quickly scrapped, says Pearson. “Richard wanted everything.”

Passing the scepter in 1993, Oral told his son, “You’re anointed by God, chosen by the Lord to be the second president.” Oral was leaving ORU about $50 million in debt.

“I’m just delighted that the medal is on you and now off of me,” Oral said and promptly retired to his condo on a golf course in Newport Beach, California.

* * *

All Souls Unitarian Church is not far from Oral Roberts University. From the pulpit, an All Souls minister once dubbed ORU “Babylon on the Arkansas.” According to the Book of Daniel, King Belshazzar of Babylon declared that his walled city upon the Euphrates would never fall, all the while feasting and drinking from golden goblets plundered by his father.

All Souls was where Ronnie, Oral and Evelyn’s eldest son, attended church with his wife and two adopted kids in the 1970s. Ronnie—Oral’s would-be successor, the original beloved son—could not have been more different from his brother. Richard conformed; Ronnie rebelled. Marvin Shirley, a close friend from All Souls, remembers Ronnie as a liberal rationalist who read widely, was fluent in five languages, and viewed the Bible as a historical document. This was the ultimate apostasy for a child of Oral Roberts.

Ronnie was loath to participate in the public performance of being a Roberts, remembers All Souls’ former minister, Dr. John Wolf. “He really wanted nothing to do with it at all out there [at ORU],” says Wolf. Only Evelyn could talk Ronnie into joining the family on Oral’s television specials. Oral would demand that Ronnie shave his beard, for a beard stood for hippies and secularism and everything that the ministry was not; Ronnie would refuse. In the programs Ronnie usually ended up in the background or off to the side of the frame somewhere. “It wasn’t just a beard. I mean, it was a beard,” Wolf says, laughing. “He looked like Rasputin for a while.”

One Sunday, the televangelist himself showed up at All Souls, Wolf remembers. Oral and Wolf were friendly antagonists in those days. Seeing Ronnie’s father in the Unitarian pews, incredulous, Wolf asked, “Oral, what are you doing here?” Oral replied, “Well, I just want to find out what kind of place my kid was going to.”

Ronnie eschewed his royal lineage, seeing it as something of an embarrassment.

He left town for college and headed to Stanford, dropped out after a year, and joined the army as a linguist, teaching Mandarin in Vietnam. He had himself removed from the family trust fund. After spending three years in a PhD program at the University of Southern California, it was a job offer that brought Ronnie back to Tulsa. He taught at a local high school and started an antiques business. “He despised what his father did,” says Shirley, “the way he bilked the poor.” According to Shirley, Ronnie had rejected faith healing since adolescence and thought Oral “was in it for the money.”

Toward the end of his life, Ronnie developed an addiction to cold medication. Finally, he reached a breaking point. He pleaded guilty to forging a prescription for Tussionex and was placed on probation. A report filed by probation and parole officers noted Ronnie’s “strongest feelings about his childhood were those of alienation and rejection from the family because he chose not to adhere to the religious beliefs of his parents and rest of the family.”

On Mother’s Day of 1982, Evelyn went to visit her eldest son, writes biographer David Edwin Harrell Jr. Ronnie was considering a job that Oral had recently offered him at the university—a move Oral had made many times, always on condition that he shave his beard and quit smoking. Submit, obey. At the time, Ronnie was estranged from his wife and children, living in an apartment just off Peoria Avenue. He had withdrawn from his friends, most of whom hadn’t seen him in months. Ronnie always rejected Oral’s job offers. Even though he was at the end of the line—his antiques business had failed, his marriage had failed—this time was no different. Ronnie told his mother that he could never take something simply because he was a Roberts.

Exactly one month later, Ronnie’s body was found in his car about five miles outside of Tulsa. He’d shot himself in the heart with a .25-caliber gun.

After hearing word from the police, Richard and one of Oral’s aides went to Ronnie’s apartment, where they found a note. Ronnie had written that he looked forward to seeing his older sister, Rebecca, again. Richard broke the news to Oral and Evelyn.

The Roberts family arranged to have the funeral at ORU, in Christ’s Chapel. Oral’s eulogy remembered Ronnie “as a man who was never quite the same after a tour of duty during Vietnam.” Evelyn believed the devil was to blame for Ronnie’s suicide. Roberta, the youngest Roberts child, traced Ronnie’s demise to his undergraduate years at Stanford, where everything “his world rested upon” was challenged.

In the aftermath, Oral and Evelyn pored over their memories, wondering if there was something they could have done differently. Richard assured them there wasn’t. “I’ve had to work hard on my dad and mother,” Richard told Harrell, the biographer. “It’s natural that they would say, ‘If I had just done this or that.’ It’s not true.”

“My son had a will of his own,” Oral eventually concluded. “My will cannot cancel out anybody’s will.”

Lives, especially ones that end in suicide, do not lend themselves to neat lines of causation. Even now, over 30 years later, longtime friend Marvin Shirley is still mystified that Ronnie—a sensitive soul, a flautist—would ever shoot a gun, for any reason.

Upon Oral’s death in 2009, Bruce Nickerson, a classmate of Ronnie’s at Stanford, wrote a eulogy for father and son:

Ron was gay—a fact that his father could not accept. However Ron told me his father loved him and had never withdrawn support, either financially or emotionally. He just couldn’t get beyond Leviticus…

His family has denied that sexual orientation was a factor [in his suicide]. Remembering his anguish at Stanford, I am certain it was the cause, and that drugs were a futile attempt to mask the pain he must have suffered every day. When I met him he was a terribly troubled youth, struggling with who he was.

It was a time when getting married was the only way to have a normal life, to have a family. “Ronnie was trying very hard to be [part of] the outward couple that Oral wanted,” says Wayne Robinson, the former aide.

Oral’s youngest child, Roberta, has two adult sons, Randy and Steve. Both are gay. They too were once princelings, living in the royal Roberts compound. In 2005, when Evelyn died, they went together to the funeral. At the grave, they tried to enter the Roberts family tent but were turned away by a guard.

“That’s my grandmother inside the coffin,” Randy said.

“I know who you are,” the guard replied.

The two brothers stood outside the family tent and watched.

* * *

Lindsay changed over the years. By the time she was the first lady of ORU, she had a small village of people she could phone who would do her bidding. Sometimes she was sweet and maternal, sometimes cruel and wrathful. She would throw explosive temper tantrums, according to former employees. (Richard and Lindsay did not respond to several interview requests.)

Richard and Lindsay’s eldest daughter began attending ORU in the fall of 2003. (All three eventually enrolled.) Whatever the Roberts daughters wished, they received. They wanted a Pilates class to fulfill their PE requirement, so the school had to invent a Pilates class, recalls a faculty member.

“The girls would do things like check out equipment and basically wreck it,” says the faculty member. “They seemed to feel like they could get by with most anything.”

Professors got in trouble if the Roberts daughters complained about their teaching, says the faculty member, and Richard and Lindsay routinely asked professors to change their daughters’ grades.

A charming figure on campus, Richard was popular with the student body. But the alumni had given up on him long ago. Alums had so little confidence in him that only about six percent were ponying up donations.

“The alumni for years wanted somebody to truthfully tell them, ‘Here’s where the money goes,’ ” says then-Provost Mark Lewandowski. “There was a lack of open disclosure and true transparency.” That’s a nice way to say that alums were tired of donating money, only to have it disappear into thin air. Like the nearly $9 million Richard fundraised to build a new student center that never materialized.

Things came to a head on Wednesday, November 14, 2007, a month after Richard and Lindsay’s Larry King appearance. Oral summoned the tenured faculty for a three-hour meeting. He said he was there to listen, asking them to speak freely and openly. And yet he’d brought Richard along. One by one, speaking directly to Richard, the professors rattled off their complaints.

“You are my friend and my brother in Christ, but it is time for you to go,” Provost Mark Lewandowski told Richard. “I cannot continue to serve under you.” It was a major act of defiance, coming from Lewandowski, an ORU loyalist and the son of two ORU professors.

Richard pleaded with them to stay, at least for a few more years. He explained his ministry would be under a cloud if he were to be ousted, remembers the faculty member. Lindsay had resigned from the board of regents and, he promised, would no longer involve herself in university affairs.

“My house has been out of order,” Richard confessed, according to the faculty member.

Oral doubled down: If Richard left, he’d walk away with him—arm in arm with his anointed son. Oral called on the faculty to forgive Richard, to take a “fresh start.” He was 89-years-old at this point. His hearing was going, and he needed a walker. But ever the benevolent dictator, Oral demanded obedience. He asked everyone who agreed with him to stand—an old power play from his repertoire. One professor stood and bravely ventured, “I don’t know what you mean by ‘fresh start.’ I can forgive Richard. But I am not going to allow him to come back as president.”

One by one, Oral started grilling the few professors who remained seated. Suddenly, he stopped.

“No, I shouldn’t do this. I’m sorry,” he said, dropping his head in his big, wrinkled hands.

* * *

Richard and Roberta, the two youngest Roberts children, are the only surviving siblings of the four. They weren’t exactly on speaking terms in 2009 when it came time for Oral’s “homecoming,” as he called it, but they headed to the hospital together. Approaching his room, Roberta and Richard heard Oral singing from his hospital bed. He was making his way down the list of hits from his old television shows: “God Is a Good God,” “Something Good Is Going to Happen to You,” “Expect a Miracle.” The two siblings joined in. Richard knew all the words, of course. Those were the tracks off his 1968 debut album, My Father’s Favorite Songs. Roberta mixed up some of the verses, and Oral, on his deathbed with pneumonia, cut in to correct her—multiple times.

In an interview with KTUL, Richard said that Mart Green, the Hobby Lobby heir who bailed out ORU, “asked me not to come back on campus” after his 2007 ouster. The next time he set foot on ORU’s campus was for his father’s funeral on December 21, 2009. Richard and Roberta both delivered eulogies. Roberta was terrified of speaking before the crowd in the Mabee Center, the school’s main arena. (“I was about to throw up.”) Richard—it has to be said—looked a little pleased to be back on stage. He even got to sing a song.

All of the luminaries of the Pentecostal world came to mark the death of the patriarch. Hardly any of them were invited to Oral’s graveside service. Richard was meting out punishment for disloyalty—for not standing by him unconditionally as ORU president, says a former regent.

“That was his first chance to be absolutely in charge again,” says the regent, “with no one but him calling the shots and commanding the stage since his shameful demotion.”

For one day and one day only, Richard ruled supreme.

* * *

Roberta was a lonely child. Left with family friends when Oral and Evelyn were off traveling the world, she found companionship in Jesus and became the strictest Pentecostal in the family. Richard and Oral, meanwhile, were golf buddies.

Roberta and Richard have always been at odds. “When we were little, we’d get our allowance and his would be spent within half an hour,” Roberta remembers. She was the kind of careful child who saved and budgeted. Richard would come to her, wanting to borrow her allowance. She’d comply. “You think I ever got paid back? No!” she says, with mock exasperation. “That’s the story of his life.”

As adults, even when both siblings and their families lived in the compound, the two pretty much only saw one another at holidays, remembers Roberta’s son Randy. These days, their contact is even more limited. Roberta sent Richard flowers one Easter; the following December, he dropped a birthday card off at her house, leaving the bright pink envelope for her to find in a flowerpot.

* * *

On the day Roberta shows me around ORU’s campus, she seems nervous and has brought a typed list of stories she wants to tell. It is in many ways a list of firsts: the first time her father took the family to see the empty farmland where he planned to build a university; the dorm where she first lived as an ORU student; the first time she saw the man she would marry (“Almost exactly 42 years ago!”). “First kiss” is number nine on the list.

“Isn’t that the neatest?” Roberta asks, pointing out each attraction. Her voice is chipper, but she is clearly pained. Her thin, pink lips are drawn tight. She walks much too quickly, which is not an easy thing to do in heels. A slim woman in her 60s with white hair in a pixie cut, Roberta wears a navy ankle-length polka-dot dress with padded shoulders.

“Dad did not really function as a father, at least not toward me—actually until perhaps a year or so before his passing,” she writes in her memoir, My Dad, Oral Roberts. Before that, she’d been on the outs with Oral for nearly two decades. It was only after the patriarch’s death that Roberta became an ORU trustee.

When we enter Christ’s Chapel, a soaring sanctuary filled with light, a calm comes over Roberta. She surveys the stage and the roving TV camera boom. She admires the parquet floors, the plush of the seats. Roberta is unabashed in her love, filled with the wonder of her father’s creation.

Roberta faces the writing along the back wall. “ ‘Raise up your students to hear my voice. To go where my light is dim,’ ” she reads aloud. Smiling, she turns her back to the inscription and begins to recite from memory. “Their work will exceed yours, and in this I am well pleased,’ ” she says. “That’s what Dad heard from God.”

Later, we wander the halls of the Mabee Center, a rotund, flat-topped building trimmed with gold. An elderly security guard pushes aside his lunch when Roberta asks if he’d mind letting us into the television studios.

“Mrs. Potts,” says the guard, “you can get into anything you want.”

She laughs. “You shouldn’t give me anything I wanted, because I might ask for something I shouldn’t.”

“I doubt that very seriously. I knew your momma too well,” the guard replies. “You had two of the nicest young boys,” he adds suddenly. “They always said, ‘We’re the Potts boys. Can we go into the basketball game? We’re Potts children, can we please use the phone?’ ”

“I trained them well,” she says.

We enter the cavernous television studio. The lights are off. We stand in silence, looking into the darkness.

Heading back into the sunshine, Roberta calls out to the guard, “Thank you for your kind comments about my sons. Some day they’re going to come back to the Lord.” A cure for what she calls their “lifestyle”—that’s the miracle she’s expecting.

* * *

“How can I say that there were no excesses, when there were?” Roberta writes of Richard’s tenure as ORU president. She says she never learned what exactly was true among the allegations against Richard.

“Did you ever learn specifically that any of them were false? Or blown out of proportion?” I ask. “Um, I guess not. I can’t think of anything,” she stammers. She pushes all that out of her mind.

As it turns out, donors to Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association do, too. In 2010, the ministry’s revenue was nearly $13 million, and Richard and Lindsay paid themselves a combined salary of over $800,000, according to tax filings.

In 2010, the ministry also filed an amended tax return for 2006, saying an internal review of “travel and other expenses” found that $100,602 had been incorrectly billed to the ministry—when really it should’ve been taxed as executive compensation. In other words, it seemed Richard and Lindsay had put their leisure pursuits on the ministry’s tab.

“Dear friend,” Richard wrote in a recent letter to potential donors. Out of work? In debt? “Perhaps you feel like you can’t sow anything anywhere because your financial situation isn’t good right now.” Yet, Richard continued, “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Meanwhile, ORU had a succession of presidents outside the Roberts family: A protégé of Oral’s, Billy Joe Daugherty, stepped in briefly. Daugherty, the founder of a 17,000-person mega-church across the street from ORU, is said to be the son Oral wished he’d had.[2] Then there was Mark Rutland, followed by the current president, William Wilson.

Having bailed out ORU, the Oklahoma City-based Green family mostly stayed out of the spotlight. Soft-spoken, bespectacled Mart Green, successor to Hobby Lobby CEO David Green (net worth: $5.2 billion), served as chairman of ORU’s board. The Greens’ donations to ORU now total over $200 million, according to Roberta Roberts Potts.

ORU is finally out of debt. The professors’ wrongful termination lawsuits were settled out of court long ago. It is Hobby Lobby—not ORU—making national headlines these days: In June, the Supreme Court ruled in Hobby Lobby’s favor, granting a religious exemption to the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate for covering birth control.

* * *

Richard’s toppling from the ORU throne was not the most noble of exits. And yet, afterward, he seemed relieved, like a burden was lifted, says former Oral Roberts Ministries employee Ryan Rhoades. Facial hair was forbidden under the university’s strict anti-hippie dress code. But after Richard and his ministry were expelled from campus, the staff relaxed and grew out beards. Even Richard. Settling into their new offices across town, Richard introduced a four-day workweek. He joked around, carefree at last.

Roberta sometimes catches her brother and sister-in-law on The Place for Miracles, Richard and Lindsay’s daily half-hour television program. Oral looms large on the show—my dad this, and your dad that. Richard sings, as always, although his voice is getting a little flat with age.

In late January 2012, an Oklahoma highway patrolman clocked Richard’s black Mercedes going 93 miles per hour along the Creek Turnpike, a tollway just south of ORU. A blast of alcohol fumes greeted the highway patrolman when he leaned into the car. Richard failed the first sobriety test, then a second. Richard’s DUI mugshot showed an old man wearing a pink shirt and a black jacket, his face bloated and splotchy, his hair white and thinning. It was shortly after midnight of what would have been Oral’s 94th birthday.

Later that year, Richard and Lindsay’s house, a cobbled mansion in a gated community a few miles south of ORU, went up for sale for $2.15 million. Soon, there were reports that Richard and Lindsay had decamped for Oral’s condo in Newport Beach. In December 2013, the building in Tulsa where Richard taped his TV show went up for sale. The show goes on—but broadcasting, it seems, from California. Richard still travels a bit, speaking and holding “miracle healing services” at churches and hotels around the country and, occasionally, overseas. Sometimes, his daughters join him on stage.

In Richard’s absence, ORU finally built the student center he had long promised but failed to deliver. It was ORU’s first new building in over 30 years. Designed in a nondescript institutional style, nothing is gold about it. Plans are underway to refurbish the ORU-owned CitiPlex Towers (formerly the City of Faith), swapping the gold-tinted windows for blue. The gilded age is over. The time of Technicolor dreams has given way to more modest aspirations: to be, simply, a normal Christian school.

As this past school year came to a close, Mart Green announced the day had come for him to step down as chairman of ORU’s board. He’ll stay on as a trustee. The school thanked him with a statue in his honor.

The main entrance to ORU is named Billy Joe Daugherty Drive. It is a stately roundabout, lined with the flags of the world. The iconic bronze, 60-foot-tall Praying Hands sculpture sits in the middle—Oral’s healing touch immortalized. There is no Richard Roberts Road, or much of anything else to indicate he was ever there at all.

* * *

Originally published in This Land Press, September 2014. Subscribe to This Land

* * *

[1] Copeland was one to talk. Earlier that month, at the behest of Senator Charles Grassley, the Senate Finance Committee launched an investigation into the extravagant lifestyles of six prominent televangelists. Private jets, fancy cars, mansions—all paid for by their respective tax-exempt ministries. (Nonprofits are effectively taxpayer subsidized, and so personal enrichment through them is illegal.) Three of the six televangelists under investigation were ORU regents: Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, and Creflo Dollar—the very people who’d been rubberstamping Richard’s spending.

[2] In the years leading up to the patriarch’s death, Carlton Pearson, Oral’s “black son,” fell from grace in the Pentecostal world after he stopped believing in hell. Carlton and Oral eventually reconciled—albeit on a personal level, not theologically. Pearson’s biopic Come Sunday is in the works, and Robert Redford is in talks to play Oral in the film.

[3] Much was made of Lindsay’s alleged relationships with unnamed “underage males” when the lawsuits hit ORU in 2007. In the years since, Matt Schwoegler, the one-time boyfriend of the youngest Roberts daughter, acknowledged that most of the allegations probably referred to him: the hundreds of late night text messages Lindsay sent teen boys; the nine nights Lindsay and a boy spent in the compound’s guest house; the times Lindsay installed a teen boy in her home, leading the Roberts daughters to put deadbolts on their bedroom doors. (Schwoegler has since racked up several criminal convictions, including credit card fraud, forgery, evading arrest, and possession of burglary tools.) Lindsay maintained she “never, ever engaged in any sexual behavior with any man outside of my marriage as the accusations imply.” Through the Roberts’ attorney, Schwoegler released statements attesting Lindsay had served as a “second mother” and “best friend” to the teen.

“Do I think she slept with him? No, I don’t,” says a relative. “Do I think he replaced Richard Oral? In many wrong ways for her, yeah.” Lindsay couldn’t save her own son, long-ago deceased in infancy, but perhaps she found another lost cause and wanted a second chance.

Top Photo: mulmatsherm, Flickr

The Honey Hunters

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Michael Snyder | Lucky Peach | Summer 2014 | 20 minutes (4,960 words)

Lucky PeachOur latest Longreads Exclusive comes from Michael Snyder and Lucky Peach—a trip into the Sundarbans, where groups of honey hunters risk their lives in the forests to follow the ancient practice of collecting honey.
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1. Liquid Gold

It was morning, ebb tide, when our launch slid up to the shore—shiny and metallic and unstable as mercury—and stuck its nose resolutely into the mud. Felt clouds sulked overhead, temporary protection from the blazing April sun. The honey collectors hopped one by one down onto the shore, which swallowed them up to their calves before releasing a thick, flatulent squelch.

Zahangir, short, dark, and strong, with a deep scar across his left cheek, trudged up the bank and into the forest first. Then came Abdul Roshid, who had organized the group; Aliur Rahman, scholarly and wispy with wire-framed glasses and a scraggly goatee sprouting from his narrow chin; Abdul Joleel, practically silent for three days running; Haleem, whose voluptuous lips seemed almost indecent in his otherwise spare and angular face; Nurul Islam, compact and smiling and warm; Kholil, a big man with a penchant for big stories; and Aminool, Nurul Islam’s nephew, the youngest in the group, who spent the day hacking absently at the underbrush with a small machete (they call it a daa in Bengali) and looking after me with mute, gesticulatory enthusiasm.

Like all the world’s mangrove forests—the low-slung tracts of salt-tolerant trees that line tropical coastlines from Brazil to Indonesia—the Sundarbans lives on mud and water, on silt and salt, its alien landscape treacherous even for the initiated, which I most certainly was not. April and May, the period of the honey harvest, are hot months virtually everywhere on the subcontinent, but here in the Sundarbans the heat is excruciating. Temperatures climb over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the brutal pre-monsoon spring. The sun pounds the uncountable streams, rivers, and creeks like a blacksmith trying to flatten a crooked piece of tin. The heat pours through the loose weave of the salt-stunted canopy. There’s no breeze—just a hard, uncompromising humidity.

Extending across 10,000 square kilometers from the southwestern corner of Bangladesh and over the border into India, the Sundarbans covers the mouth of the Ganges–Brahmaputra Delta like a mask. Two of India’s mightiest rivers end their courses here in the world’s largest river delta, fanning out over 80,000 square kilometers to water the entirety of the Bengal Basin before reaching the Bay of Bengal, where they dump more than a billion tons of sediment and organic matter into the sea each year, more than any other river system.

Along the northern coast of the bay, the delta stretches 350 kilometers across, dividing and subdividing the soft alluvial soil into hundreds of mangrove-coated islands that constitute the Sundarbans. The sludge that passes for land here is mountain mud, the detritus of the shrinking Himalayas, carried across the Gangetic Plain and the Assam Valley to this tropical burial ground.

Roughly 3.5 million people live within twenty-five kilometers of the Bangladeshi Sundarbans, the vast majority of them depending on the forest for their livelihoods, either directly or indirectly. According to Zahir Uddin Ahmed, the divisional forest officer for Sundarbans West, about 300,000 of them enter the forest each day to harvest its resources. Most of them, like Zahangir, Nurul Islam, and Haleem, spend the better part of the year as fishermen, while others gather timber and palm fronds or work on shrimp farms in the surrounding villages. Aliur Rahman builds boats, about one a week with help from an assistant, for a profit of 3,000 to 5,000 taka (approximately $39 to $65) per boat. Abdul Roshid runs a motorcycle taxi service. But during these short months in the spring, they form one of the 350-odd groups that will plunge into the forest to harvest hundreds of thousands of kilograms of wild honey, the most lucrative of all the forest’s products, and the most dangerous to gather.

IMG_4450Photos by Shumon Ahmed

* * *

Few agricultural practices have a longer history than honey hunting. In the Cuevas de la Araña in eastern Spain, an 8,000-year-old painting depicts the so-called “Man of Bicorp” with his hand deep inside a beehive, surrounded by what looks like a very unhappy swarm of bees. Here in the Sundarbans, the crux of the local lore revolves around a confrontation between a group of honey collectors—known in the Sundarbans as mouals—and the fearsome tiger god Dakshin Rai, a folk deity well outside the standard Hindu pantheon. The story goes something like this:

The honey hunter Dhona and his nephew Dukhe go into the forest with a group of mouals. After some time, they still haven’t found any honey, so Dakshin Rai appears to Dhona with an offer: if he leaves his nephew as a living sacrifice, then Dakshin Rai will ensure that he returns to his village with an unthinkable bounty. Dhona accepts the offer and, in no time, finds his boat loaded with honey and wax. Before sailing for home, he sends Dukhe off into the forest alone to collect firewood. Dukhe objects, but to no avail. As Dukhe sits alone in the gloaming, Dakshin Rai takes his opportunity to pounce. In utter despair, the boy cries out to the forest goddess Bonbibi (Maa!, he cries, Bengali for “Mother”), who sends her brother Shah Jangali to chase Dakshin Rai back into the forest with a club. Bonbibi then sends the boy home on the back of a crocodile. He’s so terrified of the beast that she has to blindfold him.

The group of honey collectors I joined in the forest, practicing Muslims all, still believe (albeit quietly) in Bonbibi’s power to protect them from the forest. According to Emile Mahabub, the young ecologist who helped organize my trip, Muslim mouals won’t enter the forest on Friday afternoons because they believe Bonbibi will be too busy with her own Friday prayers to protect them. Oddly enough, the forest goddess is herself considered a Muslim—even by Hindus. The rituals practiced by some Sundarbans Hindus—as described by the naturalist Sy Montgomery in her book Spell of the Tiger—may well predate the rise of orthodox Vedic Hinduism 3,000 years ago. Dr. Istiak Sobhan, the Bangladesh program coordinator for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, says the Ganges–Brahmaputra Delta itself began taking form just 5,000 to 7,000 years ago. If the story of Dukhe is as old as it seems, then honey hunting in the Sundarbans has existed in some form or other for nearly as long as the forest itself.

The honey hunters who took me into the forest all live in a 5,000-person, Muslim village called Horinogor strung along a broad, flat river at the northern edge of the Satkhira Range, the westernmost section of the Bangladeshi Sundarbans. Though every adult male member in every one of their families had gone to the forest at least once to gather honey, none could trace his family’s presence in the village back more than three generations. Horinogor itself, like most settlements near the Sundarbans, is probably not much more than a hundred years old.

These days, honey collection is performed less as an incidental boon to fishermen working in the spring season than as unskilled seasonal labor on an inflated pay scale. Officially speaking, the honey collection season begins annually on the first of April, when the Forest Department issues permits for roughly 2,500 men (never women) to row into the forest, usually in groups of seven to ten. For two months—or longer in particularly good seasons, which come rarely now—mouals will walk for as many as ten hours each day searching among the high branches for hidden hives, the largest of which can grow to a square meter in size and yield twenty kilos of honey. (Big-story-telling Kholil claimed to have once harvested a hive containing forty kilograms.) These immense hives are built by Apis dorsata, the same giant honeybees that nest on Himalayan cliffs, concrete overhangs in Delhi and Mumbai, and throughout the forests of southeast Asia.

The bees begin migrating from the nearby countryside as early as late January. The first honey appears by mid-March along with the tight white clusters of blossoms that frost the tips of the khalsi trees. Until the end of June, the bees build their nests, dangling from the branches like inverted cockscombs and cloaked in thousands of defensive bees, each just under an inch long. On our first afternoon together, Nurul Islam told me that he had once inadvertently upset a hive with the smoke rising from his cooking fire. The swarm descended and stung him sixty times. “The whole of my body was swollen,” he said, “I had a high fever for three days.”

In the course of the spring bloom, the bees will produce honey from as many as twelve species of trees, each distinct in flavor, texture, and color. Honeys from the goran and passur trees are thick and red with little fragrance and a tendency to crystallize. Keora honey, though fair and thin (traits valued as highly in Sundarbans honey as they are in Bollywood actresses) is blandly sweet compared to the first and most prized of the Sundarbans honeys: khalsi. Pale gold in color, liquid and fragrant, subtle in its sweetness with a tart, almost peppery sting at the finish, khalsi honey lasts no later than mid-April and, once harvested, ferments within three months; honey hunting is as much a game of speed as endurance.

Over the course of a good two-month honey season (the best of the honey will be gone by the end of May), a group of seven or eight experienced mouals can gather as many as 1,200 kilograms of raw honey and generate earnings of at least 30,000 to 50,000 taka per head. Even in the best months, a fisherman will earn less than half that. Since most groups of honey hunters earn too little throughout the rest of the year to fund their own licenses, they work through middlemen (in our group, Abdul Roshid) who arrange the necessary permits and buy their entire harvest when the season ends at about 300 to 350 taka per kilogram. In Dhaka, the middlemen sell the honey for 450 taka per kilogram to larger retailers who, in turn, repackage the product and sell it for 600 taka per kilogram or more. Hardly a drop goes to export.

Honey collectors themselves won’t keep more than a few kilos of their harvest, which they’ll use primarily as medicine in the winter months or dribble lightly over bland bowls of rice porridge in the mornings. Honey doesn’t figure in the local cuisine here. For the collectors, honey isn’t food—it’s gold.

* * *

2. To Be With Death

Like a surrealist nightmare, the Sundarbans is beautiful and sinister in equal measure. The forest seems fortified: the mudbanks are a first line of defense, low-lying ramparts that render invaders clumsy, slow, vulnerable. Phoenix palms, barbed with two-inch thorns, grow in dense clusters. The toxic white sap secreted by the broken leaves of the gewa tree will temporarily blind you if it touches your eyes (in English, they call it a blind-your-eye mangrove). Peel back the gray bark of the sundri tree[1] and the young wood shines red, as though the tree itself were bleeding. Hundreds upon hundreds of stalagmitic respiratory roots push up through the mud on the forest floor, a Gaudian dreamscape in miniature. Instead of bugs, the ground crawls with crabs; instead of acorns, it’s studded with seashells. The ghostly backs of pale gray river dolphins occasionally break the deceptively still, mud-brown surface of the water, which conceals far less benign populations of crocodiles, river sharks, and venomous sea snakes. Hidden among the greenery there are cobras and kraits and pit vipers.

The Sundarbans also shelters the largest population of Royal Bengal tigers left on the planet—roughly 350 of them—and the only ones that habitually consume human meat. The Forest Department recorded only twenty-nine official deaths in the Bangladeshi Sundarbans in 2012, just four from tiger attacks, and, according to Zahir Ahmed, none in 2013. These numbers, as anyone can tell you, bear only a tenuous connection to reality. According to a paper on the Sundarbans tigers published last year by Dr. Monirul Khan, who teaches zoology at Jahangirnagar University outside Dhaka, tigers kill an average of twenty-seven people annually in the Bangladeshi Sundarbans alone.[2] Venturing deep into the forest without the aid of guideposts or markers, mouals are more vulnerable to the dangers of the forest than anyone else.

In the course of some twenty years working in the forest, Zahangir has seen about nine tigers. Three years ago, in the middle of the honey season, one of them attacked and very nearly killed him; he has that scar on his left cheek and a set of four puncture wounds on his right shoulder, each the size of a particularly nasty cigarette burn, to show for it. It was around two p.m. on a hot May afternoon when, having just reentered the forest with two companions, he heard a roar behind him. His companions had already gone about fifteen feet ahead into the jungle and he was, for the moment, alone and practically defenseless. “When the tiger roared, I screamed, and the other two came running back, but the tiger jumped in front of me and knocked me over and grabbed me easily by my shoulder.”

When the two others appeared, the tiger released his grip on Zahangir, whose face and head were bleeding profusely. The pressure from the bite to the shoulder was so intense that it stanched the blood before it began to flow. Zahangir stood as quickly as he could, arm limp at his side, blood pouring from his face, and helped the others to chase the animal back into the forest. “All we had with us were our daa,” he said. It was four months before he could even begin to lift his arm again. He missed the remainder of that year’s honey harvest and the best months of fishing in the early monsoon—thousands of taka of potential earnings lost. The next year, once his shoulder had healed, he went back to the forest.

Every honey collector I met in and around Horinogor had a story to tell about tigers. Nurul Islam narrowly escaped an attack by chasing a tiger back into the forest with his daa. Kholil told me that he’d twice fended off tiger attacks using nothing more than a large stick. Abdul Roshid told me about a tiger that had attacked Horinogor several years back, killing three people and a slew of goats in one day.

Scientists, naturalists, and folklorists have attempted to rationalize the tigers’ behavior (kidney problems caused by high salinity in the water make them irritable, corpses carried down the Ganges over the millennia have given them a taste for human flesh), yet the view I heard expressed most frequently in Bangladesh is also, of course, the simplest: tigers in the Sundarbans hunt humans because food is limited, because we make easy prey, and because we’re here.

Before he started fishing for crabs and collecting honey ten years ago, Abdul Roshid, now in his early fifties—he doesn’t know his exact age—had spent most of his life helping an uncle smuggle goods back and forth between Bangladesh and India. The Sundarbans, its maze of waterways virtually impossible to patrol, had been a popular route for illegal movement between India and Bangladesh since Partition in 1947. Over the years, relations have deteriorated and India’s Border Security Force has cracked down, killing as many as 1,000 Bangladeshis along the 4,000-kilometer border over the last decade.

In the same period, the Bangladeshi Sundarbans has become increasingly lawless, thronged with human predators who pose a greater threat than any other animal. The labyrinthine networks of rivers that lace the jungle conceal an estimated two to three thousand armed pirates, called dacoits, who routinely kidnap workers, extort money from their families, and bribe politicians in order to continue operating with impunity. As a young fisherman in the village of Mothurapur, a short walk up the embankment from Horinogor, told me, “The tigers eat one. The dacoits eat everything.”

The pirates that troll the Sundarbans run a simple but effective operation. Camping out in the forest’s waterways, they maintain close ties with informers back in the villages, who keep them apprised of the movements of their neighbors. The pirates use their powerful motors to overtake the slow wooden launches, and their firearms to intimidate the people in them (a honey collector carrying a daa stands some chance against a tiger, but not against a man with a rifle). They steal Forest Department permits along with a portion of whatever the collectors have harvested, and then take hostages. Though the dacoits rarely kill hostages deliberately, gunfights between rival gangs often result in collateral casualties. “To be with the dacoits is to be with death,” Nurul Islam told me.

They’ll hold ten to fifteen people at a time, demanding ransoms from their families and friends back home to be delivered through the mobile phone banking technologies popular throughout the developing world. In order to pay, victims and their families take out high-interest loans from local moneylenders, mostly in cahoots with the pirate gangs, who both propagate and benefit from the cycle of debt that prevents honey collectors from finding alternative (i.e., safer) employment. Even now, Nurul Islam has a cousin being held for a ransom of 15,000 taka. The family will have no choice but to pay. According to Nurul Islam, forest workers on average turn over two-thirds of their yearly salaries to the dacoits. “If we didn’t have to pay them, we could have 100,000 taka in our pockets,” he told me, visibly angry. “They suck our blood.” Welcome to the halophytic Wild West.

* * *

The various dangers of working in the Bangladeshi Sundarbans all stem from the same cruel fact of biology, ecology, and economics: competition.

Even though commercial timber harvesting in the Bangladeshi Sundarbans practically ceased in the 1990s, the forest continues to shrink each year, bringing resource gatherers, dacoits, and animals into increasingly frequent conflict. Just as natural processes have shifted the Ganges–Brahmaputra Delta south over the course of millennia, tectonic shifts in North India have urged the course of the Ganges east, leading to the gradual (and totally natural) deaths of the river’s southern distributaries, among them the Hooghly, the river that connects India’s third largest city, Kolkata, to the sea. Back in 1975, in an effort to save one of her greatest cities, India constructed the Farakka Barrage to redirect water from the Ganges back to the Hooghly. In the process, India also choked off the primary source of freshwater and sediment to Bangladesh’s western Sundarbans.

Subsidence—the natural sinking process that affects all deltas—now outpaces sedimentation in the Sundarbans, thanks, in large part, to the Farakka. Between 1979 and 2009, some eighty square kilometers of the Sundarbans sank below sea level. Now the combination of subsidence and global sea level rise threatens to put the entire forest—Bengal’s only natural buffer against cyclonic storms—underwater within a century. Under ordinary circumstances, the forest would likely just migrate north, Dr. Sobhan told me, but the dense band of human settlements along its northern boundary makes that impossible. In flood-prone Bangladesh, a nation of 160 million people crushed together onto a piece of low-lying land smaller than Illinois, the loss of the Sundarbans would be cataclysmic.

The rise in salinity levels in the western Sundarbans has led to even more pressure on the forest to provide jobs. Diminished flow of freshwater into the Bangladeshi Sundarbans beginning in the 1970s created favorable conditions for shrimp farming. So in the early eighties, a society based on labor-intensive subsistence farming shifted quite suddenly to a far less labor-intensive industry, freeing up a significant labor force with neither the capital nor the mobility to do anything other than try its luck in the forest. In the late seventies, Forest Department estimates put the number of resource gatherers entering the forest daily at 45,000. Today, Zahir Ahmed said, that number is more than six times higher.

During the 2009 season (as far back as Ahmed could take me), the Forest Department issued permits to 1,515 honey collectors in Bangladesh; last year, the department issued permits for 2,603—a number that doesn’t account for the many groups now entering the forest illegally before April 1 to poach the most valuable honey. Though the Forest Department reports a steady rise in revenues from honey and wax collection (a pretty astounding 2.28 million taka last year), Kholil told me that his group now brings in an average of about 300 kilograms less honey each year than they did before. Whether this is a result of natural changes, increased competition, or both is hard to say for sure. Kholil was certain, though, that the hive we found on our first morning had already been cut down once that season, probably a solid week earlier—and it was only April 4.

Despite the diminished returns for their work, the collectors keep coming. One young moual whom I met in Horinogor told me that, for him at least, moving to a city like Dhaka made little sense: “Friends of mine in Dhaka told me they earn 4,000 to 5,000 taka per month,” he said. “I can make that much here.”

Of the men I spoke to, only Aliur Rahman and an old man called Gangadhar in Mothurapur referred specifically to the “tradition” of honey collection. When I asked Zahangir if, given an opportunity for an equally remunerative occupation, he would still go to the forest, he looked at me as though I’d asked him the dumbest question in the world. “No,” he scoffed. Neither would he allow his son in the forest, a sentiment shared by practically every honey collector I met. “I want [him] to study. We want our children to go to schools like other children,” Haleem told me on our last afternoon together. “No father wants to take his son to the forest.”

I wonder if, twenty years from now, honey hunting in the Sundarbans will have stopped completely. I wonder equally if that would be such a bad thing.

* * *

3. In Which We Find Honey

I’d finally made it up onto more or less solid ground, coated nearly up to my knees in a slick of gray mud.

Everyone but Haleem and Aminool, who’d hung back for my benefit, had already dispersed among the nipa palms and tiger ferns. They shouted, whooped, and hollered to keep track of one another as they fanned out through the underbrush. Firecrackers burst intermittently to scare away any tigers that might be lurking nearby. A fresh pugmark that turned up in the silty ground, the only evidence I saw of tigers the whole time I was in the forest, suggested that they might have been very close indeed.

Without any trails to follow, I stuck as close as I could to Aminool, bent 90 degrees to duck under the vines dangling like nooses from the branches. I asked Aminool if we were looking for anything in particular to guide us. He smiled, gave a noncommittal shrug and pointed out the abandoned fragments of last year’s hives clinging to the branches, translucent and brown as cicada shells. Beyond that, nothing.

We’d been walking for well over an hour when the sound of the shouts coming from off in the forest changed: “Allah Allah!” someone called; a sharp ululation, it sounded to me like someone calling “Olly Olly Oxen Free!” Arriving in the clearing where the rest of the mouals had started tying torches out of tiger ferns, I heard the hive before I saw it: the rustling, crunching, consuming sound of many small creatures moving in tandem. Thousands of defensive bees clung to the hive, glossy and crowded as the seeds in a pomegranate, rippling their thoraxes in a choreographed show of aggression.

With cotton cloths wrapped securely around their faces, the collectors lit their torches. White smoke billowed out into the dense air. The bees descended in a frenzy, flew frantically, disoriented and buzzing and supremely pissed off. I huddled low behind Aminool’s torch to protect myself from the horde and, choking on smoke, watched as Abdul Joleel climbed out onto the branch and lay his body directly over the hive, now a translucent, lacy crescent. He slid his daa easily through the wax and cut down half the comb, which landed with a heavy thud in the metal basin that Kholil held above his head. He’d removed about half the hive, leaving the larvae and queen behind and a foundation for the drones to rebuild in the coming weeks. The collectors would likely return to this spot several more times this season.

As the smoke thinned, the bees, no longer anesthetized, charged. We started to move: the honey collectors ducked expertly into the forest; I tripped blindly over the respiratory roots, snagging my shirt and my skin on Phoenix palms, struggling futilely against the mud and breathing heavily in the smoke-laden air. It took fifteen minutes of tumbling headlong into the bush to outpace the bees.

We stopped, finally, in a rare clearing. I looked into the basin that Kholil had taken from over his shoulder and laid carefully on the ground: the matrix of wax, a pool of fragrant honey studded with leaves and a half dozen worker bees struggling in a trap of their own making. Kholil glanced into the basin and shrugged: a small hive. I was already exhausted, my feet caked in mud and scraped half raw by the splintered sides of roots, shirt torn and temples drenched with sweat—and I’d barely managed to move at a respectable walk. I asked Kholil how quickly they would move were they not matching their pace to an outsider’s. “On our own,” Kholil said, “we run.”

Later that afternoon, Nurul Islam brought around a bowl of honeycomb and honey, strained of the forest debris. This was khalsi, he told us, the forest’s best honey. I picked a chunk of wax out of the dish, sucked the honey out one end and bit off a piece of the deflated comb, nature’s own candy. Bright and fine and musky, it tasted just as the forest had smelled, with neither the cloying sweetness nor the viscous adhesive quality of processed honeys.

Leaving the Sundarbans several days later, I met a man ladling honey from a large metal pail on the road between the town of Bagerhat and a river post called Hularhat, where I was headed to board the overnight “rocket” steamer back upriver to Dhaka. He’d spent three years back in the eighties hunting honey in the Sundarbans until, in 1987, a tiger had followed him up into a tree. Before he managed to knock it to the ground with his daa and call for help, the tiger gouged his arm, leaving a long, jagged scar up his right forearm. Since then, he’s been harvesting honey from the hives that turn up on local farms, pollinated from jackfruit trees and sunflowers, and splitting the proceeds with the farmers. The Sundarbans still produces half of Bangladesh’s honey, and the vast majority of the country’s wild honey. (Zahangir had told me that he continues to go back to the forest because “there’s always a chance to earn more.”) But for this man, that possibility didn’t compensate for the dangers: “I’m not going back to the forest,” he told me. “There’s enough honey here.”

* * *

On our last day together, the honey collectors and I gathered at Abdul Roshid’s house back in Horinogor, a solid red brick structure toward the back of the village, set among the tidy geometry of shrimp and fish ponds, clearly the home of an affluent man. “You took a lot of risk when you came with us,” Haleem told me as we sat safely in the shade of the patio. “The spot we went yesterday is very fierce. The tigers there have a bad reputation.” The rest of the honey collectors nodded in agreement. “There are places in the jungle that are dangerous. We’re scared of those places.”

Fear is a form of respect. In the Dukhe story, Dakshin Rai gives honey in exchange for a life; the vehicle of Bonbibi’s maternal beneficence is likewise a symbol of terror and death. Gangadhar, the old man in Mothurapur, had said of the villagers who join the dacoits, “They are not afraid for their lives.” In the Sundarbans, there is no stronger condemnation. For all our urbane, patronizing exhortations to live an eco-friendly lifestyle and our paternalistic (if basically noble) desires to “protect” the environment, we have forgotten a basic fact that, in the Sundarbans, becomes painfully obvious: You don’t protect the forest. If you’re lucky, the forest protects you.

An hour earlier, in preparation for a big lunch that we’d arranged with Abdul Roshid, I’d watched three live geese slaughtered right there in the backyard, all according to halal regulations: throats carefully slit and drained onto the ground, an act of ritual logic that, in this untamable place, made perfect sense to me. Haleem and I spoke as the goose stewed over an open fire, the aromas of cardamom and bay leaf and cinnamon reassuring reminders of the proper order of things: the rules and the precision, the clear hierarchy, the goose’s neck held out straight for the butcher’s daa—a civilized kind of killing.

* * *

Originally published in Lucky Peach, summer 2014. Subscribe to the magazine here.

* * *

[1] One of the most common varieties of mangroves found in the Sundarbans (twenty-two of the world’s forty varieties are endemic here), this tree probably gave the forest its name. Alternative etymologies include the Bengali for “beautiful forest”—sundar bon—and for “sea forest”—samudra bon.

[2] Estimates for the number of people killed by tigers in the Sundarbans, even those made outside the Forest Department, vary widely; I read everything between 4 and 150 people killed annually. The discrepancy isn’t entirely the Forest Department’s fault. Technically speaking, anyone wishing to enter the forest must first purchase a permit. The only deaths recorded by the Forest Department are those of people who have done all the proper paperwork. For a whole host of reasons, this means that a lot of the victims of tiger, crocodile, and snake attacks, both in the villages and the jungle, go unrecorded in the annual body count. This is especially true for honey collectors, whose registration process is fairly convoluted and who increasingly enter the forest illegally before the official start of the season.

 

The Art of Arrival: Rebecca Solnit on Travel and Friendship

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Rebecca Solnit | Orion | Summer 2014 | 20 minutes (4,780 words)

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[ 1. ]

The word “journey” used to mean a single day’s travels, and the French word for day, jour, is packed neatly inside it, like a single pair of shoes in a very small case. Maybe all journeys should be imagined as a single day, short as a trip to the corner or long as a life in its ninth decade. This way of thinking about it is a;rmed by the t-shirts made for African-American funerals in New Orleans and other places that describe the birth date and death date of the person being commemorated as sunrise and sunset. One day.

I caught up with Jo Anne Garrett late in her journey, when she had come to rest and I was learning to roam. In those days, I would devour the six hundred miles between my home and Jo Anne’s in a day and try to arrive before sunset, when we would sit up on the deck that reached east from the second floor of her home and watch the shadows of the sun behind the mountains stretch far across the desert floor and across the invisible line between Nevada and Utah. Dozens of miles beyond, at the other end of Snake Valley, Notch Peak sat on the far horizon, sharply visible across all that dry air.

She had lived there in a house she had built herself with the beloved for whom she had left her first husband in the 1960s, and she lived there long after he had died, serene, with the air of someone who has truly arrived, not restless for other places, for life to change, for company or bustle or entertainment. She lived in that magnificent house with its tall wall of windows facing the mountains to the west and its deck looking on that dry ocean to the east like a priestess in her temple. She lived there to carry out the small rituals of her day, bear witness to the light that changes continuously, day by day and over the course of the year, and love the place and a number of people.

It was the last act of a long life in which she had been a Montana farmgirl who had saved up and gone to college, had married young and had four children, the proper trajectory for a woman in those postwar years, had left that husband and struggled to maintain her relationship to those children, had married a younger man who brought her to a place his mother had ties to, Baker, Nevada, a small hamlet far from everything else. If everything else is supposed to mean cities and commerce and crowds. It was close to the sky and to Wheeler Peak, at 13,065 feet the highest mountain wholly inside the most mountainous state in the union. You couldn’t see that peak out her windows; as is often the case, it was hidden behind peaks that were nearly as tall. People can be like that too, where the person who changes the world or makes the system work is hidden behind others.

She had done that rare thing in an American life in our time: she had gotten to where she was going, though her life was still full of journeys, mostly full of drives to meetings about environmental politics. Even the nearest grocery store was in Ely, Nevada, seventy miles away.

[ 2. ]

You travel to get away from something, and though people caution that you can’t run away, you can, and sometimes you should. After all, this is a country full of people who were running away—my father’s parents from the pogroms and massacres, my mother’s grandparents from the famines and anti-Catholic laws, rural kids from the brutalities of agriculture and the limits of small towns, city kids from the slums or the harshness, suburban refugees like me escaping anomie and homogeneity.

Nowadays we are encouraged to think that travel is for variety and discovery, but travel has its own rhythm and routines, and maybe the best journeys are the ones that are worth repeating and are repeated. That’s what I had for the years when I plunged into the West every summer and stopped at Jo Anne’s. This is how home becomes bigger, the opposite of leaving home. And home has to mean something more than a house; it has to mean a place, so that going out the door can be going home as much as going in.

But there are many kinds of travel, many reasons to move. Sometimes you travel so that the process of becoming that is your inner life has an external correlative in your movement across space. You may not know how to save your soul, but you know how to put one foot in front of another. You may not know the way to stop being so furious you can hardly sleep, but you can buy a road map of the American West. And then you can put the need on like a knapsack and wear it along your journey, wear it out, shed it, find that it belongs to someone you no longer are. This is pilgrimage, which is not as pretty as it sounds. It’s not running away, though: it’s running toward.

[ 3. ]

Jo Anne was for those seventeen years of our friendship the gravitational center around which I orbited the West, she and that house. The first time I visited her, she took me up to the heights where the bristlecones grew, and after that she stayed home and left me to explore the vicinity on my own. I went out; I came back. I went away to the West Coast, and came back again on my way to New Mexico or my way back from it. When I first started coming she was robust and the grocery store in Ely had almost nothing fresh; a decade in, she was a little frailer and there was a vast new grocery store with a long aisle of gleaming green things. But the house never changed.

A low polished teakettle always rested on the old gas stove. A bright yellow enamel pitcher with wickerwork woven around its handle sat on the counter. Wooden plates and earthenware ones sat on open shelves. A tiny green lawn like a prayer rug lay just outside the front door. A spidery vine plant climbed up the local stone around the fireplace toward the window, on the long slow journey plants take toward the light. Everything was deliberate, considered, as though each item had also traveled and then arrived in its true place. The work of art was finished.

Her house mixed rugged western and Japanese-influenced modernism, a great angular open plan downstairs and an open second story with an interior balcony facing west over the sitting room and kitchen. Upstairs, the two bedrooms were only partially divided by a wall, and the shower looked east toward Notch Peak. Spaces flowed into each other, wood flowed into stone, and every room was full of books. The exposed structural members were old salvaged mine timbers, age-darkened beams so vast they were basically pine trees squared off, and not short or slender trees either. Jo Anne would describe the building of the place as a mock-epic that had lasted an alarmingly long time, much of the time of her romance with Joe, and was, if I’m not mistaken, unfinished at the time of his death.

I don’t know who Jo Anne was in her earlier phases, and when I finally saw a photograph of her in the 1980s with dark hair, I was a little shocked by the unrecognizable woman there. Who she had been as a young woman, as a mother to children and then those children grown up, as a woman caught up in a romance strong enough to break a marriage for I don’t know.

She had been many people along the way, but by my time she had found a philosophy—and, as far as I could tell, lived up to it—of kindness, of generosity of spirit, of careful listening, and even more careful judgment. She was loath to say anything bad about anyone and even had gracious terms for the greedy and powerful people she fought for years to defend the place she loved, amusing variations on “confused” and “wrongheaded.”

She had a light laugh and a host of airy expressions, in speech and in writing. When she said, “I love you,” as she often did when I arrived or departed or we finished a phone conversation, the words were delivered with a festive lilt. Most people say “I love you” as though they’re dropping something heavy, possibly sodden, at your feet, but her love flew up like a bird, or so her intonation suggested.

In 2002, she wrote me about an environmental benefit: “Totally against my rural, vegetative and penurious grain, I seem to be headed tomorrow for the fast lane of Las Vegas. . . . My local best friend, Margaret, has agreed to go along. She is a gala person, so this will be fun (as well as improbable).” Her style seemed to be a mix of the esprit de corps of the 1940s, which prized good cheer and lightheartedness, and the hard work she had done since, the work of making herself, of setting on a journey to become rather than just drifting along as most of us do.

She had made herself, which you do if you live long and intentionally, and made herself as someone whose kindness and steadfastness were notable. Maybe that’s how she came to seem like her hospitable house. She was not tall but had a straight back and strong arms and dressed with quiet style in jeans and white and blue shirts with the same few pieces of silver and mother-of-pearl jewelry over and over and one western bracelet intricately braided from horsehair. She was weathered like the wood of her house, creased from smiling.

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Photo: auvet, Flickr

[ 4. ]

You travel to get somewhere, and you travel for the sake of adventure, for the scenery, for being in motion, for discovery, for being uprooted and at large, that nice expression that seems to suggest that liberty is an enlargement of the self, that you grow as your scope does. But maybe the final art of travel is arrival, the end of the story that eludes so many of us who are afloat or adrift, who believe there should be, must be, something next.

In a way, everything is traveling: the planet revolving daily, orbiting the sun annually, the blood traveling within our veins, the ideas traveling within our minds. Maybe being still is how you turn your attention from the logistics of your own trajectory to the passage of all the other beings and their shadows. To arrive, then, is not about immobility but something else, perhaps confidence, clarity, satisfaction, attention.

Thinking of Jo Anne now she seems like an incarnation of the West or the ideal of the West: unflappable, self-reliant, vigorous, tenacious, resourceful, a lover of light and space and place and land, not only of people. But also like the Buddhist idea of a bodhisattva, a person who has devoted herself to the salvation of all beings, rather than self-salvation and disappearance from the realm of us mortals off into nirvana. It would have been easy to imagine the landscape she was in as fixed and unchanging, like the rocks themselves, but its fortunes were being shaped by people far away, and most of Jo Anne’s journeys in later life were to intervene in that process.

She won a great battle to protect her place and was at work on another at the time of her last journey. The former was the battle to defeat the MX missile, or rather to defeat the late-1970s plan to put long-range nuclear missiles on a circular railroad track that would go round and round eastern Nevada and western Utah, rotating two hundred or so nuclear bombs through 4,600 sites.

The mad notion behind this railroad to nowhere was that the missiles were serious enough menaces that the Soviets would be forced to target them, should the all-out nuclear armageddon both countries spent decades preparing for come to pass. The circular railroad track was akin to painting a target on the place. The deep desert was to become a national sacrifice area, a place that would be destroyed to save the rest of the country.

The possibility of Soviet bombs wasn’t the only threat; construction of those bunkers and that railroad to nowhere would have ravaged large portions of the Great Basin and sucked up quantities of its precious water. The people inside the target—ranchers, Mormons, Western Shoshone, a handful of environmentalists—considered whether their desire not to be developed as a war zone and potentially saturated with exploding Soviet nuclear bombs was selfish.

They had been saturated already with the fallout of American nuclear bombs drifting northeast from the Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas (the tests were held when prevailing winds were east or northeast because the region was, in the words of the government, “virtually uninhabited,” prompting a ferocious Mormon antinuclear activist who had lost many family members to cancer to describe herself to me many years later as a “virtual uninhabitant”). They resolved that the missile plan was not good for anyone, and a few of them fought it.

[ 5. ]

You set out on a political campaign as you would a journey into the unknown, unsure if and when and where you will arrive, with ideas about what you’d like but few of how you’ll get there and with whom. It’s a walk; you go step by step, and you learn along the way; the ground itself changes underneath you; and if you win, you’ve changed the world a little. Often you’ve changed yourself and your relationships, learned things, formed friendships (or made enemies), generated other movements or activists, or changed the benchmarks for what we can and may aspire to. Activism is full of peripheral achievements that are rarely measured. And outright victories that are soon forgotten—who now thinks of the bomb cemetery the deepest deserts of the West might have become?

Jo Anne became part of the leadership, helping to form organizations and serving on the board of Citizen Alert, the Nevada-based group that was founded to fight the MX, for almost three decades. The great house was a gathering place in which activists met and planned and coordinated to defeat the destruction of the place. She traveled to Ely to host the meeting she and Joe had organized with the locals one icy January day in 1980; eight hundred people showed up, a huge crowd for the sparsely populated region. She went to the nation’s capital to meet with the major environmental groups.

It’s hard to say what defeated the MX missile. The Mormon church eventually came out against it. Nevada senator Paul Laxalt finally came out against it. Jimmy Carter lost the 1980 presidential race to Ronald Reagan, and Laxalt, a Republican and a friend of Reagan’s, may have been the decisive power that convinced the Reagan administration to cancel the shell game in the desert. But it was grassroots activists like Jo Anne who brought the issue to the attention of the public and the people in power. Without them, in that case and so many others, the whole process might have gone forward without a hitch.

I joined the board of Citizen Alert in 1996, when its glory years of being a grassroots group fighting the MX and then facing Nevada’s myriad environmental problems (many due to the state’s huge military presence and nuclear issues) were waning. That’s how I got to know Jo Anne. For the next six years I saw her at meetings and retreats in Nevada, the first of which was in Austin, way out Highway 50 in the center of the state, a dry little town that once boomed so big from mining that every tree for dozens of miles around was cut down.

[ 6. ]

There’s a rhythm to traveling east or west across Nevada, a little like hitting waves in a boat, but these crests in the form of mountains come an hour apart. Once you cross over the Sierra Nevada, where the peaks scrape off the clouds and their moisture and create the rain shadow of the Great Basin, you enter the basin and range country, where a succession of north-south mountain ranges are separated by long valleys, many with few or no visible human inhabitants.

The silence, the space, the subtle variations between one grass and sagebrush basin and the next have their own beauty, one that has never received much praise. The mountains have been called sky islands, because moisture increases with altitude, and in the heights, trees grow, animals thrive, and species evolve in isolation from the next island across the sagebrush sea. Water is hidden in creeks in steep valleys, in inconspicuous springs, hot springs, and geysers. This regular landscape ends spectacularly in the range centered on Wheeler Peak and the surrounding landscape that became Great Basin National Park in the 1980s.

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Photo: Wheeler Peak, pavdw, Flickr

I had spent time camping at the Nevada nuclear test site, then at the ranch of Western Shoshone matriarchs Carrie and Mary Dann, a few hundred miles northwest of Baker, during my involvement with their land-rights struggle, and I had begun housesitting or catsitting or subletting the writer Lucy Lippard’s house in Galisteo, New Mexico, not long before I met Jo Anne. The whole Southwest became a circuit I would travel fairly regularly; all of it became home of a sort.

Those summer days on the road, I counted my wealth in how many homes I had to stay in en route, how much landscape I could drink up, how much pleasure there was in the way the road opened up and the world appeared, this mesa, that mountain growing closer and closer until you were driving up it and desert gave way to forest, heat to cloudy coolness, this little town, these mustangs running across the road, that river and its cottonwood groves. The places too became old friends.

I didn’t have a cell phone during the first several years, and even after I did I was entering vast signal-free zones where I could be truly alone on roads where you might not see another car for a long time. I would arrive at Jo Anne’s with a cooler full of produce from California’s superabundance, melons and greens and whatever was freshest back home, along with books and Chinese mooncakes or loaves of bread not available in the outback. Sometimes I’d call to take orders for coffee or fresh corn. I’d arrive; she’d pour wine or water or coffee, and we’d go sit on that ledge outside the bedrooms, and the shadows of the mountains at our back would travel their dozens of miles across Snake Valley again.

She would put me in her guest bedroom or the little apartment on the south side she and Joe built to live in while they worked on the big house. In the morning I would almost always go up into Great Basin National Park, to where the road forked. The main road went right, spiraling up to ten thousand feet through the pinyon-juniper zone that occurs throughout the Southwest at around seven thousand feet, higher up into pine trees, then into aspens, and beyond to the altitude of bristlecones. A few times I set out to hike to the top of Wheeler Peak, up past tree line, but one summer deep snow stopped me, one summer I ran out of daylight, and many summers I took the road to the left instead.

That was the short road that ends where Baker Creek tumbles downhill among cottonwoods and willows, turning everything around it into a little green oasis amid the aridity, a place where wildflowers and tall emerald grass grew when the snow melted. I went to Jo Anne’s to write the first chapters of my book A Field Guide to Getting Lost early in the millennium, late in the spring, and I would write and hike during the day, visit her in the evening to watch the light from upstairs. In that green oasis, more and more butterflies darted and hovered around the creek and its blossoms, and then time itself seemed to run backward as late storms arrived and it all snowed over. Eventually even Jo Anne’s yard and drive snowed up, and I drove five miles or so through the snow to the plowed highways and back home. She stayed.

She was fighting the Las Vegas water grab in those days, an attempt by what was for many years the fastest-growing city in the U.S. to round up enough water to keep its fountains and golf courses going no matter what. The plan was to put in a long pipeline that would suck out the groundwater that fed the springs, the seeps, the wetlands, the wildlife, and the ranches and turn eastern Nevada and a bit of western Utah into a dead zone. Jo Anne had taken on the battle with zeal, and liked to say it had reinvigorated her in her eighties. In 2004, she wrote me, “And intuitively I’ve felt like going for it, without any expectation of success, or even support. At the same time two other women from far-flung sections of the state are saying the same thing. What fun!”

She testified to a committee of the Nevada Legislature in 2006:

Most members of this Committee may already be aware of the proposal by the Southern Nevada Water Authority to extract groundwater from both Spring and Snake valleys and send it south in a 300-mile pipeline. This desperate measure is designed to enable the unprecedented growth of the Las Vegas urban area to continue unhindered for as long as possible. If the Project proceeds, this last-ditch attempt to postpone the slowing of urban development in Southern Nevada will soon drain Spring and Snake valleys, whose 6 inches of rainfall supports a precariously balanced water budget. This sad prediction is ultimately inescapable, according to any hydrologist who is not presently employed by Southern Nevada Water Authority.

[ 7. ]

The wrong kind of travel seized hold of me in recent years, work travel to cities and among strangers, trips in which I disgorged ideas rather than took them in. I didn’t drive across the Southwest nearly as much, and my summers lost their rhythm. When I managed to get out there, Jo Anne had more limited energy and would make it clear when it was time to leave her to herself. And then she began to fail.

In the fall of 2012, I tried to visit, but the weather and the window of time didn’t cooperate. My dear friend Bob Fulkerson kept me posted. The head of Nevada’s Progressive Leadership Alliance for the last twenty years, and before that the director of Citizen Alert, he had had his life changed by Jo Anne. She had recruited him in the 1980s, when he thought he was going to become a teacher, and his adult life sprang from that detour she offered him, with great benefits for the people and land of Nevada. Bob, a fourth-generation Nevadan, in turn changed my life when in 1990 he invited me into the heart of his home state. I’ve been a devotee of Nevada ever since.

In the spring of 2013, my brother David and I drove up from San Francisco to Bob’s Reno home, transferred our gear to Bob’s four-wheel-drive truck, and set out. We camped that night by an old reservoir a hundred miles down a dirt road and got to Jo Anne’s early the next afternoon. She was home as usual, a little more worn, smaller, more fragile, a little more scattered, but sparkling and delightful and welcoming. We sat with her downstairs eating berries and other California treats, but left the food I had brought to cook for dinner in my cooler; she preferred to go out and minimize the bustle.

We ate meat and potatoes at the rambling place ten miles down the road, and admired the photographs on the walls from the annual sheepherder’s gathering there. Afterward, Bob and David bunked in the little apartment, and I took up my old place in the bed just the other side of the wall from hers. In the morning we found out it was her eighty-eighth birthday and that we had celebrated it with her unwittingly. We told her we loved her, she said the same with her usual lilt, and then we went into the park, took the left fork of the road, wandered among the little linear garden of Baker Creek just as its lushness was springing up from winter and snow. The creek sang as its water fell over the small ledges, and Bob and I talked about old age and loss, and then we drove back to where we’d come from.

[ 8. ]

Like a life, a journey assumes a shape and a meaning that are only clear afterward, and like a journey, a life requires that you learn to let go of the plan when the actuality departs from it, to embrace what’s arriving, let go of what’s departing, to move forward and not get stuck. You can cover the same ground with entirely different purposes. Some people run away all their lives; some people search without finding; some people know where they’re headed and move toward goals, ideals, people; some in that subtlest of journeys move toward becoming who they are meant to be; some arrive.

In the summer she got pneumonia, and Bob sent me updates. With the doctor I keep company with now, I went up to Reno to see her in the convalescent hospital she was obliged to stay in while she recovered. We got to her room, but she was with the physical therapist, and while we waited I went in search of a ladies’ room down the long corridors.

When I came back, my beau was already suited up against contagious infection in a paper jumpsuit and latex gloves and kneeling at her feet, chatting with her as she sat on her bed, smaller again than she had been that spring. He had explained to her what she had, and why it was making it hard for her to keep track of her thoughts, and generally made her feel more confident about herself and her condition and prognosis. They were beaming at each other like old friends. She wandered, but she sparkled with the old delight when we spoke, though I was unsure how clear she was and how much I should spare her references that seemed beyond her grasp.

We kept the visit short, so she wouldn’t be worn out by it, and camped by the shores of Pyramid Lake that night and the next. The Sierra were on fire and the light was strange, the sun at dawn and dusk a red sphere burning in a thick sky, the air hazy, the water still beautifully clear. At some point, maybe on the long drive to look for a camping spot, my companion told me that when he had told her I was on my way she had exclaimed happily, “My Rebecca?” I was delighted and moved to be her Rebecca.

In October, I was in another country with a friend who’d just had a baby when Bob wrote to me that Jo Anne had gone walking and not come back and there was a search effort on for her. I pictured the stony, dusty ground all around her house, the small old trees and slopes, and wished I was there among the searchers. The sheriff was called in, and forty people went out together looking for her, and continued looking for three more days. They say she had a faint smile on her face when they found her.

No one knows what she set out to do when she went walking from her house, but I think she may have gone to meet the fate that most of us run from. Not literally, and to say so is not to say that she was not confused, that it was not an accident. It’s just to say she walked all the way to the end of her journey and met the sunset on her feet. Few nowadays are granted such a complete arc, such a full day.

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Originally published in Orion, summer 2014. Request a free trial issue. 

 

Illustration: Kjell Reigstad


Untangling the Knot: My Search for Democracy in the Modern Family

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Sabine Heinlein | Longreads | October 28, 2014 | 16 minutes (3,966 words)

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No one has assessed the family’s dark side quite as fittingly as R.D. Laing, the Scottish leader of the “anti-psychiatry” movement. Laing considered the family “one of the biggest knots in which man has ever tied himself.” While his idea of schizophrenia as a family illness has largely been disproved, Laing’s crisp, honest and complex observations of the family system are still invaluable. In The Politics of the Family, he wrote that among family members “different mappings” happen simultaneously. Your map—your distinct reality, role and projections—differs from that of other family members. To survive, a family resorts to a “shared fantasy image.” Anyone who gives up this image “shatters the ‘family’ in everyone else,” Laing wrote. “[I]f someone breaks such a ‘deeply’ implanted social law, we are inclined to say that he is ‘unnatural.’”

To say that my mapping differs from that of my parents and sisters would be an understatement. Imagine five different maps superimposed onto each other, with each family member insisting that her map is the one to follow. It’s almost impossible to navigate your own system or even to find your way out of it.

Like many families in the 1960s and ’70s, my family operated under the tenets of democracy; in theory we were equals. My parents encouraged individualism and allowed us to question and challenge hierarchies. I was raised to be independent at a very early age. While my father was mostly absent, he dutifully fulfilled his assigned role as the breadwinner. My mother, our primary caregiver, stayed home, unfulfilled. She was proud when neighborhood children said she was more like a friend than a mom. She confided in us my father’s and her marital unhappiness and infidelities. Secrets were virtually nonexistent. While in the privacy of our home her palm occasionally slipped onto my cheek, she opposed physical punishment in public. Quoting child psychologists, she advocated a hands-off child-rearing approach. Problems were supposed to be talked through, not hidden under a veil of silence.

In practice my parents were bad examples, stuck as they were in the mazy channels of communications. My mother flies off the handle easily and my father does not like to talk about problems; it tightens his throat, he once told me. There was much yelling in the family, much intentional hurting, much running off and away—routines that have extended into adulthood and old age. My parents’ contradictory approach tore through the family like a hurricane. Eventually it became impossible for me to share my family’s fantasy image. To me my family appeared like a broken mirror, its thousand little shards impossible to assemble. I’d never be able to get rid of those cracks.

To see myself in one piece, I had to distance myself and work on creating my family of choice. I am still interested, though, in how other families function. Isn’t it always easier—and more rewarding—to look from the outside in? I believe that gaining distance from our kin enables us to see ourselves more clearly. There is much to learn from the ways other families succeed or fail. That’s why I asked friends how they navigate their families’ varied realities. Does your family exercise free speech and compensate for—or at least accept—its members’ weaknesses? Does it celebrate their strengths without jealousy? How do you communicate with each other and what challenges mutual understanding?

Traditionally, a family’s primary purpose was to reproduce the species, maintain its culture and religion, provide economic stability, and care for its elders. But in the 20th century, as gender equality and non-traditional family systems took hold, the parameters shifted (and continue to shift in the 21st century). We thought we knew how to do things better and thought we deserved more. As I interviewed family experts and friends about their notion of functional (and dysfunctional) family, one thing became clear: The last 40 years have brought more freedom, openness, transparency and equality to families. But as we were harvesting these fruits of family democracy, our expectations and demands gave birth to a conundrum of unfulfilled needs and misalignments that have never been solved. I wondered what a successfully democratized family would look like. How can its members learn to navigate democracy’s sometimes turbulent repercussions without clinging to the resentments sowed in its wake?

* * *

_0001_Families-01

I met Anne and her husband John several years ago while reporting on my first book. I liked them very much and sometimes wished they had been my parents. Anne is a retired elementary school teacher and John is a sociologist. Both seemed empathetic: Anne had been volunteering in prison for decades; and John had several prison pen pals, because he believed that the transparency of regular correspondence made inmates less vulnerable to abuse. When I visited them, John and Anne asked me a lot of questions and listened—really listened. In conversations, their sharp intellect allowed them to shift easily to a larger, sociological perspective. Over dinner one night, the couple, now in their mid-70s, told me about the family’s joyful cross-country camping trips. With their little sons Paul and Tom, now in their 40s, strapped to the back of their motorcycles, they visited national parks and Disneyland in California. Everyone in the family agrees that they were open about and supportive of their son Tom’s homosexuality. The pride and love with which Anne and John shared news about their children and grandchildren filled me with envy. “How do you do it?” I recently asked Anne, suggesting I use her family as an example of successful democratization.

The subject line in Anne’s response to my interview request read “Pop the Bubble,” undercutting my optimistic reading of the family’s dynamic. In her candid email, in which she cc’ed her husband and her sons, Anne was quick to take responsibility for things that had gone wrong in the past. “I think my biggest mistakes with the kids were when I went along with John’s decisions and actions and didn’t stand up to him, especially when he was too harsh,” she wrote. While she read child-rearing books and attempted to raise their sons within the democratic principles of her Quaker community, in practice, democracy was a challenge. John’s volatile temperament and “his lifetime of ailments” had damaged her family. (John did not participate in the email conversation, even though Anne said she wished he would.)

Asked to recount an incident that best illustrates his family’s undercurrents, Tom, the older son, remembers dancing around the Christmas tree with his little brother Paul. When John heard the record skipping, he stormed into the living room, yelling and knocking over the tree. It was Anne who quietly picked up the shards and moved the tree to the basement, where, to avoid further damage, Christmas was to be celebrated from now on.

John, Anne and my parents were brought up in the economically and emotionally deprived environment following World War II. For the most part, their parents’ generation still applied an inflexible and authoritarian child-rearing approach. Families had a more or less clearly delineated hierarchical structure.

“[In the ’60s and ’70s] parents were anxious to do the best for their kids and excited to give them things that their parents had to sacrifice or put on hold during the Depression and World War II,” said Stephanie Coontz, professor of history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and author of The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap. “It was a time period when women were told they should find all their happiness in giving their children more than their parents gave them and in being a wife and mother. But they began to think that maybe they wouldn’t. So you’d see women going back to school, going back to work and arguing with their husbands.” Coontz added that these changes contributed to rapidly rising divorce rates. On the one hand, our parents were hopeful and excited about their new roles and their children’s increased opportunities; on the other hand, they soon learned that these opportunities didn’t come without pitfalls. Coontz likened the family environment of the ’60s and ’70s to “a pressure cooker of hope, optimism, fear, anxiety and tension.”

Central in the launch of a more individualistic and democratic parenting style was pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose first edition of the wildly popular bestseller The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care was published in 1946. Spock advised parents to trust their instincts, treat their children as individuals, let them grow at their own pace, respect their feelings and suspend corporal punishment. Spock’s impact on child-rearing began with the baby boomers and solidified when our parents raised what became known as Generation X. Brought up in the turbulent times of the 1960s and ’70s, my generation benefitted from the sudden economic expansion of the late ’50s and ’60s; we had opportunities that our parents never had. We were encouraged to go to college and choose our careers according to our talents and likings. In other words, the third and fourth editions of Baby and Child Care, published in 1968 and 1976 respectively, found fertile ground. Spock’s ideas have continued to shape contemporary child-rearing practices, even if indirectly, and are echoed in approaches such as “attachment parenting,” which is based on the idea that the emotional bond a child forms with her caregivers has lifelong consequences on their relationship.

Tom said his mother Anne’s guilt often goes overboard. She continues to feel responsible for her sons’ past psychological problems. When Tom and his younger brother struggled with addiction issues—Tom is a recovering sex addict and Paul had problems with alcohol and marijuana—Anne and John readily attended family therapy sessions. Yet, Tom remembers, John offered little active participation. “Our family conversation style is forced, not natural,” Paul agrees. “I don’t feel that our family has achieved the described ‘democratization.’ We have never found a comfortable way to bridge our love-language barriers. We will write a letter or send a card with heartfelt sincerity. I think we each take ownership and responsibility for our past actions, but we do not speak of them. Our family uses acts of love more than words.”

While unconditional love has helped Anne, John and their sons to bridge the new possibilities and old expectations, for Anne democratization within the family remains a work in progress: “We mostly followed John’s lead and wishes in decision making, problem solving, work and play. Having said that, I was the one who insisted that we have children, and I did the majority of childcare. I gave John the power in our marriage, just as my mother gave it to my father. There was a profound imbalance, which has equalized over time. Now, with John having Parkinson’s disease, and with it diminished executive function, I hold the power. After 52 years of marriage, this has been a remarkable confidence-building switch for me.”

* * *

_0002_Families-02

My friend Jake, whose story illuminates the gap between theory and practice, broke up with his parents more than ten years ago. Both of Jake’s parents are social workers—and they have fought with each other for as long as he can remember. Jake’s parents often threatened to get a divorce but never followed through. While his mother taught her children analytical thinking and communication skills, when it came to her relationship with his father and the problems that engulfed the whole family, she seemed helpless.

Jake’s parents went to graduate school at a time when family systems theory and other novel psychological approaches began to replace psychoanalysis. Murray Bowen, one of the major figures of family systems therapy, agreed with R.D. Laing’s notion that it is not only the individual who is sick but the whole family. But Bowen and his colleagues were not interested in Sigmund Freud’s notion of the unconscious. While the psychoanalytic method still dominant in the 1950s and ’60s focused on internal mechanisms—a person was to understand his or her own hidden desires and frustrations and take responsibility for them—family systems therapy held that insight accomplishes little; what needed to be changed was the outside reality. To help family members in the process of “differentiation” (the psychological term for the healthy development of a person’s selfhood) one had to intervene and shift the dynamics that made the system sick. In his seminal paper “On the Differentiation of Self” Bowen recounted how he successfully (at least according to his own assessment) implanted lies and misunderstandings in his own family to destabilize the dynamics he deemed unhealthy. And Bowen was not the only one who advocated interruption, bluntness and even lies. In her 1978 essay “The One-Way Mirror,” New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm describes how Salvador Minuchin, another prominent family systems therapist, encouraged the parents of an anorexic girl to force-feed her in public.

Jake, who is 41, noticed and tried to address the dysfunctional dynamics in his own family at an early age. One time, when he was nine or ten years old, he staged a family intervention that would have made Bowen and Minuchin proud. Anticipating yet another fight at the dinner table, he hid a tape recorder. “If only they could hear themselves fight, they would realize,” he thought. When he played back the tape to his parents, they laughed. Then they yelled again.

Jake, a successful videographer, told me that he considers his family relationships a form of emotional abuse that “is not locatable on a single thing, like physical or sexual abuse. It permeates every single thing—like communication, judgment and money.”

It is not that Jake hasn’t tried to understand, challenge or interrupt his parents’ continuous fighting; it just never seemed to work. He remembers probing his mother, asking her how she could possibly put up with her awful relationship with his father. One time, while she was baking a cake, he got her to tell him that she knew very early on in the relationship with his father that something was fundamentally wrong. But then she turned around to use the blender, literally drowning out the conversation.

About ten years ago, in the car after a family reunion, Jake found himself dragged into a huge fight between his parents over a promise his father had broken. It was then that he decided to cut off both his mother and father. “The incident was only a catalyst,” Jake explained. “Over the years, I have discovered a lifetime of reasons. I needed to be away from it. When I was around them, I was part of it. And I didn’t want to continue to reinforce that part of me that was part of this system.”

Joshua Coleman is an Oakland-based psychologist whose complicated relationship with his own daughter served as a motivation to write the self-help book When Parents Hurt: Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don’t Get Along. He told me, “We [parents] started thinking much more about what our children thought. We instilled in them a greater degree of self-esteem and self-possessiveness and taught them to be in touch with their feelings. There is a lot of positive that comes from it, but the downside is that this has really heated up the family environment, which wasn’t true when there was a bigger division and when the roles weren’t as blurry.”

Family historian Stephanie Coontz agrees: Intergenerational communication is often complicated by the fact that “the parents who raised you trying to be more individualistic have not gone to the kind of extreme self-exploration and therapy that some of their kids and grandkids have gotten into.” Coleman aptly develops Coontz’s thought: He describes my own generation as wanting “their parents to speak in a language that they weren’t raised to speak in.” He sees his role as teaching parents to speak their children’s language.

I asked Jake what his parents could do to heal the rift. First he told me that his parents simply don’t possess qualities that he’d associate with people he wants to hang out with. “It’s not a genuine meaningful interaction, just boring or mundane.” Then he said that he wished his mother could tell him, “‘I stayed in that relationship because I was codependent, and I was too scared to change my behavior—and I really regret that. Maybe I could have had a better life if I had done it differently.’” Jake added, “That would be meaningful and open up a channel where I could extend more generosity or compassion and where she would meet me on a human level.”

Most traditional family systems therapists I have spoken to hold that true differentiation can only be accomplished within the family system, but Nicholas Strouse, the director of Westport Family Counseling in Connecticut, disagrees:  “Often those who are alienated have developed the ability to be the observer, to watch, organize, digest and gain perspective about the patterns in the family. It’s been my experience that many of these outsiders are able to grow and heal more quickly, whereas the other family members often stick together in a system that really dislikes change.” Both Strouse and Coleman told me that they have seen an increase in family breakups, although it seems unclear whether amplified media attention and psychological awareness have simply encouraged more people like Jake to step out of the shadows.

* * *

_0003_Families-03

As I looked around me, trying to find members of a family that like each other—a family built on transparency, mutual respect and equality—I remembered Rebecca, a 30-year-old fellow journalist and friend. When Rebecca was little, the roles in her family were negotiated as necessary. While her mother attended law school, her father did most of the practical child-rearing. Her mother, now 66, was the decision-maker;  her father, 67, cooked and drove the three children around.

What stuck in my mind was her family’s Christmas tradition. Each Christmas Eve the five family members meet to go to the cinema. The remainder of the evening is spent “dissecting” the movie. On Christmas Day they meet again for a series of lectures. Each person prepares a 15-minute talk about a topic of his or her choice; the talks are followed by short Q&As. Rebecca’s father has lectured about the spread of Islam; her mother about the creation of Israel and about vampires in popular culture (one of Rebecca’s favorite lectures so far). Rebecca has given talks about painter Claude Monet and feminist writer Ellen Willis, her siblings about global warming and swing dancing. Comparing herself to some of her friends, Rebecca says, “We don’t have any big crazies in our family, which is amazing.”

“But what about problems or conflicts?” I asked Rebecca. “How do you solve them?”

“My parents don’t subscribe to the talk-about-your-feelings school,” she responded. “There is a lot of communication in our family about a lot of things, but there is not a lot of communication about family issues.” As an example she recounted how she didn’t find out about her mother’s partial mastectomy until the day of the surgery.

I was surprised because Rebecca always struck me as someone extremely open and outspoken. “The three of us are really self-critical and self-analyzing, because my parents gave us those tools,” she explained, acknowledging that the family doesn’t apply these tools when it comes to emotional problems within the unit. The child of Holocaust survivors, her mother was raised in a cold and silent household and never learned to address emotional issues. While her father was warm and caring, her mother was “super strict” and “paranoid about sharing.” But Rebecca excuses her mother. “She is one of the reasons why I am curious,” she said, remembering the family’s memorable visit to a diner. What was supposed to be a quick break from a big family reunion turned into an animated two-hour assembly. “We were just sitting there, talking about Internet culture!” Rebecca remembered.

* * *

The history of democracy within the family is equally exciting and sad. This summer, my mother visited me in New York after more than three years of oppressive silence. My father and I have found a more or less satisfactory way to communicate with each other. As he grew old and began dividing up the fruits of his lifelong labor with my siblings and me, we have become business partners. For the past few years we have been operating within parameters that I find emotionally deficient but manageable. My mother and I, though, have continued to struggle. For decades our relationship had been defined and battered by a false sense of transparency, honesty and equality. Rusty hooks were thrown into murky water, catching things that should have stayed buried in mud. When I wanted to talk about subjects the way she had taught me to talk about them, I was called unforgiving. She had prepared me to remember but wanted me to forget. Intimacy had been encouraged but also heavily punished. She resented seeing her children get the things she had missed growing up. Each time I opened myself, I was hurt. I had become too smart, she said. I was hiding, she said. I was fleeing, she said. I was confrontational, she said. I shouldn’t analyze everything, and I should instead focus on the good times of the past.

After decades of struggling with the spaces between democratic aspirations and practical limitation, I finally decided to rewrite my map. I tried to do what R.D. Laing deemed impossible: untie myself from my family’s knots. Maybe now, three years later, we could talk like amicable strangers? Maybe the distance had helped. Too much closeness and transparency can’t possibly be good. I had long promised to never bring up the past again. I wanted to start over. So as we sat in my living room for the first time in years, I imagined conversations about books, cooking and animals—anything but family, really—but each sentence I uttered dropped back into the silence that came after I stepped out of the system. Had she not been my mother, we would have never met.

What have I learned from the families and experts I interviewed? That maybe a family doesn’t have to function on every level. That maybe a certain distance and respect for the unspoken is good. It seems, though, that in order to make democracy work, there needs to be at least one shared language that allows for communication, mutual enjoyment and, possibly, intimacy. It doesn’t seem to matter much whether this language is based on intellectuality, emotionality, work or a mutual interest.

While I can now see the origins of my family’s incongruities more clearly, my parents and I have not found a language that allows for a meaningful, loving connection. When I stopped participating in their dysfunctional system, all I was left with was this eerie silence. I had made myself, in R.D. Laing’s words, “unnatural.” While I can see my family more clearly now, and even excuse some of their behavior, I have become unrecognizable, a stranger to them. And yet, there is hope: Democracy is not supposed to lead to an immutable state. It should be up for renegotiation tomorrow, next month, next year. So I hope that one day, before it’s too late, we can meet again and find a mutual language.

* * * 

The names of the family members have been changed to protect their privacy.

* * *

Sabine Heinlein is the author of the IPPY Gold Award-winning narrative nonfiction book Among Murderers: Life After Prison and the ebook The Orphan Zoo: Rise and Fall of the Farm at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. She is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize.

Edited by Melissa Dunn. Fact-checked by Brendan O’Connor.

Illustrations by Kjell Reigstad

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Escape from Jonestown

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Julia Scheeres | A Thousand Lives | 26 minutes (6,304 words)

 

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For our latest Longreads Exclusive, we’re proud to share Julia Scheeres’ adaptation of her book, A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown, which tells the story of five people who lived in Jonestown at the time of the infamous massacre, which occurred 36 years ago, on Nov. 18, 1978.

This story also includes home movies—never before released publicly—from inside Jonestown. The footage, discovered after the massacre, includes tours of the compound by Jim Jones and interviews with many of those who lived and died there. You can view the entire series of clips at YouTube.com/Longreads.

* * *

The journey up the coast was choppy, the boat too far out to get a good look at the shore. While the other passengers spread out in sleeping bags over the deck, 15-year-old Tommy Bogue gripped the railing, determined not to miss a beat of this adventure.

This was his first sea journey. His first trip outside the United States. His first sighting of jungle. Guyana: the very name was exotic. He’d never heard of it before his church established a mission there. As the shore blurred by, vague and mysterious, he imagined the creatures that roamed beyond it. Many of the world’s largest animals lived there: the giant anteater, the giant sea otter, the giant armadillo, the 20-foot green anaconda. He’d read and re-read the Guyana entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica until he could spout off trivia to anyone who paid attention to what the skinny, mop-haired teen had to say. Now, as the trawler chopped through dark waves, he ticked off this book knowledge to himself. He knew a few things about the strangeness surrounding him, and those few things comforted him.

Everything about Tommy was average—his height, his build, his grades—except for his penchant for trouble. His parents couldn’t control him. Neither could his church. He was always sneaking out of services to smoke weed or wander the gritty streets of the Fillmore District. Ditching church became a game—one that he was frequently and severely punished for—but one that proved irresistible.

MSP 3800.ALB08.Bogue.Thommy

Tommy Bogue

They’d only told him the day before that he was leaving for South America. His head was still spinning with the quickness of it all. He was glad to get away from the never-ending church meetings and rules. But mostly he was excited about seeing his father. Jim Bogue left for Guyana two years earlier, and although he’d called home using the mission’s ham radio, the conversations were rushed and marred by static. His father sounded proud of all the pioneers had accomplished at the mission post, and Tommy was eager to see it for himself.

As the trawler swung in a wide arc toward land, the other congregants crowded Tommy at the railing. The boat nosed up the Waini River, its wake lifting the skirts of the mangroves as parrots flashed in the high canopy. The travelers slipped back in time, passing thatched huts stilted on the riverbanks and Amerindian families, who eyed them warily from dugout canoes.

At Port Kaituma, Pastor Jim Jones finally emerged from the wheelhouse, wearing the dark-lensed, gold-framed sunglasses that rarely left his face. He welcomed them to the village—which seemed to consist of little more than stalls selling produce and used clothing—as if he owned it. Tommy listened attentively to Pastor Jones, who was only there for a short visit. Guyana was a fresh start for him and he wanted to make his father proud.

A tractor pulling a flatbed trailer motored up. The newcomers boarded it with their meager belongs. As they lurched down the pitted road toward the settlement, they grabbed the high sides, joking as if they were on a hayride.

Jim Jones in 1971

Jim Jones in 1971

Pastor Jones raised his voice over the thrumming diesel engine to boast about the mission. About the “ice cream tree” whose fruit tasted like strawberry sherbet. About the abundant crops of cassava, bananas and cutlass beans. About his protective aura, which surrounded the property—there was no sickness there, no malaria, no typhoid. No jungle cats or snakes dared venture onto it. Nothing bad happened there.

At some point, Tommy noticed the squalor: the shanties lining the road, the kids with open sores and distended bellies, the dead dogs rotting where they fell. The trenches of scummy water. The stench. The mosquitoes. None of this jibed with the movies of the mission they’d seen at church, which made Guyana look like a lush resort.

The tractor turned down a lane that wound through a tight stand of trees. The canopy soared 200 feet above them. The light dimmed and Tommy glanced behind them at the receding brightness, then ahead to where his father waited.

View more home movies from Jonestown

* * *

The draw of that lonely outpost, some four thousand miles away from California, was different for everyone. Some wanted to escape the ghetto. Others wanted to be part of a bold social experiment. They were going to give a big thumbs-down to AmeriKKKa and forge a utopia free of all the evil -isms. Some people planned to volunteer a few months before returning home. Others thought it’d be a great opportunity to their kids to spend a semester abroad. In the beginning, members of Peoples Temple referred to the settlement as Jones did, calling it “the promised land.”

When Tommy arrived, there were only two dozen people living in Jonestown. In those early days, there was a real sense of purpose. Old people sorted rice and cleaned vegetables, young people weeded the fields and hauled boards from the sawmill.

Tommy worked alongside his dad, hammering together cottages. They’d both changed in two years. Tommy sported a scraggle of fuzz on his upper lip; his father seemed more defeated than ever. In California, with Jim Jones’s encouragement, Jim Bogue’s wife had embarked on an affair with another church member. This was not uncommon; Jones split up marriages and families as he saw fit. Loyalty to the cause, he preached, should trump mere human alliances. When Tommy jumped off the tractor trailer, Jim Bogue rushed to embrace him, joyful tears wet on his cheeks. It was the first time Tommy had ever seen his father—his reserved, stoical father—cry.

Jonestown from the sky.

Jonestown from the sky.

They relaxed together at suppertime, when the settlers gathered to eat family-style dinners of fried chicken or fish with local greens. Cans of Pepsi were shipped up from Georgetown, and the kitchen handed out peanut butter fudge for treats. Afterwards, they’d play board games or watch movies in the large, open pavilion at the settlement’s center. Some nights the youth would find a boom box and dance as the voice of Diana Ross wailed in the jungle. It was July 1976. America was celebrating its bicentennial; Jonestown was birthing a new society.

Then it all changed.

New West magazine was about to publish an exposé portraying Jim Jones—by now a celebrated California powerbroker—as a charlatan who faked healings, swindled money from his followers, and fathered a son with an attractive acolyte. It was all true.

Until then, Jones had only visited the mission sporadically. But now he moved in permanently, occupying a secluded cottage on the outskirts of Jonestown with two concubines while his wife took up residence nearby.

Then he started to evacuate his flock from San Francisco before the scandals went public. By fall of 1977, there’d be 700 people shoehorned into Jonestown, five times more than the compound could feed.

But Jones didn’t care whether his people thrived in Guyana—he had far darker plans for them.

For several years, he’d been mulling over an idea he called “revolutionary suicide.” He wondered if his followers were dedicated enough to Socialism to kill themselves for it. In 1973, he’d talked to confidants about the possibility of loading his top aides onto buses and driving them off the Golden Gate Bridge, or onto a plane and having someone shoot the pilot. But then he came up with a grander plan: Jonestown. In a remote jungle in South America he could isolate his followers and do as he pleased with them.

New West magazine on Jim Jones and Jonestown

New West magazine on Jim Jones and Jonestown

By the time they regretted moving to Jonestown—a two-day boat ride from civilization—it was too late. They were trapped there. He confiscated their money and passports and dropped all ministerial demeanor.

“If you want to go home, you can swim,” Jones told disgruntled residents. “We won’t pay your fucking way home.”

In September, he raised the notion of “revolutionary suicide” with the rank and file. He took a vote to see how many people supported it. Three loyalists raised their hands. The vast majority of Jonestown residents were shaken by his word and vehemently argued against it—they’d come to Guyana to forge better lives for themselves and their children, not to die.

But Jones wouldn’t let the subject drop. He harangued them nightly; they had to prepare themselves to give the ultimate sacrifice.

Tommy was scared. He started plotting his escape, with his best friend Brian Davis, who was also 16. From the Amerindians Tommy had learned jungle survival skills—how to build snares, find water, differentiate between poisonous and edible plants. To develop a “jungle eye” to get his bearings by focusing through the trees at breaks in the foliage. To ditch trackers by walking up streams or in circles.

Brian Davis

Brian Davis

He shared all this with Brian. They schemed in whispers, out of sight, in the dark. They’d make their way to Venezuela, then somehow back to California. On Nov. 1, 1977, under the guise of looking for firewood, they crossed the line separating the fields from the jungle and ran, clutching gunny sacks stuffed with food, clothing, and matches.

They made good headway until darkness fell. There is no “jungle eye” at night. When they raised their hands to their faces, they felt heat emanating from their palms, but saw nothing. They kept tripping on vines, startling at weird noises. All the fanged and clawed creatures hunted at night—the jaguar and puma, the anaconda and emerald tree boa. They turned back to the road running between Port Kaituma and the neighboring village. As it cut through a steep hill, the Jonestown guards surrounded them.

At the pavilion, the throng waited, angry at being hauled out of bed. Jones sat on a platform at the front, sneering as the guards shoved the teens toward him.

In a low growl, Jones asked the boys how far they thought they’d get before switching on a tape recorder resting on the table beside him. The tape, Q933, was one of 971 audio tapes that FBI agents recovered from Jonestown after the massacre.

It starts mid sentence, as the guard berates Tommy:

… I’d just like to say, this idiot—you’ve been in the bush, but you’ve only been around where people are always at…and there ain’t going to be no animals there. You get out in the Venezuelan jungle, and you’re going to run into every kind of fucking thing. They would’ve killed you, you’re lucky we found you. You know what lives here, man, you know it. Don’t say you don’t.

Jones: “What lives there? The puma? The leopard? The ocelot? ‘Bout 50 different breeds of poisonous reptiles? Are you aware of this—any of this? How long you been around here?”

Tommy: “Fourteen months, Father.”

Jones interrogated the boys, then asked if anyone else had questions for “these assholes.” The size and sound of the crowd’s fury is frightening even on a low-quality tape recording. How much more so it must have been for the two boys that night. The recording shows Jones’ disturbing ability to switch from a gentle rebuke to an enraged bellow in the space between two words. He whipped the crowd into a frenzy. “Goddamn white fascist bigots!” a woman shrieks. “You’re evil!” Jones shouted before spitting several times. Tommy’s mother Edith rushed forward to slap his face repeatedly until Jones told her “enough.”

The conversation took a surreal turn when Edith suggested she cut both their heads off, then commit suicide, to keep the “church from getting in trouble.”

Edith Bogue, talking to Jones

Edith Bogue, talking to Jones

A long debate ensued about whether the boys should die. Jones stopped the recording the session before dictating their punishment, but a slip of paper retrieved by the FBI revealed what it was. The typed release, signed by Jim and Edith Bogue and by Joyce Touchette—Brian’s guardian in Jonestown—permitted the boys to be “physically restrained by chain” to prevent them from running away again.

The next day, each boy had a metal ring welded onto his ankle, which was connected to the other boy by a three-foot chain. They were forced to run wherever they went, dragging the chain between them. They had to sleep together, shower together, use the toilet together, and sleep on the same bunk.

A guard led them to a fallen tree and ordered them to turn it into firewood. They chopped wood from dawn to dusk. During their second week, Brian, exhausted and sore, slid his thumb over the wood splitter as Tommy wielded the sledgehammer.

“Hit it,” he whispered. Tommy refused. “Dude, hit it so we can have a break,” Brian insisted. They argued briefly before Tommy relented. The guard took them to the clinic, where a nurse bandaged Brian’s thumb and sent them back to work.

A year later, one of the boys would make a final, successful, attempt to escape Jonestown.

The other would die there.

The parents of Tommy Bogue agree to restrain him with chains.

The parents of Tommy Bogue agree to restrain him with chains.

* * *

In December 1977, another cord tethering Jim Jones to reason snapped when his mother died in Jonestown. A life-long smoker, Lynetta was in the last stages of emphysema when she moved to Guyana. In December, she suffered a stroke that left her partially paralyzed, and she died within two days. A few hours after her death, an emotional Jones gathered his followers in the pavilion to notify them of her passing. He described his mother’s last moments as she gasped for air with her “tongue hanging out, saliva flowing down her face. She couldn’t move her eyes.” He invited people who knew Lynetta well to take a last look at her. Although she looked horrific while she died, in death she looked “very well, very well indeed,” he said.

Again he raised the specter of mass suicide.

“How many plan your death?” he asked.

“There’s a number of you that do not lift your hand and say you plan your death. You’re gonna die. Don’t you think you should plan such an important event?”

He called on a 75-year-old Texan named Vera Talley.

Vera Talley

Vera Talley

“Sister Talley, don’t you ever plan your death?”

On the tape recording of the conversation, she sounded hesitant.

“No,” she finally said.

“And why don’t you, dear?” Jones asked.

“I don’t know, I just hadn’t thought about it.”

“Don’t you think it’s time to think about it?”

The old woman was confused; she thought Jones was talking about life insurance. “My husband quit paying it and I didn’t have no money to pay it, and I just let it go, and I hadn’t thought no more about it.”

“I’m not talking about insurance,” Jones said. “I’m talking about planning your death for the victory of the people. For socialism, for communism, for black liberation, for oppressed liberation … Haven’t you ever thought about taking a bomb and running into a Ku Klux Klan meeting and destroying all the Ku Klux Klan people?”

The microphone buzzed loudly, interrupting and angering Jones. He admonished people sitting in the back of the pavilion to stop playing with their babies and pay attention.

Maya Ijames, an 8-year-old biracial girl with a cloud of soft black hair, lifted her hand. She, too, was confused.

Maya IJames

Maya IJames

“What does planning your death mean?” she asked sweetly. On the tape, her voice is shockingly innocent and clear.

In his response to Maya, Jones launched into a diatribe, the essence of which was captured in one sentence: “I think a healthy person has to think through his death, or he may sell out.”

The remark revealed Jones’s deepest fear, that his followers would betray him.  He’d rather they die first. “When somebody’s so principled, they’re ready to die at the snap of a finger,” he told the crowd, “and that’s what I want to build in you, that same kind of character.”

He described various methods of suicide. “Drowning, they say, is one of the easiest ways in the world to die. It’s just a numbing, kind of sleepy sensation.”

The crowd was solemn, and their lack of enthusiasm infuriated him. “Some of you people get so fuckin’ nervous every time I talk about death!” he shouted. He stuck out his tongue and pretended to gag, just as he’d seen his mother do in her last breaths. The crowd laughed uneasily.

An elderly woman refused to smile at his antics, and he turned on her: “You’re gonna die someday, honey!” he bellowed. “You old bitch, you’re gonna die!”

Baby nursery at Jonestown

Baby nursery at Jonestown

He started keeping lists of those residents who didn’t raise their hands when he held votes for revolutionary suicide, of parents who were “too attached” to their children. He directed Jonestown’s medical team to research ways to kill everyone and to be creative about it—there wasn’t enough ammunition to shoot the one thousand people who now populated Jonestown.

On Wednesdays, the camp doctor, Larry Schacht—a loner with depressive tendencies like Jim Jones—took a break from healing Jonestown residents and researched ways to murder them. He grew botulism and other deadly cultures in discarded baby food jars, but ultimately decided suicide-by-bacteria would take too long. Another scrap of paper, collected by FBI agents, reveals his “solution” to the problem. “Cyanide is one of the most rapidly-acting poisons,” Schacht wrote in the memo. “I had some misgivings about its effectiveness, but from further research I have gained more confidence in it, at least theoretically…cyanide may take up to three hours to kill but usually it is within minutes.”

He placed an order for one pound of sodium cyanide from J.T. Baker, a chemical company in Hayward, California. The order, which cost $8.85, was for enough poison to kill 1,800 people.

* * *

A water brigade at Jonestown.

A water brigade at Jonestown.

The extreme duress of life in Jonestown made people crack. They didn’t care about socialism if it meant chronic hunger, exhaustion, and fear. Some days they’d stand in the food line after a day of working in the fields, only to be handed a few slices of watermelon. At night, Jones screened documentaries on Nazi death camps or read from the torture memoir of a Chilean Socialist, hoping to infect them with his relentless nihilism.

Despite the odds, residents clung to the hope that they’d get out of Jonestown alive. Human instinct is to survive; surrendering to death is unnatural. Jim Bogue made a plan. He got his family into Peoples Temple—now he had to get them out.

Since Jones was constantly badgering residents to finds ways to make money, Bogue proposed gold prospecting. It would allow him to survey the jungle and the possibility of escaping through it. He didn’t know a thing about gold—other than that it seemed to be all that the cursed soil was good for—but the leadership agreed to give him a go at it, even ordering prospecting guides and pans.

He set off into the jungle with another Jonestown resident named Al Simon. Bogue found a kindred spirit in Simon; neither man was in Jones’s inner circle and both were estranged from their wives. Something in Bogue’s gut told him Simon was trustworthy. It was possible to get a sense of another resident’s true feelings by reading their body language during Jones’s harangues: a wince, a sigh, a moment’s hesitation during a death vote. But it took months for Bogue to broach the topic of escape with Simon. First they discussed the failure of the farm. Eventually they discussed the failure of Jim Jones.

Al Simon, with Summer Simon

Al Simon, with Summer Simon

Simon was also deeply afraid. In the rallies, he sat with his toddler, Summer, sprawled sleeping in his lap, while Crystal, 4, and Alvin, Jr., 6, dozed on the hard bench beside him. He was thankful that they were too small to understand most of what was said during those bleak discussions. He made it clear that he was against revolutionary suicide. “I feel all the children here should have a right to live to carry on,” he wrote to the Temple leader. As the months passed, however, it became increasingly clear to him that Jones didn’t give a damn about anything, even children.

Using machetes, the two men started hacking a path behind the sawmill. They planned to forge a trail for several miles to the narrow-gauge railway that ran between Port Kaituma and the neighboring town. Bogue wrote Jones periodic updates, saying he’d found a promising streambed that had a “good rock formation, good water source”—always adding that he’d need more time to suss it out.

The men’s progress was agonizingly slow. The rain forest was dense with vines and saplings, and in some stretches, they’d hack for hours, until their muscles shook, only to clear few yards. Blisters caused by his water-logged boots covered Bogue’s feet, but his resolve to save his family was a powerful anesthetic.

Somehow their plan would succeed; they had to believe it. The opposite was unfathomable.

Then came another twist: Congressman Leo Ryan from San Mateo, California, announced plans to visit Jonestown. He wanted to investigate charges that residents were being held against their will.

When Jones heard the news, he was beside himself. He gathered residents in the pavilion:

Jones:  “I can assure you, that if he stays long enough for tea, he’s gonna regret it….son of a bitch. You got something to say to him, you want to talk to him?”

Crowd:  “No!”

Jones:   “Anybody here care to see him?”

Crowd:  “No!”

Jones: “I don’t know about you, I just wanted to be sure you understood where I’m coming from. I don’t care whether I see Christmas or Thanksgiving, neither one. You don’t either. We’ve been debating about dying ’til, hell, it’s easier to die than talk about it…I worry about what you people think, because you’re wanting—trying to hold onto life, but I’ve been trying to give mine away for a long time, and if that fucker wants to take it—he can have it, but we’ll have a hell of a time going together.”

At first he refused to let Ryan enter Jonestown. But his lawyers urged him to reconsider. Barring the congressman would only validate rumors that Jones was hiding something, and when Ryan returned to Washington, he’d probably hold hearings on the matter.

And so, on Nov. 17, the congressman, along with an entourage of reporters, relatives and government officials, were escorted into Jonestown. At first, the reception went well. Residents obeyed orders to not complain and offered rehearsed answers to prying questions. Before the group’s arrival, they’d been fed a hearty dinner of barbecued pork, biscuits, callaloo greens, as well as the first coffee they’d tasted in months. Having a bellyful of good food buoyed their morale.

The guests were treated to a talent show. The Jonestown band played. Residents danced. It was an intricately staged song and dance.

At a break, Ryan addressed the audience: “This is a congressional inquiry. I think that all of you know that I’m here to find out more about questions that have been raised about your operation here, but I can tell you right now that, from the few conversations I’ve had with some of the folks here already this evening, that whatever the comments are, there are some people here who believe this is the best thing that ever happened to them in their whole life.”

The residents’ applause, which lasted a full minute, reverberated off the metal roof. The NBC cameraman panned over the ecstatic crowd, before returning to the congressman, who waited for the noise to subside with an awkward smile. He attempted to speak several times, but was drowned out each time by applause, whistling, shouting, and drums.

Around eleven that night, residents started to fade into the darkness toward their cottages. The elaborate charade seemed to be a success.

Until the next morning. During an interview, NBC correspondent Don Harris asked Jones about the allegations of mistreatment and imprisonment. Jones denied everything. Harris showed him a note that a resident had slipped him the previous day. “Help us get out of Jonestown,” it said. Next, Edith Parks, a grandmotherly woman with white hair and cat’s-eye glasses walked up to a State department official. “We want to leave,” she said.

The house of cards was tumbling down.

Tommy saw Edith Parks talking to Ryan’s aide, Jackie Speier, and panicked. They’d been ordered to steer clear of visitors. He sprinted to find his dad, who told him to collect his two older sisters and meet up at the sawmill.

Al Simon was already there with his daughters and father, Jose Simon.

There was no time to wait—they needed to leave now, Bogue said.

Jim Bogue in Jonestown

Jim Bogue in Jonestown

But Simon couldn’t find his boy, Alvin, Jr. He wanted to return to the central area. “I’m gonna get him, and I’ll be right back,” he said. Bogue promised his friend they’d wait for him; the two men had forged a path to freedom together and together they would hike it out.

But Al Simon didn’t return. Finally the party decided to return to the pavilion to look for him. They found a growing number of defectors and decided to join them.

Congressman Ryan told the Bogues that the truck was too full; they’d have to wait for a second load out.

“There won’t be another load,” Edith Bogue retorted.

Jim Jones walked up to Jim Bogue and threw his arm around his shoulder.

“You know you don’t have to go,” Jones said.

Bogue just looked at the ground and shook his head.

“If you do go, you’ll be welcomed back anytime,” Jones said. “Even some of those who have lied against us have come back.”

Bogue just let him talk. He had nothing more to say to him.

* * *

The jungle surrounding Jonestown.

The jungle surrounding Jonestown.

The sky had been swirling with dark clouds all morning and now a giant wind heaved through the pavilion, sending papers aloft and rocking the wooden planters hanging from the rafters. It was if all the tension in Jonestown had condensed in the sky above it and had now, on this final, horrible day, transmogrified into its own physical force. The clouds split open, rain drummed the pavilion’s metal roof, drowning talk, stifling movement. A moat formed around the structure’s edges.

Jones sat defeated as his aides pressed in around him. He didn’t listen to their reasoning that too few people had left to justify any drastic action. He simmered with rage, telling his lawyer that those who were leaving were traitors. ⁠He narrowed his eyes with hatred behind his dark glasses, licking his dry lips repeatedly, intent on his diabolical plan.

Tommy saw his buddy Brian Davis in the crowd.

“Why don’t you come on?” Tommy asked him.

“I can’t go,” Brian said. He had a weird flat look on his face. His father, a true believer, stood beside him.

As the defectors carried their baggage down the walkways, their roommates, relatives, co-workers, friends, and adversaries watched, huddled in doorways, eyes darting, chewing their cuticles. “Goodbyes” seemed beside the point.

As Al Simon walked his kids toward the dump truck with his father, his estranged wife appeared. She pulled Alvin Jr. from his grandfather’s arms and shrieked at her husband:

“You bring those kids back here! Don’t you take my kids!”

Jose Simon snatched up his grandson again and cradled him to his chest like a baby, then starts toward the truck again. The television camera zooms in: the grandfather’s face is grimly determined, the boy’s eyes wide with anguish. They hurry down the muddy path and catch up to Simon, who carries Summer while Crystal, lopes beside him. The two men walk shoulder to shoulder, casting nervous glances behind them.

They almost made it.

Jones’s lawyers intervened; Simon couldn’t just take the kids. Congressman Ryan offered to remain at the settlement to negotiate the custody matter but as he talked to the lawyers, a burly ex-marine named Don Sly rushed from the crowd and put a knife to the congressman’s throat. The lawyers pulled him off and urged Ryan to leave—for his own safety. The politician was clearly shaken—as a representative of the United States government, he thought his position would afford him respect and protection in Jonestown.

The defectors crowded into a huge dump truck. Ryan, shirt ripped from the tussle, climbed into the cab. The drive to the airstrip took forever. Halfway to the front gate, the truck stopped so the television crew could film a few last shots of the jungle. The defectors protested. “Grab your sisters and hit the jungle if anything goes down,” Tommy’s dad told him.

At the airstrip, more anxiety: the airplanes that were supposed to be waiting weren’t there.

Fifteen minutes later, a five-seater Cessna appeared, followed, several minutes later, by a 20-seat Guyana Airways Twin Otter. NBC’s Bob Brown filmed them landing. In the background, you can see a group of men huddle together then walk to the tractor-trailer, which was parked next to the smaller plane. Speier started making seat assignments. There were 30 people but only 26 seats. The defectors boarded first. She told the reporters that some of them would have to wait and fly out the following day. They protested, each eager to file their Jonestown story before the others. An Amerindian child ran onto the plane, and Speier was trying to coax him out when the passengers noticed the tractor trailer barreling toward them across the airfield.

Driving it was Stanley Gieg, a handsome 19-year-old from the San Francisco suburb of Walnut Creek. Gieg stopped 30 feet away from the Otter, parallel to its open gangway. Five men who’d been crouched in the trailer bed, stood, holding guns. They hopped to the ground and started shooting as they walked toward the plane. They shot out the nose wheel, then trained their guns on people.

Tommy was sitting directly in front of the gangway. “Duck down!” someone yelled, and everyone—including the pilot and co-pilot—dove to the floor. The woman in front of Tommy, wasn’t fast enough. A bullet hit the back of her head and her brain landed in the seat next to her. Tommy jumped up to close the door, putting himself in the line of fire. He knew they’d all die if he didn’t. He pulled on the cables, but the gangway cables were too heavy. His sister Teena jumped up and together they closed it. Tommy was sprayed with shot in his calf and Teena took a .22 bullet in hers.

The assailants walked to the other side of the plane, firing their guns. Ryan ran around the front of the plane, before crumpling to the dirt grabbing his neck. “I’ve been shot,” he said.

NBC cameraman Brown continued filming the attack until he was hit with a slug. In the raw footage, he groans loudly before the film dissolves into gray static.

As the passengers inside the Otter watch from the windows, the gunmen stalked among the wounded, shooting them point blank. Dead were Parks, Brown, Harris,

Greg Robinson, a photographer for the San Francisco Examiner, and Leo Ryan—the only U.S. congressman to be assassinated.

Once the attackers drove off, Tommy lowered the gangway. The survivors got out and were starting to regroup when someone yelled, “they’re coming back!”

Tommy grabbed his sister Teena and sprinted for the bush.

Back in Jonestown, Jones summoned his followers to the pavilion one last time. He told them the congressman was dead and that the Guyanese army would arrive at any moment—to torture and kill them. “We had better not have any of our children left when it’s over,” he said.

The FBI would collect Jones’s final speech from the tape recorder beside his chair. The “Death Tape,” as it became known, ran for 44 minutes, and included more than 30 edits where Jones stopped and started recording. After one early edit, Jones warns a “Ruby” that she’ll regret what she said—if she doesn’t die first. A survivor would later state that high school principal Dick Tropp also opposed Jones’s plan, calling it “insane.” We’ll never know how many others he silenced.

On the tape, Jones’ voice is sometimes slurred. Probably he is high. He lisps some words beginning with “s.”  “Suicide” becomes “thuicide,” “simple” sounds like “thimple.” His autopsy report would reveal that his tissue contained levels of the sedative pentobarbital that were “within the toxic range,” evidence of long-time abuse of barbiturates. ⁠

Only one person is heard opposing Jim Jones on the tape, and that is Christine Miller, a 60-year-old native of Brownsville, Texas.

Christine Miller

Christine Miller

Miller: I feel that as long as there’s life, there’s hope. That’s my faith.

Jones: Well— someday everybody dies. Some place that hope runs out, because everybody dies.

Miller: I’m not saying I’m afraid to die.

Jones: I don’t think you are.

Miller: I look about at the babies and I think they deserve to live, you know?

Jones: I agree. But don’t they also deserve much more, they deserve peace.

Miller: When we destroy ourselves, we’re defeated. We let them, the enemies, defeat us.

Jones: We will win. We win when we go down.

Miller: I think we all have a right to our own destiny as individuals. I have a right to choose mine, and everybody else had a right to choose theirs.

She was shouted down. An elderly man took the microphone, crying. “Dad, we’re all ready to go. If you tell us we have to give our lives now, we’re ready—I’m pretty sure all the rest of the sisters and brothers are with me.”

He is roundly applauded. The tide had turned in Jones’ favor. He’d been goading them toward this night for years.

Jones: Please get us some medication. It’s simple. It’s simple. There’s no convulsions with it. It’s just simple. Just, please get it. Before it’s too late. The GDF (Guyana Defense Force) will be here, I tell you. Get movin’, get movin’. Don’t be afraid to die. If these people land out here, they’ll torture our children, they’ll torture our people, they’ll torture our seniors. We cannot have this.

Parents try to console their children. Lovers embrace. Confused seniors wonder what’s happening. Jonestown guards circle the pavilion, guns trained on the cowering residents—they can either take the “potion” or be shot.

Jones is impatient.

Jones: Have you got the medication here?! You’ve got to move!”

From the school tent, aides carry a large steel drum containing a dark purple liquid. Dr. Schacht mixed his toxic cocktail carefully. It contains potassium cyanide, valium, chloral hydrate (used to put babies and small children to sleep for surgery) potassium chloride  (used to stop the heart muscle in lethal injections) and Flavor-Aid, a cheap Kool-Aid knockoff. ⁠Nurses fill paper cups and syringes with the poison and residents are told to form a line, mothers and babies first.

It’s impossible to determine how much time passes between edits on the Death Tape. The tape is recycled; whenever the mike falls silent, there is a ghostly bleed through of the Delfonics’ 1968 hit “I’m Sorry.”  The music would later be misconstrued by some, including FBI analysts, to be live organ music, as if a funereal march played while people lined up to die.

As Jones talks, trying to soothe the congregation, kids scream. High-pitched, terrified screams. “Don’t tell them they’re dying!” Jones tells parents. He reassures them that it’s only “a little rest, a little rest.” Poisoned parents, weeping, carry their poisoned daughters and sons into the dark field next to the pavilion, cradling them as best they can as they begin to writhe and froth at the mouth. They watch their kids die, then begin to convulse themselves.

Jones tapes his last lie for posterity: “We didn’t commit suicide, we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”

He descends from his throne and pulls residents who hesitate toward the vat.

After watching his people die in agony, Jones chose a quicker death. It would be interesting to know his last, drug-sludged thought as he placed the barrel of his .38 Smith & Wesson revolver to his right temple and pulled the trigger. He’d accomplished his deepest desire: soon, people all over the world would know his name. It would be synonymous with evil.

After the massacre.

After the massacre.

* * *

As Tommy and Teena plunged through the jungle, the small holes peppering his calf hemorrhaged blood. Pure adrenaline kept him moving. He used the survival skills the Amerindians taught him, leading his sister in circles and walking up streams to keep their attackers at bay.

He grew delirious from the blood loss. He thought he saw a man leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette. He grew convinced that birdcalls were actually made by the Jonestown thugs as they signaled their positions to each other and zeroed in for the kill.

At the Port Kaituma rum shop where the other airstrip survivors had taken refuge, Jim Bogue told reporters he wasn’t worried about his son. “He knows the bush,” he boasted.

But Tommy lacked the primary tool for jungle survival: a knife. Without one, they couldn’t eat.  They gulped down muddy river water. By the third morning, his leg smell like rotten meat and maggots infested the bullet holes. He could barely walk. He’d see a light in the distance, and limp toward it, thinking it was a way out of the jungle, only to find it was an opening in the canopy, a light well. He and Teena sunk to the jungle floor, dejected, when they heard the splashing of boat oars. “Tommy Bogue!” called a lilting Guyanese voice. It was one of the Amerindians who’d taught him how to survive in the bush.

When rescuers carried him into the rum shop on a stretcher, for the second time in his life, Tommy Bogue saw his father cry.

* * *

Thom Bogue, today.

Thom Bogue, today.

 * * *

Julia Scheeres is the author of the memoir Jesus Land, which was a New York Times and London Times bestseller. A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown was named one of the “Top 10 Books About the 1970s” by the Guardian and was named a “best book of the year” by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Boston Globe. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband and two kids.

For the Public Good: The Shameful History of Forced Sterilization in the U.S.

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Belle Boggs | The New New South | August 2013 | 62 minutes (15,377 words)

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We’re proud to present, for the first time online, “For the Public Good,” Belle Boggs‘s story for The New New South about the shocking history of forced sterilizations that occurred in the United States, and the story of victims in North Carolina, with original video by Olympia Stone.

As Boggs explained to us last year: 

“Last summer I met Willis Lynch, a man who was sterilized by the state of North Carolina more than 65 years earlier, when he was only 14 years old and living in an institution for delinquent children. Willis was one of 7,600 victims of North Carolina’s eugenics program, and one of the more outspoken and persistent advocates for compensation.

“At the time I was struggling with my own inability to conceive, and the debate within my state—how much is the ability to have children worth?—was something I thought about a lot. It’s hard to quantify, the value of people who don’t exist. It gets even more complicated when you factor in public discomfort over a shameful past, and a present-day political climate that marginalizes the poor.”

Thanks to Boggs and The New New South for sharing this story with the Longreads Community, and thanks to Longreads Members for your helping us bring these stories to you. Join us.

* * *

One

Willis Lynch lives just outside Littleton, North Carolina, in a trailer set close to a quiet road that runs between tobacco and cotton fields. Retired from a career that included military service, farming, plumbing, handyman work, and auto repair, Lynch still does all the work himself on his 1982 Ford EXP, a car he modified to improve its gas mileage, adding Plexiglas panels to make the recessed headlights more aerodynamic and lowering the radiator to keep the engine cooler. It gets 40 miles to the gallon, according to Lynch, and has traveled more than 700,000 miles.

“People around here know me for being smart, for knowing how to fix a lot of things,” he tells me the first time I meet him, not long before he shows me the paperwork that suggested he was unfit to father children. In 1948, when he was 14 years old, Lynch was sterilized on the recommendation of North Carolina’s Eugenics Board, a state-run organization that targeted thousands of men and women for vasectomies, hysterectomies, salpingectomies (removal of the fallopian tubes), ovariectomies (removal of the ovaries),  and even castrations. He has lived most of his life with the knowledge that he would never have biological children.

I’d gotten in touch with Lynch after reading some of his frank public comments on North Carolina’s sterilization program, recounting, in just a few sentences, a life that turned out differently from the one he once imagined. My husband and I had been trying to conceive a child for four years when I first met Lynch, and I knew from experience already how involuntary childlessness made you an outsider in places others took for granted as welcoming, how difficult it could be to get through a day without dwelling on your invisible loss. I thought I understood something that the politicians who had been fighting over compensation for victims like Lynch did not: it is not possible to forget. But I wondered, is it possible to recover?

Sitting in his small kitchen, I tell him that I don’t have children either, that I know a little of what it’s like to miss people who don’t exist.

“You can’t have kids?” he asks gently.

“I don’t think so,” I say, sparing him the details.

“It stays on your mind,” he agrees.

Lynch is still in good health, able to walk a mile-and-a-quarter — his daily exercise — in 21 minutes. Most of his contemporaries are enjoying grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but every day he wonders: What would my kids be like? How many would I have had? Would they favor me? He wonders if a child of his might have inherited his talent for singing and playing guitar — he is an avid fan of country music, particularly Jim Reeves and Hank Williams tearjerkers, and every Friday, he performs a few of the 60 or 70 songs he knows by heart at the VFW hall in nearby Norlina.

“Some people think they have to wear boots, belt buckles, and britches like they’re in Nashville,” says Lynch, who prefers the same work pants and button-downs he wears any day of the week. “I go as I am.”

At the VFW, he’s friendly with the other musicians, the couples who come to dance, but he stands slightly apart from them, drinking bottled water alone in the kitchen and stepping outside during breaks. Things might have been different if Lynch had had children of his own. He might have had a lasting marriage, someone to take out on Friday nights. His child, too, might have been a part of things. He wonders if she’d have come hear to him sing, if he’d be someone Lynch could be proud of.

He shakes his head at the clumsily typed, tersely written documents he shows me, now decades old, which he keeps in a plain clasp envelope. An operation of sterilization will be for the best interest of the mental, moral, and physical well-being of the said patient, and/or for the public good, the Order for Sterilization or Asexualization reads. “I never figured out why they did that to me.”

document-lynch

Willis Lynch’s order for sterilization.

* * *

Two

People generally have two reactions when they hear about American eugenics programs for the first time: the first is shock, and the second is distancing. How could those people have done that to them?

Most have heard of the program in Nazi Germany, in which more than 400,000 people considered unworthy of life — those with hereditary illnesses, but also the dissident, the idle, the homosexual, and the weak — were targeted for forced sterilization beginning in the 1930s. Few realize that some of the inspiration for Germany’s eugenics program, and even the language for the Nuremberg racial hygiene laws, which among other restrictions banned sexual intercourse between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans, came from eugenicists who had been practicing for years in the United States. Some 60,000 American citizens were sterilized, often under coercion or without consent.

Returning from my first visit with Lynch, I met my in-laws, in town from Northern Virginia, for dinner in Durham. When I told them about all he had been through, they were outraged. They had never heard of forced sterilizations taking place in the United States, but blamed their ignorance on where they grew up. “I’m from the North,” said my mother-in-law, who had assumed that Lynch is black (he is white). “We didn’t have things like that there.”

I went home and looked it up. Pennsylvania, her home state, never passed a eugenics law, but managed to sterilize 270 people anyway, and also to perform the first known eugenics-motivated castration, in 1889. The first state to enact a eugenics-based sterilization law was Indiana, in 1907; it was followed 2 years later by Washington and California. Eventually 33 states would pass such legislation. Internationally, the list of countries with a history of forced sterilization includes Canada, Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, Denmark, Japan, Iceland, India, Finland, Estonia, China, Peru, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, and Uzbekistan.

Though North Carolina did not sterilize the greatest number of people (that distinction belongs to California, where 20,000 were sterilized), the state’s Eugenics Board was notorious for its aggressiveness. While many states confined their sterilization programs to institutions, North Carolina allowed social workers to make recommendations based on observations of “unwholesome” home environments or poor school performance. The state’s program was also one of the longest lasting, increasing its number of sterilizations while others were winding down. Between 1929 and 1974, more than 7,600 North Carolinians were sterilized. Like Willis Lynch, many of North Carolina’s victims were children, and consent was provided by relatives or guardians who feared the loss of public assistance or other consequences if they refused.

Over more than a decade, sterilization victims waited for North Carolina to make things right. Lynch, for his part, testified at state hearings, gave interviews to newspapers and magazines, and talked regularly by phone with other victims. For years, not much materialized: an apology from Democratic Gov. Mike Easley, expressions of regret and sympathy from his successor, Beverly Perdue, also a Democrat.

Then in 2012, something remarkable happened: A Perdue-appointed task force that had been listening to testimonies from Lynch and others like him for almost 2 years recommended a package of compensation for the victims of eugenics, and the state’s Repubcan-controlled and oft-divided House of Representatives supported the measure in a bipartisan effort. The plan included equal monetary payments to victims, access to mental health resources, and a program of public recognition and education that would ensure that no one would ever forget what happened to them. It began to look like North Carolina would be the first in the nation to address the legacy of eugenics, and victims imagined what they might do with the restitution: pay bills, fix up their homes, visit distant relatives.

The members of the task force were united in their recommendation, but the journey to a proposal that satisfied the victims had not been easy. They’d listened to many hours of painful testimony from sterilized men and women and their families, and had reviewed thousands of pages of supporting documents: medical records, reports from the Eugenics Board, propaganda in favor of eugenics-based sterilization. They’d looked at the faulty science behind eugenics, as well as North Carolina’s unequal targeting of poor, vulnerable, and minority citizens. They’d considered actuarial data to estimate the number of living victims, and calculated the potential total cost of compensation. Though they acknowledged that no amount of money can pay for the harm done by compulsory sterilization, they did, in fact, put a number on the line: $50,000 for each living victim.

But some wondered: Can you put a price on reproductive ability? And is it appropriate, in a time of austerity, to make such large monetary payments, especially when it won’t right the wrongs? Should today’s taxpayers be responsible for something that happened decades ago? Though the effort to include the task force’s recommendations in the House budget had been bipartisan, the measure faced more dissent from the GOP-led Senate: The state can’t afford to pay for something that won’t fix any problems, and it was a long time ago, anyway. It wasn’t us.

It is human nature to distance oneself from what now seems cruel, violent, reprehensible. We tell ourselves that we would not have done that, that our country is better than that now. But that same distance —I am not like that, I am better — is what motivated the first eugenicists and their followers.

* * *

Three

Like Willis Lynch, Francis Galton was born into a family of seven children, though more than 90 years earlier and thousands of miles away. The circumstances of his early childhood in England were quite different: His father was a wealthy banker, his mother the daughter of physician Erasmus Darwin, making Francis Galton a cousin to the father of the theory of evolution. The Galton family also included a number of prominent gunsmiths, ironmongers, athletes, and Quakers.

Under the tutelage of a doting older sister, Galton showed exceptional intellectual promise even before he was school-aged. He knew his capital letters by 12 months, could read at 2-and-a-half, and could sign his own name by 3. The day before he turned 5, Galton boasted in a letter to his sister:

I am four years old and can read any English book. I can say all the Latin Substantives and Adjectives and active verbs besides 52 lines of Latin poetry. I can cast up any sum in addition and multiply by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10. I can also say the pence table. I read French a little and I know the Clock.

When he finally entered school, he was surprised and disappointed that his classmates did not share his enthusiasm or facility for reciting the Iliad or Walter Scott’s Marmion. He was sent to a boarding school at age 8, and at 16, left secondary school to study medicine (a pursuit he later abandoned).

As an adult, Galton had a varied and peripatetic career. He traveled to Africa for anthropological work, discovered the anticyclone, published the first weather map, pioneered the first system of fingerprinting, and developed a “Beauty-map” of the British Isles that compared the relative attractiveness of women. (London had the most beautiful women, according to his research, Aberdeen the ugliest.)

He is best known, however, as the father of modern eugenics, an area of study partially inspired by cousin Charles Darwin’s work. Less than a month after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Galton wrote, in an admiring letter to his cousin: “I have laid it down in the full enjoyment of a feeling that one rarely experiences after boyish days, of having been initiated into an entirely new province of knowledge, which, nevertheless, connects itself with other things in a thousand ways.” Galton was interested in the potential implications of Darwin’s work on heredity and evolution: Could these principles be used, through selective breeding, to enhance the human gene pool? Likely influenced by the achievements of his own illustrious family, Galton believed that talent and ability are transferred genetically rather than by environment. To Galton’s mind, his particular aptitude for geography, language, and the sciences came not so much from his education and privilege as from his eminent forebears.

Improving human societies through selective breeding was not a new idea, even in the 1800s. In ancient Greece, deformed babies were killed at birth, unwanted ones abandoned to the elements. Spartan elders inspected every newborn for potential contribution to the state — weak babies were dropped into a chasm — and the strongest men and women were encouraged to procreate (including outside of marriage). In the Republic, Plato argued that “the best of either sex should be united with the best as often as possible, and the inferior with the inferior as seldom as possible.” The goal was the good of the state. If only the strongest and smartest reproduced, then their offspring would, over time, benefit everyone through their industry, bravery, creativity, and strength.

But the term eugenics was not coined until 1883, when Galton published his fifth book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. In it, he combined the Greek word eu, meaning good, with the suffix -genes, meaning born, and defined eugenics as “the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations.” He identified both positive eugenics (encouraging the breeding of the best) as well as negative eugenics (discouraging and even preventing the unfit from procreation), though he found the former more practical and socially palatable. Arguing that religion and custom had always strongly influenced breeding and marriage, Galton proposed that eugenics, with its ultimate goal of improving human societies, could be introduced to the general public as a new and compelling religion.

With his amateur background in anthropology, Galton classified humans along a line of “Mediocrity,” or average talents. Those above average, especially the most talented, should be encouraged to procreate within their classes, early and often. Those below average, especially the lowest-ranking, should be encouraged to abstain or, at the very least, refrain from tainting the bloodlines of their superiors. He had only a few vague suggestions about how this could be accomplished: intelligent and well-born women should be encouraged to marry at 21 or 22, promising couples provided with inexpensive housing, social inferiors encouraged to regard celibacy as noble self-sacrifice, and habitual criminals segregated, monitored, and denied the opportunity to produce offspring. “What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly,” he asserted. His vision was Utopian; the English race, after a few generations, would be “less foolish, less excitable, and politically more provident.” Men of special ability, like himself and his cousin, would be less rare, and would be able to contribute more than their fair share to the general population.

Galton soon realized a problem with positive eugenics, though: Eminence generally appeared later in life, often after the opportunity to marry and produce children. To address this problem, he established London’s Anthropometric Laboratory, the world’s first mental testing center, which sought not only to provide individuals with information about their own abilities, but also to serve as a collection of data for Galton and other scientists. These early tests, offered for three pence each to subjects ranging in age from 5 to 80, were unlike the written test Willis Lynch would take, years later, though their goal was the same: determination of ability or potential. Galton’s tests involved a variety of largely physical measurements: grip strength, head size, tactile sensitivity, breathing capacity, and visual and auditory acuity. His Anthropometric Laboratory collected data on more than 9,000 people, and although there is little evidence that they found much use in the information cards they received, his studies of the data eventually produced the statistical concepts of standard deviation and percentile ranking.

Negative eugenics — preventing those deemed unfit from reproducing — was considerably more challenging, at least as envisioned by Galton. It was not reasonable to expect most people to live a celibate life simply for the betterment of the gene pool, and monitoring ex-cons and other undesirables  was equally daunting. Though the British Eugenics Education Society, founded in 1907, campaigned for sterilization and marriage restrictions for mentally ill citizens, negative eugenics remained mostly the subject of political debate in Britain, and legislation enforcing sterilization of the unfit was never passed. Galton died in 1911 without seeing his “new religion” realized. Despite the genetic promise of his intellectual gifts, he also died childless.

* * *

Four

Willis Lynch was raised by a single mother in a house without electricity, not far from where he lives now. Lying in bed at night, he could see stars through nail-holes in the roof, but he never felt deprived. He remembers his childhood as “the good old days.”

“I was mean,” he freely admits about his adolescence. Often in trouble for fighting, he was sent at age 11 to the Caswell Training School for the Mentally Handicapped, which housed not only those with intellectual disability but also juvenile offenders and unwed mothers. Located 100 miles away, in Kinston, Caswell was too far for visits from family members, and he received only two weeks in the summers to spend at home.

At Caswell, Lynch woke at 3 a.m. to milk the cows, and he was homesick for family and friends. His mother, who was on welfare, struggled to provide for her seven children, and though she missed her son, she didn’t have the resources to bring him home. Lynch says the school’s strict discipline policy taught him to stop fighting, and he made friends and did his best to get along. But 2 years after he was committed, he was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was to undergo a vasectomy. He remembers little about the surgery itself, only a mask being held over his face, and being asked to sing a song to a nurse, but he can still recall doubling over in pain when he tried to walk, the next day. “That’s when I knew something wasn’t right,” he says. He never received sex education in public school or at Caswell, and he had to put the pieces together on his own.

The Eugenics Board’s records show that Lynch had been targeted as “feebleminded” on the basis of an IQ test. Feeblemindedness is a catch-all label that was used by eugenics boards across the country to identify those unfit to reproduce. The feebleminded, those with low IQ scores and “abnormal” behavior, were seen as particularly dangerous by eugenicists, who connected their condition (believed to be hereditary) to promiscuity, criminality, and social dependency. Eugenicists feared that the feebleminded could easily pass as normal, reproducing with the general population and passing on undesirable traits to their children. To talk to Lynch, who has a precise recollection of dates, facts, and country music trivia, and who taught himself a number of skills, from electrical work to guitar playing, is to realize how carelessly the term was applied.

His mother, who must have known that her son was not feebleminded, consented to his procedure when the Welfare Department threatened to take away the benefits that provided for the rest of her children. Lynch doesn’t blame her. She did the best she could, he says. She hoped that by consenting he’d be allowed to come home again.

She lived only seven miles away from where he lives now, and they remained close until her death a few years ago, at age 93. Lynch is proud of the filial duty he showed his mother all her life, taking her to church and out to dinner. Just inside the entrance of his home, there is a framed color photograph of her hanging on the paneled-wood wall. Across the small kitchen and sitting room is a sepia-toned one of Lynch at 20 years old, handsome in the first suit he ever owned, back in the days when he says he was fighting girls off. “People say I favor her through here,” he says, gesturing to his eyes.

Lynch says he wasn’t too optimistic when the compensation plan was announced in 2012, having learned in life to look both ways. He imagined taking his favorite nephew on a trip — they’d once travelled to the Hank Williams museum, in Alabama — but says he’d never been crazy about money. It’s the principle of the thing, he insists.

* * *

Five

Willis Lynch and the other victims might have spent their whole lives wondering if their stories would be heard had it not been for a team of newspaper reporters at the Winston-Salem Journal. In 2002, the Journal published “Against Their Will,” a five-part series written by Kevin Begos, Danielle Deaver, Scott Sexton, and John Railey, revealing the social and political history of North Carolina’s eugenics program and the racial and economic biases that motivated it.

Raised in North Carolina by a family of progressive Democrats, Railey had never heard of forced sterilization happening in his state. He was shocked to find, among the thousands of pages of state records, a letter from the Eugenics Board to Democratic Gov. Terry Sanford, a noted progressive and beloved family friend. Why didn’t Sanford put a stop to the program, still operating during his governorship and clearly counter to his liberal policies? Railey never found a satisfying answer to that question. “This was my epiphany, the blast that shattered any last illusions I still had about my state,” he said.

“Against Their Will” had an almost immediate impact.  It inspired state Rep. Larry Womble to take a personal interest in the victims, requesting a formal apology to victims from Gov. Mike Easley and sponsoring a 2003 bill that officially took the sterilization law off the books. Easley’s apology and the Journal‘s story attracted national and international attention, prompting apologies from governors in other states, including California and South Carolina. Easley authorized a committee to study possible compensation, an effort that was continued by his successor, Beverly Perdue. Perdue established the Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation in 2010 and appointed the task force that considered compensation. Over the years, the task force looked at a variety of compensation amounts (their first recommendation of $20,000 was considered paltry by many victims) and amends-making measures. Railey was there for it all.

In helping to report the story, Railey not only brought a shameful program to light, but also made lasting friendships with many victims, meeting them at their homes, at church events, and at hearings. He calls them his buddies and speaks to them by phone a few times a week, updating them with what he’s heard from the Legislature and checking in on how they’re feeling. He’s kept them updated, too, on the health of Womble, who continued to champion their cause even after a devastating automobile accident in 2011.

Railey has written more than 75 editorials and columns about North Carolina’s eugenics program in the decade since the story broke. His most recent pieces have focused on the opportunity for the state’s conservatives to correct a big-government mistake, and on memorializing the victims who have died since the fight began.

“When you come to know these people, you just can’t help but share their outrage,” he said. “You appreciate the lessons they give you about tenacity, and guts, and compassion–and not letting something like this wreck them. I’m constantly learning from them.”

* * *

Six

The American eugenics movement is often characterized as a progressive folly for its faith in science and its big-government intrusiveness, but the truth is somewhat more complicated. The American Eugenics Society counted among its members some of the country’s most influential Progressive Era businesspeople, philanthropists, and activists, including J.P. Morgan Jr., Mary Duke Biddle, and Margaret Sanger, but the group of scientists and eugenicists who founded it also included well-known racists and anti-Semites. Early outreach efforts often included a mix of public health education and racist, anti-immigration messages.

The Fitter Families for Future Firesides competitions, sponsored by the Eugenics Society starting in 1924, provided one way of reaching out to rural white Americans. Held in state fairs across the country, the contests originated as Better Babies competitions and exhibitions that were meant to educate the public about infant health and mortality. Fitter Families contests, with the goals of collecting data on hereditary traits and spreading the message of eugenics to a wider population, invited entire families to submit to screenings for health, character, and intelligence. Those scoring highest received awards and medals bearing the inscription, “Yea, I have a goodly heritage” and had their photographs taken for the local papers. Following an examination, a family might listen to a Galtonesque lecture on the importance of mating the best with the best; browse an exhibit about comparative literacy rates of foreign, African-American, and native-born white Americans; or read about the social costs of incarcerating the mentally deficient.

At the 1926 Sesqui-Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia, a poster equipped with flashing lights informed fairgoers that “every 48 seconds someone is born in America who will never grow up beyond the mental age of 8” and that “crime costs America $100,000 every second.” The poster also claimed that  “few normal persons go to jail.” The message received by the “Fittest Families?” You are carrying the burden of the least fit, who should not be having so many children. In one way or another, you will pay for the children of undesirable parents: to feed and clothe them when their parents cannot, to care for them in institutions, and later, to imprison them.

Outside of state fairs and exhibitions, this fear of social dependency had already primed the culture for an embrace of negative eugenics. Large-scale asylums for the homeless and mentally ill, built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, raised fears that increasing numbers of handicapped citizens were a drain on public resources. The country’s first major immigration law, the Act of 1882, specifically prohibited entry by any “lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” American eugenicists believed, as Galton did, that people could be bred, like livestock, for desirable traits. Those with undesirable traits, which included everything from alcoholism to criminal recidivism to poverty, could be sterilized.

Indiana passed the first law allowing eugenics-based sterilization in 1907. Thirty-two other states would follow. After constitutional challenges, many employed language and structure from the Model Eugenical Sterilization Law written by Harry Laughlin, one of the founders of the American Eugenics Society. (Laughlin’s law later became the model for Nazi Germany’s Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, and he would receive an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg for his support of “the science of racial cleansing.”)

Laughlin proposed a position of state eugenicist, whose function was “to protect the state against the procreation of persons socially inadequate from degenerate or defective physical, physiological or psychological inheritance.” He defined a socially inadequate person as one who, in comparison with “normal” persons, fails to maintain himself as a useful member of the state, and he set out the socially inadequate classes: the feeble-minded, the insane, the criminalistic, the epileptic, the inebriate, the diseased, the blind, the deaf, the deformed, the crippled, and the dependent (including “orphans, ne’er-do-wells, the homeless, tramps and paupers”). Twenty years later, Virginia’s Sterilization Act, patterned after Laughlin’s, was found constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Buck v. Bell case, in which Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote, about the family of 19-year-old Carrie Buck, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

North Carolina’s first sterilization law was recorded in 1919, but sterilizations did not begin until 1929, after the passage of Buck v. Bell, when one vasectomy, one castration, and one ovariectomy were performed (the state’s law was unusual in allowing castrations for “therapeutic treatment”). In 1933, the law was declared unconstitutional by the state’s Supreme Court on the basis of a deficient appeals process, and a second law was passed that year, ostensibly providing for due process for the individuals recommended for surgery. Sterilizations could be petitioned by the superintendent of public welfare, the heads of prisons or other institutions housing potential patients, or their next of kin or legal guardians. Despite the ability of individuals to appeal such recommendations, the statute was broad, allowing the Eugenics Board to overrule objections and authorize sterilizations in the best interest of the individual, for the public good, or if the individual was suspected to produce children with “a tendency to serious physical, mental or nervous disease or deficiency.”

By July 1935, the state had sterilized 223 men and women, most of them residents of state-run institutions. Though it would take another decade for public opinion to begin turning away from eugenics, Eugenical Sterilization in North Carolina, a report published by the state that year, envisioned a public that still needed convincing. The report argued, among other things, that sterilization was protection that benefitted both society and the sterilized individual:

There is no discovery vitally affecting the life, happiness and well being of the human race in the last quarter of a century about which intelligent people know so little, as modern sterilization. The operation is simple, it removes no organ or tissue of the body. It has no effect on the patient except to prevent parenthood. Under conservative laws, sanely and diplomatically administered, as they have been in California, these discoveries developed by the medical profession now offer to these classes the greatest relief possible and the greatest protection to the defenseless child of the future. It offers one, humane, practical protection against threatened race degeneracy.

* * *

Seven

The third of 10 children, Annie Buelin barely remembers when her father was taken to a home for the mentally ill in Virginia. He was already in his 60s when he married her mother and set up a household in Flat Rock, North Carolina, but Buelin isn’t sure if it was senility or something else that caused him to lose his mind. Buelin’s mother — 15 when she married, with a third-grade education — supported her children through welfare, working in tobacco fields, and doing washing and ironing for her neighbors. She hardly had time to keep up with all of her children.

As a child, Buelin dreaded going to school. She received free lunch, and everyone knew it. She didn’t have nice clothes, and she and her brothers and sisters were left out of school plays and celebrations. She sat in the back of the classroom and tried not to draw attention to herself, and she was too nervous to answer when her teachers called on her. “People laughed at us because we didn’t have money,” she remembers. “It didn’t bother my siblings as much, but that kept me tore up.”

At age 12, Beulin stopped attending school, instead working as a live-in babysitter for neighbors whose long shifts in the mills kept them away from home. She earned $15 a week doing housework, cooking, and childcare. It was hard work, but she didn’t mind it. She was able to contribute to her family’s finances, and she enjoyed caring for the children.

Soon, though, local officials noticed her truancy. One day, a social worker appeared and took her to the county welfare office to give her a test. “They didn’t tell me what the test was, or what it was for,” Buelin says. Later, her sister would tell her that the test had found she had the IQ of a 7- or 8-year old.

The social worker told Buelin she had to go back to school, or else she would have to have an operation that would prevent her from having children. “‘Well, I’m not a-going,’” she remembers telling the social worker.

When the day came for her surgery, she walked the half-mile driveway to the road alone. A nurse picked her up and took her to the hospital in nearby Elkin, where she was admitted. Buelin never had a chance to see the paperwork; the nurse filled it all out and signed it for her. She doesn’t remember much about the operation itself, but she vividly recalls returning from the hospital, five days later.

“No one was there when I got home,” she says. She was still in pain from the surgery, but she walked until she found her mother at work in a nearby tobacco field. They didn’t talk about what happened.

“She just did the best she knew how,” Buelin says. “She let people run over her. She didn’t realize she had any other choice.”

In fact, her mother likely didn’t have any other choice. Had she refused consent, the Eugenics Board would have held a hearing to review Buelin’s case in Raleigh, more than three hours away, and could have overruled her mother’s objections based on Buelin’s test scores and the conditions of her home. It’s possible they would have declared her mother incompetent, even if she could attend the hearing, and assigned a guardian ad litem to make the decision for her.

After the surgery, Buelin didn’t tell any of her friends what had happened to her. At church, some people knew, but no one mentioned it or asked how she was doing. Her surgery wasn’t discussed much among her family either, though her brother-in-law warned her that she’d better tell any man she planned to marry. Buelin saw a doctor in the hope that the procedure could be reversed, but after an exam was told that her fallopian tubes had not been tied but severed. She’d had a complete, irreversible salpingectomy.

The 1948 manual of the North Carolina Eugenics Board repeats the claim, made in the 1935 manual and derived from the California legislation, that sterilization is not a punishment but a kindness. In the eyes of the Eugenics Board, Buelin would not be stigmatized or humiliated as a result of her surgery, and her community would not shun her. Her married life would be happy — happier, since her future husband would not have to fear for the welfare of their children. The surgery would have no effect on her life, the manual insisted, other than preventing parenthood.

* * *

Eight

Pronatalism is the widely accepted cultural idea that biological parenthood and family life are not only normal, but necessary for the successful transition to adult life. Aside from a slight dip in the 1970s, America has been a distinctly pronatalist country, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries, promoting idealized visions of family life through film, television, and advertising. It was particularly strong around the time that the North Carolina sterilization program reached its peak. Surveys taken in 1945, 1955, and 1960 found that zero percent of Americans considered no children the ideal family size.

Many researchers believe that the desire to have children is not only the expression of a cultural desire to fit in and be validated, but an inherent, inborn need. Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson was the first to describe ego development as a lifelong process that lasts into adulthood. Adults’ primary challenge, according to Erikson, is generativity versus stagnation, with the core of generativity expressed through raising the next generation, especially through parenting or caring for others. Stagnation occurs when adults are unable to satisfy their need for generativity, and can result in depression and emotional stunting.

More recently, evolutionary psychologist Douglas Kendrick suggested a revision of Maslow’s classic hierarchy of needs, replacing the ultimate goal of self-actualization, the desire to fulfill one’s potential, with parenting, the desire to care for one’s offspring and other relatives. The Americans with Disabilities Act has recognized infertility — the inability to become pregnant after trying for one year — as a disability. And reproduction, according to the Supreme Court, qualifies as a “major life activity.”

My own depression started after about two years of trying without success to conceive. I avoided people I loved and felt isolated from everyone except my husband and my few childless (or childfree) friends. Although I don’t consider myself disabled and find Kendrick’s model to be too narrow, I also understand that we live in a world — a pronatalist one — where many people feel that you aren’t really an adult until you are a parent.

Buelin watched her siblings grow up and have children, as well as friends and coworkers at the textile mills where she eventually worked. She was happy for them, she insists, but she never talked about what happened to prevent her from having children of her own. “Lord have mercy, I loved children,” she says. “Whenever I saw someone who was going to have a baby, I thought they were so pretty.”

Buelin’s first marriage was troubled. Her husband drank and ran around on her, and she thinks he blamed her for what had happened, years before. People at work sometimes asked her why she didn’t have kids, but Buelin never told them. “I didn’t want to talk about it,” she says. “I think I was just ashamed, or hurt, I don’t know which.”

Her first husband died young, leaving Buelin alone and depressed. She saw a psychiatrist several times in her 30s, but they never talked about her sterilization or childlessness. “It got to the point where I didn’t even want to go to church,” says Buelin. “And I always went to church.”

Willis Lynch found relationships difficult, too. When he was young and working in maintenance for the city of Richmond, he began dating a woman who already had one child and was expecting another. The baby’s biological father was in jail for robbing phone booths and wasn’t around for the birth, which Lynch found deplorable. He married her just eight days after she gave birth, and Lynch grew close with the younger child. But after a few years, his wife left him for another man. “She took me for a meal ticket,” he figures. “But I didn’t regret it ’cause of those kids. I loved those kids.”

Lynch never remarried, and like Buelin rarely spoke about what had happened to him. It was too hard to explain, when so many people had never even heard about the sterilizations or the eugenics movement. He lost touch with his ex-wife’s children.

Despite the general acknowledgement that parenting is a crucial milestone, it is not hard to find those who think, even today, that some people should not have that option. To read the comments section of any online discussion of North Carolina’s eugenics program is to find a significant percentage of readers who are uncomfortable with dismissing the program outright.

Here are just a few of the comments I found online in response to a local news story about compensation, an online photo essay depicting the victims on the Mother Jones Web site, and the online transcript of an NPR story about North Carolina’s eugenics program:

I do not understand the underlying premise that forced sterilization is somehow “wrong.” That seems to be taken for granted but no one has made the case for it. Can anyone explain this? How is forced sterilization not completely consistent with what is taught in our public schools to the effect that only the most fit should survive?

 Is it or is it not a good idea to encourage persons with developmental disabilities NOT to have children?

 The idea of humans having to accomplish something in their life before breeding is actually sound. We are in a world economy … Those that can not complete high school or are not able to keep a job or produce something tangible that is worthwhile should not be breeding…. I would suggest ALL men and women be temporarily sterilized at adolescence- Norplant for women, vasectomies for men.

Once they have become contributing members of society through formal education, technical school, or have remained employed and no felonious crimes for over 5 years – then they should be allowed to breed.

Online forums are a popular place for people to express ideas they might not feel comfortable sharing in person, but I have heard similar arguments expressed within the context of the public school system. Biology students learning about genetics for the first time will often wonder, why can’t we just get rid of dumb people? And a common refrain expressed by frustrated teachers, out of earshot of students and parents, is this: If you need a license to drive, you should certainly have to get a license to have kids.

* * *

Nine

Willis Lynch doesn’t remember exactly when he first heard about North Carolina’s Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation, the organization tasked with contacting and verifying victims of the state’s eugenics program. A friend of his, one of the few who knew what had been done to him, saw something about the foundation on television and gave Lynch the contact information. Not wanting to wait for a response by mail, Lynch drove his Ford EXP to the Caswell Training Center in Kinston, where he once milked cows in the early morning and was only allowed recreation on Friday nights. Caswell operates today as a residential home for the mentally handicapped though it no longer serves children, and the farm was sold years ago. He requested and received the papers certifying his admission to the center, as well as a complicated chain of letters related to his sterilization.

Reading carefully through the correspondence between Caswell and the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, Lynch realized that their original target was not him but his mother. In August 1947, not long after his 14th birthday, Elsie Parker, secretary for the Eugenics Board, wrote to Dr. W.T. Parrott, superintendent at Caswell, requesting information about Lynch’s suitability for sterilization. Parker wrote, “The mother had been receiving aid to dependent children but the payment was terminated at one point because it was not considered a safe and proper home. At that time the mother requested a sterilization operation. Authorization was granted on the basis of feeble-mindedness. The operation was, however, never performed.”

Parrott wrote back to the Eugenics Board almost immediately: “We have your letter of August 13th in regard to the sterilization of the above named child. We would like to have this operation done. Willis has an I.Q. of 58. Thanks.” Still, it took until April 1948 for the Eugenics Board and Caswell to secure her consent for her son’s vasectomy.

Lynch doubts that his mother would have ever consented to her own sterilization. “Mama loved kids,” he says. But he understands that she might have felt pressure to agree to his operation in order to maintain her family’s welfare benefits. What work she could find paid too little to care for seven children, and two had already been removed from her home to live in institutions (one of his sisters had been sent to a home in Virginia). He returned home in 1951, but never talked with his mother about the operation or what it meant for his life.

Lynch drove the Caswell papers to Raleigh himself rather than trusting them to the mail. It was there that he first met Larry Womble, the first of North Carolina’s legislators to become an advocate for compensation. Lynch testified about his experience in a matter of minutes — he calls his story “short and bitter” — then sat down again among the other victims.

Railey, the reporter who first brought the eugenics program to statewide and national attention, remembers talking on the phone to Lynch after getting his number from Womble, then driving to meet him in the parking lot of the Littleton Piggly Wiggly.  They sat in the cab of Railey’s truck and talked about Lynch’s experience at Caswell, the dawning realization, months after the surgery, that he’d been given a vasectomy. They talked about his time in the service, as a rifleman, about the mechanic trade Lynch learned on his own, about his love for country music.

For three years now, Railey has talked with Lynch once a week about the progress of legislation. “He’ll call me on a Friday, usually. He’ll say ‘What do you hear? What do you know?’”

In his many articles, editorials, and columns about the program, Railey has often relied on Lynch for insight into the experience of the victims. “Willis is kind of an elder statesman of this movement,” says Railey. “He’s the oldest victim who speaks about it regularly. He’s very aware, but not in a bleak sense, of his own mortality.”

Railey, who considers Lynch a friend, is aware of it, too. “He’s close to his nephew, but he doesn’t have anyone else. When he’s gone, he’s gone.”

* * *

Ten

Few if any studies have been made about the psychological damage of sterility, but there is evidence that infertility, as a stressor, is equivalent to the experience of living with cancer, HIV, or other chronic illnesses. “It’s such an assault to your identity,” says Dr. Marni Rosner, a New York-based psychotherapist and author of a lengthy study examining infertility as traumatic loss. “Physically, mentally, socially, spiritually.”

Rosner’s study focused on women whose backgrounds are far different from victims of eugenics; they are comparatively wealthy and well-connected, with access to mental health care and other support systems. Still, they struggle in similar ways. They mention feeling isolated from their churches, especially on Mother’s Day, when many congregations have special recognition for mothers and expectant mothers. They experience shame, depression, grief, envy, and difficulty communicating with spouses, family, and friends. Marriages experiencing long-term infertility tend to suffer sexually as well as emotionally, and infertile couples often feel disconnected from friends and siblings moving into the parenting phase of their lives.

Rosner was  the first in her field to fully explore the way infertility traumatically impacts almost every area of life, and was questioned about her use of the phrase “reproductive trauma” during her dissertation defense. I have experienced it myself, in five years of trying to conceive: each time a friend or relative becomes pregnant, each child-centered holiday, each reminder of childlessness, is a fresh experience of grief. “It’s not concrete,” she allows. “The losses are hidden. But with reproductive trauma, the losses happen over and over again.”

Compounding this sense of loss is the inability of many infertile people to talk about their experiences. I have experienced this also; when invited to speak at a church service for infertile women and men, I found that I was barely able to raise my voice above a whisper. As Rosner writes in her study, “There are no clear norms for grieving a dream.” Fear of having one’s loss diminished and the desire not to offend or upset those with children reinforce the silence that is a manifestation of what writer and grief counseling expert Kenneth Doka called “disenfranchised grief”: “the grief that persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported.”

It isn’t surprising that sterilization victims have experienced all of those losses — social isolation, depression, trouble in their romantic relationships — but also, perhaps to an even greater extent, disenfranchised grief. Because their inability to have children was not a consequence of biology but a decision made by another, they feel lifelong shame at being deemed “unfit.” At the hearings held by North Carolina’s task force to determine the method of compensation, several of the speakers were in tears as they told their stories. Some who suspected they were targeted and sterilized refused to go through the process of verification necessary to make them eligible for possible compensation. They didn’t want to know the truth.

“It would really be wonderful if, when one of these victims told of what had happened, there was general understanding of what exactly that meant, psychologically, and the life-long implications of the infertility itself,” says Rosner.

When I first met Lynch and Buelin, I had been attending a support group for people experiencing infertility for more than a year. Each month, my husband and I drove to Raleigh to sit in a chilly hospital basement and listen to other women and men tell their stories: the years of trying and failing to conceive, the difficult and painful medical procedures, the feelings of jealousy and longing that never seemed to go away. Most of the other couples were, like us, in stable relationships, with the means to pursue some sort of treatment and the hope that these treatments might one day work. If nothing else, we had those meetings. Once a month, for two hours, we knew we could talk to other people who understood.

Lynch and Buelin have never attended a support group; Buelin, who has transportation issues, has never been able to attend a public hearing, though she once attended a church service with Railey that recognized sterilization victims. The children they don’t have are in many ways just like the children we don’t have — they are people who don’t exist, people we’ve only dreamed about, some of us since we were children ourselves. But there is one difference, which shows up in the dismissive tone taken by opponents to compensation. Lynch and Buelin’s children would be poor.

* * *

Eleven

Among the many artifacts of the eugenics era collected in North Carolina’s state archives is a pamphlet produced in 1950 by a group called The Human Betterment League. “You Wouldn’t Expect…” was circulated to citizens to gain financial and political support for what it referred to as “North Carolina’s humanitarian Selective Sterilization Law.” Written and illustrated in the style of a children’s book, the 12-page pamphlet begins, “You wouldn’t expect… a moron to run a train, or a feebleminded woman to teach school.” Subsequent illustrations depict “mental defectives” crashing cars and fumbling with money, then asks why the “feebleminded” are allowed the most important job of all: parenthood.

“The job of parenthood is too much to expect of feebleminded men and women,” the pamphlet reads. “They should be protected from jobs for which they are not qualified.” The flat colors, large type, simple text, and stylized illustrations, call the intended audience into question. Was it meant to convince those whom the state aimed to keep from reproducing? To bring their limited capacities to mind among the “normal” adult recipients? Or was it merely intended to reference the children it meant to save from “mental affliction and unwholesome surroundings?”

Elaine Riddick is one of the most outspoken victims of North Carolina’s sterilization program. She has appeared on NBC’s Rock Center and on Al Jazeera, and has been interviewed by reporters from across the country. Like Lynch, she was 14 when she was sterilized, immediately following the birth, by Cesarean section, of a son, her only child. Although Riddick scored above the state’s IQ threshold of 75, the five-person Eugenics Board approved the recommendation for her sterilization, labeling Riddick “feebleminded” and “promiscuous” and noting that her schoolwork was poor and that she did not get along well with others.

“I am not feebleminded,” Riddick told members of the task force in June 2011. “I came from a very rural area of North Carolina. I couldn’t get along well with others because I was hungry, I was cold, I was dirty, I was unkempt, I was a victim of rape. I was a victim of child abuse and neglect.” Riddick, who was frequent witness to her father’s physical abuse of her mother, was raped at age 13 by a neighbor in his 20s. She says she didn’t know anything about sex other than that “it was ugly and it hurt.”

At 59, she is also one of the youngest victims to come forward. Riddick’s sterilization, in 1967, came at the end of North Carolina’s peak years: 1946 to 1968, when the state performed 5,368  operations on its residents under the authority of the Eugenics Board. By the time of Riddick’s procedure, most other states had abandoned or scaled back their programs, in part due to postwar revelations about Nazi forced sterilizations. States were also motivated by legal concerns raised by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Skinner v. Oklahoma(1942), which held that sterilization could not be used as punishment for a crime. In North Carolina, though, the focus merely shifted to an even more vulnerable demographic, targeting more black women and girls than any other group. Riddick, who is black, was a victim of this shift.

After the surgery, Riddick had experienced frequent hemorrhaging, and her period lengthened to 17 days a month, but she did not learn of her sterilization until she was 19, when she began to wonder why she and her husband could not conceive. Her illiterate grandmother, she discovered, had consented with an “X” to a complete salpingectomy.

Riddick’s husband reacted violently to the news, threatening her and calling her barren. Eventually she had to have a complete hysterectomy. She went to a clinic to talk to someone about her emotional distress and was given prescriptions for Haldol and Prozac. “I was catatonic,” she says. “Humiliated. I felt like everyone knew. And then, on top of that, I blamed myself.”

Riddick, who was raised by alcoholic parents and who left school in eighth grade, suffered two bad marriages and a period of drug dependency and homelessness, seems on the surface an example of someone ill-equipped for parenting, likely to produce offspring destined to follow in her own impoverished footsteps. Her principal told the social worker who pursued Riddick’s sterilization that she would never be able to take care of herself, much less a child.

But that isn’t Riddick’s story, not by a long shot. Though she never finished (or even entered) high school, she managed to continue her education, first with a medical aid degree, and then with a degree in social work. “I realized if I didn’t get a little education, God knows what might have happened to me,” she says.

She was among the first to bring a civil case against the state of North Carolina, a case she lost, in the 1970s, but which gave her experience speaking in public and enduring the scrutiny of strangers. Her son, Tony, is a successful entrepreneur who often accompanies his mother to public hearings and speaking events, where he rails against what he calls “North Carolina’s genocide.”

Together, this fiercely intelligent mother-and-son pair stand in defiance of the “science” of eugenics, which, relying on faulty or missing information to make its claims of heritability of traits, was long ago discredited. No gene was ever isolated for bad character or poverty, and it was impossible to separate the circumstances of individuals — Riddick, for her part, remembers going to school hungry each day — from their performance in school or on IQ tests. The tests themselves, the primary method used to determine “feeblemindedness,” have long been seen as flawed, disproportionately penalizing minorities and low-income people.

“It was so close … the timing was so significant, that perhaps that if it were just the next pregnancy, I wouldn’t be able to stand here and speak before you,” Tony Riddick told the task force, right after his mother spoke. “I’d like to give God all the honor and praise for this delicate moment.”

* * *

Twelve

How could the state account, then, for all those who were not born? For Willis Lynch and Annie Buelin and Elaine Riddick’s missing children, and the missing children of the thousands of others who were sterilized? And how to account for the physical and emotional pain the victims experienced: the years of “female trouble,” the broken marriages fraught with physical and emotional abuse, the isolation?

In early 2012, the task force that spent 2 years reviewing documents and listening to victims’ stories acknowledged that “no amount of money can adequately pay for the harm done to these citizens.” It then recommended a package of compensation and recognition: lump sum payments of $50,000 to verified living victims, mental health services, funding for a memorial, and more funding to help the foundation locate and verify others who had been sterilized and were still alive. Though some still felt that the suggested payments were not enough —  Riddick called it “an insult” — others were relieved to see an amount more than double the $20,000 proposed in 2011. At one hearing, Lynch urged the Legislature to hurry up and approve compensation before he died.

Despite the obvious pain of the victims, their relative lack of access to mental health care, consensus that the program was a disgrace, and bipartisan support from the House of Representatives (the bill was advanced by Thom Tillis, a Republican, and longtime victims’ advocate Larry Womble, a Democrat), some felt that the proposed compensation was too generous. Others worried that the financial burden was too much for the state to bear — the task force estimated between 1,500 and 2,000 victims were still alive — or that offering compensation would create a slippery slope of liability, inviting all sorts of wronged parties to seek money from the state.

“You just can’t rewrite history. It was a sorry time in this country,” said state Sen. Don East, a Republican, who opposed compensation. (East died last fall.) “I’m so sorry it happened, but throwing money don’t change it, don’t make it go away. It still happened.” Though the House approved the compensation, which amounted to $11 million in the state’s more than $20 billion budget, the Senate refused to consider it. In June 2012, the Legislature passed a budget that offered zero funding to the victims, effectively shuttering the North Carolina Justice for Victims of Sterilization Foundation.

Victims, many of whom had traveled hundreds of miles to speak multiple times at public hearings, expressed a mix of disbelief, disappointment, and frustration.

“Everybody I know agrees with [compensation],” Lynch said.

“They can find money for everything else,” Buelin said.

Riddick, who has sought compensation for almost 30 years, was confounded by the arguments that sterilizations were perpetrated a long time ago, and that the people in power now have no connection to that past. “No one in the Senate is over 59?” she asked, referring to her age. “Their tax dollars went towards what happened, and they benefitted from the [welfare] savings that came out of that program.”

East was steadfast. “I just don’t think money fixes it.”

On that matter, at least, there is some agreement. “You cannot put a price tag on motherhood,” Riddick said.

I asked her what she would have given to have more children. “That is so easy. I would have given up my life. My whole life.”

* * *

Thirteen

If monetary compensation will not address the wrongs done to the 7,600 people sterilized by the state of North Carolina, then what is the point of adding millions of dollars to the budget of a state with a struggling economy? The answer may lie with the legal theory of transitional justice, a method of confronting legacies of human rights abuses through criminal prosecution, truth commissions, reparations, and institutional reform. Transitional justice addresses the primary objections of those resistant to expensive, government-funded programs, namely that financial compensation will not make victims whole again, and taxpayers should not have to pay for something they did not do. The practice can be traced back to the Nuremberg Trials, and more recent examples include the truth commissions in South Africa, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone.

(Though the genocide and war crimes investigated by those trials and commissions may seem far removed from the experiences of those targeted by North Carolina’s Eugenics Board, forced sterilization is in fact a violation of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, particularly Article XVI, which states: “Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. [...] The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.” According to the United Nations, measures disrupting the reproductive acts of a group can also be considered genocide.)

David Gray, a University of Maryland law professor, has written that transitional justice is not a matter of “ordinary justice.” It is not about making victims whole again, as in tort law (often, for instance in the case of genocide, nothing will do that), or about the assignment of blame for past wrongs. Gray says transitional justice is “Janus-faced,” ideally addressing both “an abusive past and a future committed to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.” Monetary compensation does not seek to restore the victims to their earlier conditions but to help correct the status injustice they experienced, and also to establish a “pre-commitment” from the state that the wrong they experienced will never happen again. According to Gray, the cost is best borne by the state, even if those in power were not involved or even alive during the time of the abuses, as an expression of that commitment. “‘I didn’t do it’ is a non sequitur when the fundamental question is ‘How do we make it right?’”

I asked Gray how the victims of North Carolina could both recognize the state’s abusive past and ensure that it never happens again.

His first suggestion was a public, accessible archive of documents related to the program (one already exists online, but is not comprehensive). “That way,” he said, “there can never be a dispute about what happened.” In addition to the archive, he suggested a public display or monument that would not only provide recognition to those who were sterilized, but would challenge the public to ask themselves, as the Holocaust Museum in Washington challenges its visitors, what would I have done? This lines up with the recommendations of the task force to create both permanent and traveling exhibits, as well as an ongoing oral history project to “tell the full story of eugenics in North Carolina.”

Gray differed with the task force, however, in how to approach compensation. Instead of awarding each victim the same amount, he suggested a fund administrator be retained to listen to each victim’s story and determine an amount based on individual experience, including physical and emotional suffering. This approach would likely result in payments roughly equivalent to the $50,000 proposed, but individualized approaches are often more palatable to detractors, said Gray. “There’s a difference between equality and uniformity. You’re recognizing the wrong, while compensating the harm.”

Though there is a danger that victims would feel divided by such an approach, one potential benefit to Gray’s suggestion would be the opportunity for all victims to have their stories heard, if not publicly, then privately. This could have a therapeutic effect on many, says psychotherapist Marni Rosner.

“Many shamed and traumatized people rarely tell their story for fear of being shamed and traumatized again, or receiving yet another unhelpful response. It’s possible that some have never had the opportunity to tell their story, from beginning to end, without interruption, to someone that is truly interested and listening attentively. This can be extremely cathartic,” she says. When an empathic witness hears the story of traumas, according to Rosner, something shifts. The brain is rewired to make room for a new, non-shaming response.

Riddick, who has told her story again and again to audiences large and small, local and international, puts it more simply: “Through talking, I starting shedding off pieces of my shame. I had to get rid of all that shame if I wanted to live.”

* * *

Fourteen

Willis Lynch and other victims of sterilization have an intuitive sense of the way transitional justice should work, and they see examples everywhere that support the rightness of their quest. Look at the compensation awarded to Japanese internment victims, they say. Or the wall of names at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. They speak, at hearings, of genocide and Nazis, and they want the state to pay for what it did. They want something lasting and significant to mark what they have been through. They want a public legacy.

For the objection raised most often by North Carolina’s resistant legislators — the state cannot afford to compensate all of the potential victims — Willis Lynch has an easy answer: It’s the state’s responsibility to pay for its mistake, a mistake it should have understood was wrong in the first place. “Look at what they do for people put in jail, people who were innocent,” he says, referring to the compensation offered by many states, on the order of $50,000 per year of incarceration, to the wrongfully convicted. “They lost their freedom, but they weren’t cut open like hogs.”

On a warm spring Friday, I drive to Norlina to watch Lynch perform at one of the “Norlina Jamborees” held at his VFW hall. It is the day of George Jones’s death, and many of the performers have chosen songs to honor the country crooner: “Jones on the Jukebox,” “A Picture of Me (Without You),” “White Lightning.” Lynch sits in the corner of the stage, his usual spot, and strums along.

I think about why his easy answer has not worked so far, why people are still uncomfortable with the idea of connecting monetary compensation to the loss of reproductive ability. The compensation in his example, afforded to wrongfully convicted inmates, is structured to replace lost wages. Japanese internment victims, likewise, received payments meant to compensate for the harm done to their businesses and earning ability. It is much more difficult to establish the value of children who never existed.

Or is it? Sitting in the audience of the darkened VFW hall, I shift uncomfortably in my newly tight jeans. I am 10 weeks pregnant, my condition invisible to everyone but me. Also invisible is the $25,000 I have paid doctors to achieve and sustain my pregnancy, the 3 years of trying and despairing and saving up money, the 2 years of difficult and invasive treatments. My experience with infertility, an unlucky circumstance rather than a state-sponsored violence, is nothing compared to what Lynch and others like him have endured. Yet I understand something of the isolation, the sadness, and even the shame that comes with not being able to have the child you always dreamed of, especially when others seem to be able to have children so easily. I also know, better than many, what people with the resources and will to pursue fertility treatment will pay in order to conceive. All of our money — all of it.

There is another cost of sterility to be considered, which is the cost of spending your later years alone, without the support network of traditional family life. The 75 or 100 men and women who have come to dance and perform at the VFW hall have a lot in common with Lynch: They are mostly country people, retired, but in evident good health as they shuffle and spin around the varnished wood floor. Still, more of them than not are couples, and it isn’t hard to imagine that they have children and grandchildren nearby to help them with things that get harder with age: home repair, trips to the doctor, legal matters. If there are repairs to be done at Lynch’s home, he does them himself. If he has a doctor’s appointment, he drives himself two hours north to the VA hospital in Richmond. His car, with its modified headlights and more than 700,000-mile history, has only one seat, for the driver.

At the VFW hall, Lynch is alone and yet not alone. He sits on a folding chair at the front of the room among about a dozen other performers. One by one, they go to the microphone and sing a number of their choosing, backed by the rest of the group. Finally it is his turn, and he gets up to play the song he’s promised me, Marty Robbins’s “Devil Woman,” a song about wrongs and forgiveness, and which shows off his falsetto:

I told Mary about us, told her about our great sin

Mary just cried and forgave me, Mary took me back again

The crowd’s best dancers take the floor, and afterward I watch Lynch accept praise and nods of appreciation from friends and acquaintances. He doesn’t linger to talk with anyone, though, and soon makes for the kitchen at the back of the room. How many of his peers know about his situation, I wonder? How many of them know how much he loves kids, how much he wishes for children and grandchildren?

It is a paradox that Lynch and others like him experienced the most intimate loss of privacy, the invasion of the state into their reproductive lives, but because we consider reproduction “private,” we have little way of talking about or evaluating their loss. At the final victims’ hearing, even then-Gov. Perdue seemed to be uncomfortable. She came in late and spoke hurriedly, saying that she was not attending in an official capacity.

“It’s hard for me to accept or to understand or to even try to figure out why these kinds of atrocious acts could have been committed in this country and I’m being told more than 30 states. I find it reprehensible,” she said. “But, I just came here as a woman, as a mama and as a grandma and as Governor of this state, quite frankly to tell you it’s wrong.” She spoke briefly of her support for compensation and thanked the victims in attendance for their courage, then left without talking to them individually.

Lynch, who’d sat next to John Railey during the meeting, called his journalist friend on the way back to Littleton. “I didn’t think much of her,” he told Railey. “I’m not too hopeful.”

* * *

Fifteen

The word “sterile” has two meanings: free from germs or contaminants; and fruitless, or unable to produce offspring. Using outdated, scientifically dubious ideas, the eugenics program in North Carolina conflated these two definitions. It sought to cleanse the state of the contamination of poverty, disability, and mental illness by surgically preventing thousands of men, women, and children from ever having biological children. It happened in every one of the state’s 100 counties: to men and women; to blacks, whites, and Native Americans; to those who already had offspring and to those who had not yet entered puberty. For some, it took years to accept that their sterilizations were permanent. Others bore the bitter understanding immediately, and thought of it daily.

All of the victims who testified before the Task Force to Determine the Method of Compensation for Victims of North Carolina’s Eugenics Board confronted painful, often shameful memories to speak before strangers, on the good-faith assumption that their words would have an impact. They would finally receive official recognition and the assurance that nothing like this would ever happen again in their state. Though they could never be made whole, they would receive financial support that would make some kind of difference in their lives.

To date, two things have happened, officially. The state included brief language about the eugenics program in the revised American History and Grade 8 Social Studies curriculum. And in 2009, it erected a new historical marker near the site in Raleigh where the Eugenics Board once met. The marker looks similar to the hundreds of other silver-and-black signs commemorating presidential visits, significant birthplaces, and Revolutionary War battles across the state. It reads:

EUGENICS BOARD

State action led to the sterilization by choice or coercion of over 7,600 people, 1933-1973. Met after 1939 one block E.

The marker does not come close to the permanent and traveling memorials envisioned by the victims, who wanted something to teach people about injustice, someplace the public could visit to pay their respects, to grieve, and to make amends. They have also yet to receive a dollar from the state.

Still, the most outspoken victims have experienced, on their own, what psychologists call “post-traumatic growth”: positive psychological change experienced as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances. Post-traumatic growth can be expressed in a number of ways: through new and satisfying relationships, through greater personal strength and vulnerability, or through creative outlets or other forms of self-expression.

Annie Buelin experienced growth and generativity through her faith. After suffering a long period of depression and spiritual isolation, she says, “I thought, I’m going to go somewhere to church.” A friend from the chicken plant where she worked invited Annie to hers. She went and even felt comfortable enough to ask the congregants to pray for an end to her depression.

That church was also where she met Woodrow. They sat near each other in the choir at an Easter Sunday evening service; Annie, an alto, noticed Woodrow’s strong bass singing voice, and was impressed when he sang a song he’d written himself. After church, Woodrow asked Annie if she’d like to have a poem. He borrowed a pen and paper and wrote one out for her, then added his phone number at the end.

Annie remembers talking with Woodrow for more than two hours the first time she called him, and his delight at hearing her voice: “He said he was walking the floor, waiting for me to call.” They dated for over a year before they married, going to church functions and getting together with Woodrow’s large family for potlucks and holidays. “I told Woodrow right off when we talked about getting married,” she says. “He said, that’s all right if you can’t have children. My children and grandchildren will make up for the ones you couldn’t have.

“At Christmas, the house would be full of 12 or 15 children,” Annie says. “I cooked for everyone. We all just had a good time.” At church, Woodrow’s kids made Annie stand for the traditional Mother’s Day honoring.

Annie and Woodrow were married for 27 years; he died in 2012 at 89. She still lives in the converted tobacco curing house he restored for her in Ararat, North Carolina, not far from where she grew up, and one of Woodrow’s sons and his wife live next door. The walls and tabletops of Annie’s home are filled with framed photographs of her late husband and his children and grandchildren, along with typed poems he wrote for Annie and her mother. He told her every day that he loved her.

Post-traumatic growth does not erase the experience of trauma, but allows people to integrate painful experiences into their life stories. Even after all the love she experienced with her husband and his family, Buelin still thinks about the children she didn’t have. “I know I would be a good mother,” she says. “I would work hard to raise them in church, to teach them right from wrong. I imagine myself sending them to school and [them] getting a good education. I would love them with everything in my power.”

Though Buelin follows the news and feels strongly that she should be compensated, her faith has helped her cope with the possibility that she might be disappointed. “To be a Christian, you can’t hate anybody,” she explains. “I forgive everybody that’s ever done me wrong. The Lord will take care of me. He loves me just as much as he loves you.”

Elaine Riddick’s growth has come through advocacy for her fellow sterilization victims and also, as with Buelin, through her faith. But it took her a while to get there.

“When I first started going to Raleigh, I was a mess,” she says, referring to the public hearings that began in 2010. “The more I went, the better I felt.”

Riddick speaks eloquently about her experience as a victim of North Carolina’s eugenics program, but can also cite statistics for programs in other states: California, Washington, Oregon. She’s developed a particular interest in international reproductive rights abuses, including recent reports that the Israeli government had been giving Depo-Provera shots, without consent, to immigrant Ethiopian Jews. She has traveled to Lynchburg, Virginia, to visit the institution where Carrie Buck lived and help a new organization begin the process of identifying victims in that state. Riddick, who is passionately pro-life, has also told her story at anti-abortion events around the country.

Her personal life, too, has improved. She is in a loving relationship, spends lots of time caring for nieces and nephews, and no longer feels jealous of pregnant women.

“I’m the type of person, if something bothers me, I have to fix it,” she says. She can now put her face next to a pregnant woman’s stomach to talk to the baby. “That was hard, but I did it.”

Riddick follows the Legislature’s debates over compensation from her home in Atlanta, but is also pursuing another civil case, this time a class action. She’s convinced several of her fellow victims to join her — Willis Lynch is a co-plaintiff — and talks to them regularly. With the goal of becoming a more effective and better informed public speaker, she reads everything she can, from international news reports to the mystical writings of St. Teresa of Avila.

Her primary goal in life, she says, is making sure that involuntary sterilization doesn’t happen to anybody else.

“I’m comfortable. I feel free,” she says firmly. “I’m so proud that God gave me a voice. I demand to be heard.”

Lynch’s post-traumatic growth is more difficult for outsiders to gauge. After his first marriage ended, he stayed away from women, fearing that he would again be used. After coming forward with his story he has granted interviews, but he doesn’t seek them out, and he is circumspect about the impact telling it has made. He’d rather talk about where Hank Williams ranks in the hierarchy of country musicians (No.1), and about which songs he’ll try out at the VFW on Friday night.

“Willis came to all this pretty tough and extroverted,” says Railey. “Even though there’s a certain point he won’t let you get past, more and more, he’s wanted to tell the story. He’s seen that he’s part of a bigger story … part of a movement towards justice.”

* * *

Sixteen

After legislators failed to include compensation in the 2012 budget, advocates and victims  vowed to fight on. Railey and his colleagues at the Journal continued to publish editorials urging action, victims continued to give interviews, and several House members, especially Womble and Tillis, continued to work behind the scenes to secure votes. In that year’s gubernatorial race, both major-party candidates expressed support for compensation, and following his election, Republican Pat McCrory included $10 million for it in his proposed spending plan for 2013-14.

But with both houses of the legislature and the executive branch under G.O.P. control for the first time since Reconstruction, progressive causes came under attack. The legislature repealed the Racial Justice Act, which allowed inmates who believed they were victims of discrimination to challenge death sentences, and passed a bill severely restricting access to the polls. They voted to reduce unemployment benefits, to cut funding for preschool programs and teachers’ aides, and to close agencies serving young children with developmental disabilities. They cut Medicaid and teacher pay, removed class size limits, and passed a bill that would close most of the state’s abortion clinics.

The state’s chapter of the NAACP organized a series of  protests at the Capitol to draw attention to the cuts, which resulted in more than 900 arrests. No one talked much about the eugenics issue, and victims and their supporters waited anxiously to see if they would be left out again. Given the contentious tone of the budget process, and the hostility so many lawmakers seemed to feel for the poor and disenfranchised, and to poor children in particular, it was hard to imagine a positive outcome. Buelin says she prayed every night for Phil Berger, leader of the Senate, who blocked compensation in his chamber’s first version of the budget.

Then, after a late night vote on Thursday, July 18, Railey heard from one of his sources that compensation would be included in the final bill reconciling the House and Senate budgets. He didn’t want to call any of the victims until he was “damn sure,” he says, and he waited nervously all weekend for word from Raleigh. On Saturday, he talked to Womble, who was optimistic. Sunday night, while watching a movie at home and working on the next week’s editorial page lineup, he checked his email and saw a joint press release from Tillis’s and Berger’s offices. He opened the document and scanned until paragraph four, where he read:

The plan [...] provides one-time compensation to living victims of a state-sponsored Eugenics program that ended in the 1970s [...]

Immediately, he began calling the victims and their advocates. He congratulated them on their hard work and perseverance. After more than a decade of seeking redress from the state, their voices conveyed “a real sense of vindication,” he says. One he couldn’t reach was Willis Lynch. When Railey finally got through the next morning, Lynch had already read the news. “I keep my eye on the paper, too,” he teased.

Statisticians estimate that more than half of North Carolina’s 7,600 sterilization victims have died, erased from history, just as the eugenicists imagined. Eighteen known victims have died since the verification process began in 2010. That leaves fewer than 200 who have been confirmed, only a fraction of those who might be eligible. Though the $10 million proposed would  cover the administration of $50,000 for each of the currently verified victims, it’s unclear how many more will come forward. The individual funds, scheduled for administration in 2015, could be more — or significantly less. It’s also unclear how aggressively the foundation will search for additional victims or where money will come from for the mental health services and memorials the task force recommended.

Still, in a political season that has attracted shaming attention to the state on a national scale, it helps to remember that any compensation is historic. North Carolina will likely serve as an example and motivation to other states considering how to address eugenics-based sterilization. Two legislators in Virginia’s House of Delegates, a Democrat and a Republican, recently co-sponsored a bill that also recommends individual payments of $50,000 each for victims of that state’s eugenics program, and advocates have been attempting to interest politicians in California and West Virginia in compensation, too.

But it is the deeply personal, painful stories of North Carolina’s victims — black and white, rural and urban, male and female — have now been heard by people around the world. They overcame their shame and their grief to talk about something that no one wanted to talk about for decades. In the absence of a traveling exhibit or permanent archive, their actions stand as both a memorial to their resilience and a challenge to the rest of us: How will we make it right?

Most victims weren’t waiting, after all, for the money. Riddick has said that she wants to use her award to help pregnant teenagers and disabled children. Buelin wants a more reliable car for getting around, but also plans to give back to the stepson and daughter-in-law who have taken care of her.

And Lynch has started planning a trip with his nephew — a token of gratitude, he says, for how good he was to Lynch’s mother. They’ll go to Nashville, to the Grand Ole Opry and the Country Music Hall of Fame, and then on to Montgomery for Hank Williams Day, held each year on January 1, the day he died. Lynch, who turned 80 in June, says he intends to live a long time yet.

* * *

Originally published by The New New South, August 2013. 

* * *

BELLE BOGGS is the author of Mattaponi Queen, a collection of linked stories that take place along Virginia’s Mattaponi River. Mattaponi Queen won the Bakeless Prize, the Emyl Jenkins Sexton Literary Award from the Library of Virginia, was a finalist for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, was a 2010 Kirkus Reviews top fiction debut, and was a finalist for the Library of Virginia People’s Choice Award for fiction. Boggs has received fellowships to the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences and is a recipient of a 2011 Artist Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council and a 2012 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Boggs was named “Best New Southern Author” by Southern Living magazine, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Harper’s, Glimmer Train, the Oxford American, Orion, the Sun, and other publications. 

OLYMPIA STONE is an award-winning independent producer, director and editor of documentary films.  Her intimate portrait of the artist James Grashow, The Cardboard Bernini, details his exhilarating quest to create an intricately detailed cardboard version of the Trevi fountain, which he intends to abandon to the elements. Broadcast nationwide on PBS in 2013-14, the film also won Best Documentary at the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival 2013, and was an official selection at Sebastopol, Santa Fe and 18 other festivals. Her first independent film, The Collector: Allan Stone’s Life in Art (2007) chronicles the obsessive collecting of her father, a New York art world gallerist whose habits and prescient scouting shaped his life and the lives of many in his artfully cluttered orbit.

Editor: Andrew Park

Special thanks to: Richard Allen, Rosecrans Baldwin, Gray Beltran, Crystal Fawn, Andrew Foster, Haven Kimmel, Dan Kois, Philip Motley, Duncan Murrell, Dan Oshinsky, John Railey, Evan Ratliff, Cristina Smith, Ron Stodghill, Olympia Stone, Barry Yeoman, Atavist, and the Duke University School of Law Startup Ventures Clinic

Platinum: A Singer Visits a Women’s Prison

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Thao Nguyen | Radio Silence | October 2014 | 6 minutes (1500 words)

Radio SilenceOur latest Longreads Exclusive: A brief encounter between a singer and an inmate at a women’s prison. Thank you to Radio Silence for sharing this story—you can subscribe to Radio Silence, or download the free iOS app.
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Defenseless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

—W. H. Auden

 

Suzy Mellen is very supportive of my career. Her optimism flies in the face of music-industry reality, and she reminds me of my mom. Suzy says, “Your record is going to go platinum! When are you going to go platinum?” I smile apologetically and tell her probably never.

“Not with that attitude,” she says.

It seems an inefficient use of our visitation time to explain why the music I make will probably never go platinum, why the tiny plot of land on which I work has no minerals.

“Write it on a card,” she says. “Write PLATINUM on a card and put it in your wallet. Carry it with you everywhere. You have to carry your truth into reality.”

Suzy Mellen is a big fan of The Secret, a sweepingly popular self-help book based on the law of attraction and how positive thinking can bring you happiness. I have never read it.

She lifts her left foot to show me the sole of her standard-issue tennis shoe. “See?”

She’s written FREEDOM in Sharpie.

My throat tightens when I see the bottom of her shoe.

“I walk my freedom,” she says. “I walk my freedom into reality.”

Suzy was sentenced to life without parole in 1998 for a murder she did not commit. You are perhaps doubtful. When I share Suzy’s circumstances, people like to jump in and tell me that all prisoners claim they didn’t do it. First, I have found that to be false; everyone I talk to who did what she is charged with acknowledges it, and second, really, Suzy didn’t do it. After more than fifteen years of thwarted efforts and stalled progress, a lawyer with the pro bono group Innocence Matters has stepped in, and Suzy’s case has surged forward. The key witness testimony, which served as the crux of the prosecution’s case, has been discredited several times over. A new district attorney is working with Suzy’s lawyer to clear her name. There is real talk of impending release. So maybe The Secret is working. Finally.

No one on the visiting team can believe it. In our collective experience, nothing that benefits those incarcerated ever happens at any kind of clip, be it clemency, release for wrongful conviction, or parole. I am told by formerly incarcerated members of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners that the parole process is widely regarded as completely arbitrary. The wry joke is that your parole rests on whether or not the members of the parole board ate good breakfasts the morning of your hearing, or if anyone argued with a spouse before work. Often, people with no disciplinary infractions on their records are denied parole. It is deemed that they’ve not enrolled in enough self-help classes, no matter the number they’ve completed. Or the board will determine that the prisoner has not yet demonstrated enough insight into the crime she committed, no matter the evidence to the contrary. Last year, one of our members was denied parole after more than forty years inside. A trans man, they said he showed a confusion and dishonesty regarding his gender and therefore could not be trusted to conduct himself honorably in the free world. There is a seemingly sinister element of caprice threatening any potential reprieve. We are all guardedly hopeful for Suzy.

* * *

Suzy has lively blue eyes, regally high cheekbones, and silver-blond hair that frames a wide, friendly face. Every time I see her (even before the break in her case), she is jubilant, vibrating at a much more ecstatic level than the rest of us, and speaking in rapid, pious, often rhyming aphorisms. Suzy Mellen loves God. I like Suzy so much that I feel closer to God after I see her, as if a friend of Suzy’s is a friend of mine.

She leads a prayer circle that is very well attended. Sometimes I can’t tell if she knows she is being hilarious. Other times, when she offhandedly recounts her Bible-class lectures, I am sure she knows that she is a comedic force.

Suzy tells them:

“I used to do crystal meth, but now Jesus is my rock.”

“I get high on the most high because there’s no greater high than the most high.”

“I’m totally addicted to Jesus.”

“Attitude of gratitude,” she reminds me. All of her tones are certain. Suzy is even grateful that she’s made the best of her time in prison: She got off drugs and got close to God and helps her friends. Suzy says “a life without parole is still a life with purpose.”

When Suzy was arrested, she was at McDonald’s with her youngest daughter (nine at the time), about to order a Happy Meal. She described how the police took her, how her daughter had sensed something was wrong before they even appeared. She was charged with killing an ex-boyfriend with whom she had not been in contact. The lead detective and the DA, hungry for an arrest and conviction, placed Suzy at the scene of the crime based on those aforementioned falsified witness statements. A man who was present at the murder (at the risk of incriminating himself) is preparing to go on record stating that Suzy was nowhere nearby.

Suzy has a standing date with her daughter at McDonald’s when she gets out. The only time I see her sad is when she says, “I promised my daughter a Happy Meal. I have to keep my promise.”

* * *

I would not let Suzy down. I cut up an old party invitation (the only thing around of durable paper stock) and write in Sharpie. When I go out on tour, I keep the PLATINUM card in my wallet and Suzy’s most recent letter in my backpack. She traced her left hand on it. It’s been all over the U.S. and Europe. I read it when I hate my job, when I am exhausted and want to go home but cannot.

In the letter she writes: “I am in prison but prison is not in me. I can celebrate every day I live on purpose and love on purpose and that’s what gives me a joyful heart. Just being thankful. Someone didn’t wake up this morning. So I’m so grateful.”

After I read that paragraph, I am fine. I feel lucky; I feel like a foolish asshole. I love my job and my life, and I am grateful. I don’t know what it says about me that I must return to her letter repeatedly, but at least it works every time.

On our first visit we talked about dancing the running man. I don’t remember how it came up. I told her that I do it when I’m on tour, to get pumped up backstage and to get the blood flowing at rest areas. I stood up to demonstrate but remembered the guards nearby and where we were and my role there as a legal advocate, so I sat demurely back down.

Suzy has declared that once she gets out we will dance the running man together, and I will be in the book she writes, and there will also be a made-for-TV movie.

Typically Suzy is my last visit of the day and the best person with whom to wrap up so many hours of witnessing and absorbing emotional tumult. She is a wellspring of energy and light, and we all gravitate to her for hope, ease, and momentum.

On our most recent visit, several of us were sitting with Suzy, shooting the breeze, winding down the day. I said I was headed out of town for a vacation. She looked at me deadpan and said, “I told God I wanted to go on vacation, and then I went to prison. So be careful.”

Our table burst into laughter, and the correctional officers eyed us suspiciously. I wondered who they would find to do her justice in the made-for-TV movie.

I was scheduled to see Suzy last month. With hedged excitement, her friend told me she was in court, presumably because her case is moving.

The next time I see Suzy, may it be in the free world. I’ll write that on a card and put it in my wallet.

* * *

On October 10, 2014, nine days after Radio Silence first published this piece, Suzy Mellen was released after seventeen years in prison. She was exonerated of all charges.

Thao Nguyen behind the scenes at Austin City Limits:

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Originally published in Radio Silence, October 2014. Subscribe, and download the free iOS app.

This Is Living — an Exclusive from Loitering: New & Collected Essays by Charles D’Ambrosio

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Charles D’Ambrosio  | Loitering | November 2014 | 25 minutes (5,836 words)

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Loitering: New & Collected EssaysFor our latest Longreads Exclusive, we are delighted to share “This Is Living,” an essay from Charles D’Ambrosio’s Loitering: New & Collected Essays, published by Tin House. Subscribe to Tin House and check out their book titles. Buy the book

I was seven and had a leather purse full of silver dollars, both of which, the purse and the coins, I considered valuable. I wanted them stored in the bank. At the time, the bank had an imposing landmark status in my map of the world, in part because it shared the same red brick as the public school, the two most substantial buildings in our town. As a Catholic school kid I did a lot of fundraising in the form of selling candy bars, Christmas stamps and fruitcakes, and my favorite spot for doing business was outside the bank, on Friday afternoons, because that was payday. Working men came to deposit their checks and left the bank with a little cash for the weekend. Today, that ritual is nearly gone, its rhythms broken, except for people on welfare, who still visit banks and pack into lines, waiting for tellers, the first of every month. But back then I’d set my box of candy on the sidewalk and greet customers, holding the door for them like a bellhop. Friends of mine with an entirely different outlook on life tried to sell their candy at the grocery store, but I figured that outside the supermarket people might lie or make excuses, claiming to be broke; but not here, not at the bank, for reasons that seemed obvious to me: this was the headquarters of money. Most of the men were feeling flush and optimistic, flush because they were getting paid and would soon have money in their pockets, optimistic because the workweek was over and they could forget what they had done for the money. On their way in I’d ask if they wanted to buy a candy bar and they’d dip a nod and smile and say with a jaunty promissory confidence that I should catch them on the way out. And I did. I sold candy bars like a fiend. Year after year, I won the plastic Virgin Marys and Crucifixes and laminated holy cards that were given away as gifts to the most enterprising sales-kids at school. I liked the whole arrangement. On those Friday afternoons and early evenings, I always dressed in my salt-and-pepper corduroy pants and saddle shoes and green cardigan, a school uniform that I believed made me as recognizable to the world as a priest in his soutane, and I remember feeling righteous, an acolyte doing God’s work, or the Church’s. Money touched everyone in town, quaintly humanizing them, and I enjoyed standing outside the bank, at the center of civic life. This was my early education into the idea of money.

My hand will always remember the density of those silver dollars, the dead weight as I tumbled them back and forth, the dull clink as the coins touched. The nature of that weight offered a lesson in value too; you knew by a sense of the coin’s unique inner gravity that the silver was pure, that it wasn’t an alloy. Holding the coin in your palm you felt the primitive allure of the metal itself, its truth. Years later, I would pay for college by fixing washing machines and dryers. I was a repairman for a company that installed coin-operated machines in apartment buildings and laundromats. We had collectors in the field, men who worked set routes, hitting laundry rooms all over the city, emptying the coin boxes into canvas sacks. Late in the afternoon they returned to the shop and delivered the dirty bags to the counting room. The coins were filthy, turning everything they touched the lugubrious gray of pencil lead (you see the same graphite stain on the fingertips of people who play slot machines compulsively). The counting room was a dingy, windowless, fortified cement vault in back of the repair shop. Inside was a conveyor belt and a slotted metal chute and a machine for sorting the coins. A woman named Laurel did all the counting. She was thin and pale and her hair was limp and she wore black-rimmed glasses and a flowered smock that seemed a peculiarly sad flourish in that colorless place. She was a drudge in the operation, and unconsciously I equated her plain looks with honesty, her weak sexual presence with a lack of guile. Every afternoon thousands of dollars worth of coins slid across her tray. The metallic droning of the coins was mind numbing, and yet this woman, hearing the slightest deviation in that monotony, would toggle a switch and stop the belt, poke through the money in the chute, and pluck out the one silver coin—a Mercury dime, or a Washington quarter that predated copper-nickel composition—and replace it with one of her own. Thus in a matter of seconds she would make between a hundred and a thousand percent on her investment. One day she invited me into the counting room and demonstrated all of this, tapping a quarter against the tray, trying to teach me the subtle difference between the sound of a standard and a silver coin, and I never thought of her the same afterwards. The racket of those rattling coins was hellish in the confinement of her concrete bunker, but this pallid, dreary woman had a keen ear for that one true thing, the soft dull sound of silver as it thunked against metal, and she would eventually amass a small fortune in rare and valuable coins.

My silver dollars felt like a fortune, assembled and protected and given value by an abiding faith, a loyalty to them. They were Christmas gifts from my father, one for every year of my life. My vague, instinctive resistance to the coins as legal tender—as pure purchasing power—added to their worth. Somehow I knew that I would never spend them, never convert them into baseball cards or Slurpees or rides at the Evergreen State Fair. I didn’t view them as vehicles for my desire; they were things in themselves, they held their own fascination, and I knew the continuing life of that fascination depended entirely on taking them out of circulation. As they lost currency, an element of worthlessness thus entered into my idea of money, an aesthetic dimension. I understood that their value increased the more they sank into the past, and because of this the coins had some of the quality of buried treasure. At that age, I lost things, I broke them or outgrew them, my interests changed, but I guarded those seven silver dollars jealously, aware of the link between their personal interest to me and their significance in the world. The coins had very little real toy value. I couldn’t throw them or use them to improvise scenarios of valor or heroism; and I couldn’t include anyone else in my play, as I did with my guns and Tonka trucks. I kept the coins in a leather purse that was shaped like a boot, a souvenir my father brought home from a trip to Tucson, where he had presented a paper at an academic conference; the boot zipped shut, and MEXICO was printed across the sole. I hid the purse in the bottom drawer of my dresser, stuffed beneath clothes I no longer wore, but then there was a moment in which I decided it was time to put the whole thing—the boot-shaped purse and silver dollars both—in the bank.

The only times I’d actually been inside the bank were in the company of my father, who, among other things, taught business finance. In back of the bank was the vault, the door a polished steel slab with a spoked wheel such as you would find at the helm of a ship, and inside the vault was my father’s safe deposit box. He kept important papers in the box, insurance policies and a few stock certificates that must have had sentimental value, as either early or important trades he’d made in his career, because normally a man with my father’s acumen would have held the issues in their street name. Also in the box, he kept an ornate silver watch and fob and penknife, a beautiful set stored in a case lined with crushed green velvet. It had belonged to his father, a man I’d never met. My father would set the watch on the table inside the vault and let me play with it while he shuffled through his papers, always telling me that his father had given it to him, and that he, in turn, would pass it on to me, when the time was right. Imagining that far-off juncture thrilled me, in large part because it implied that my father knew the future, and that he’d considered my place in it. I had only recently learned to tell time, and my sense of it was shaky, but I would pull the crown and adjust the delicate black hands until they closely matched those of the bank clock, then I would wind the stem and hold the watch to my ear, listening as the seconds ticked away inside.

My father seemed affable and relaxed in the bank, friendly with the tellers and the president alike. He addressed everyone by name, he flirted and joked, walked briskly and with confidence, taking command of the space. His own father had been a bookie and a figure of the Chicago underworld. More than once my father had seen him viciously beat other men over money, and I would come to understand, with time, that it had terrified my dad, seeing his father so violent in the conduct of business. As a young boy, he would visit the local precinct, first with my grandmother, then on his own, to bail his father out of jail. Because they were on the take, the police had to make a show of arresting my grandfather periodically, and on those occasions my father would come to the station, only to find his dad laughing and joking and playing cards with the cops who’d arrested him. My father’s early education in money must have given him a glimpse of something savage and hollow in the heart of the system. The shock of that insight took the form of shame, as it does for so many of the son’s of immigrants, and so now, as I look back, it makes perfect sense to me that my father’s public self glowed in the company of people who did their business legitimately. His passion for securities—and common stock, particularly—was where he ultimately acquired his citizenship; in the bank, or on the phone with a broker, or in class teaching others about finance, he acted like a man with the rights and privileges of a native, a status his own father had never fully attained. Funny, charming, seemingly at ease—he became these things the minute he walked through the bank door. He especially loved the buildings that housed the institutions of money, banks among them. The enormous trust implied by the whole system was palpable to him, perhaps because he knew the fragility of it first hand, how beneath the flirtation and joking, the first names and handshakes, without some essential civil arrangement between people, it could always devolve into brutal beatings.

People who knew him in his capacity as a money-wiz have told me that he was a genius, and there’s no question that he was a smart man. Whether he was explaining why cigarettes were price inelastic or describing the dissonant notion behind fairly standard ideas of diversification (that you’re actually seeking an utter lack of correlation as a form of harmony), you felt the force and elegance of his mind—and at our house, this kind of stuff was table talk. And so what happened with my silver dollars and my shoe-purse is a mystery, a moment that I’ve returned to again and again over the years. The whole thing had the character of a lesson, of something more than a simple transaction. Put plainly, here is how I remember it. My father and I drove to the bank and stood in line and waited for a teller. When it was our turn, I reached up and stuck my shoe on the counter, which was about level with my chin. My father had instructed me at lunch that I would do all the talking, and we had even rehearsed the lines, so I said to the woman that I wanted to put my purse and silver dollars in the bank. Even to this day, I can see myself standing there, I know the hour, the weather outside as seen through the bank’s high windows, the slight feeling of confusion, the hesitance as I wondered if my words were making sense, the coldness at my temples where a faint doubt registered. My father exchanged a glance with the teller, and I looked back, over my shoulder, at the vault, and when he asked me if I was sure, I said yes, because that was our script, that was the story we had rehearsed and agreed to tell. The teller did her work, and then handed me back my empty shoe and a green savings book. At this point I was so flustered that I couldn’t summon the courage to tell her what I was thinking—that the shoe was part of it, that I wanted my leather boot in the bank too.

Naturally, when I went to retrieve the silver dollars they were gone; and yet I was devastated when I was handed, instead, seven ordinary dollar bills. I felt rooked. All the alchemy of imagination that had brought me to the bank, that had enlarged the idea of those silver dollars, was undone. What has remained curious to me over the years is why my father didn’t see what was happening and intervene. He had all the savvy, while in some ways my idea of the bank was based on banks in old Westerns. For me, it was a place where people stored money, and where criminals could grab it, if clever or brutal enough. The bank kept money safe. It was the physical place, it was the vault with the polished steel door, it was the safe deposit box in which I’d store my silver dollars beside the watch and fob that would one day be mine, when the time was right. Most of all, the bank was where my father and I spent some of our best days, the rare place where I saw him happy and at home, his private and increasingly troubled and violent self set aside in favor of the public man who was upright and worthy and could stride across the carpet to shake the president’s hand. It seems so obvious now, but ultimately that’s what I was investing in when I decided to put my silver dollars in the bank, that future with my father.

Our business at the bank finished, we took a walk. Town was only one block long but my father was dressed for Michigan Avenue, dapper in his wingtips, navy blue blazer, and the sort of rakish flat cap favored by southern Italians. I wore dungarees and leather boots and a green flannel shirt from Penney’s. I kept a native’s eye on the Sammamish, where sockeye ran in the fall, flashing red in the slow murk of the slough, and a disused granary that rumor said was full of rats, but to my father that beckoning world was terra incognita, and at the corner, already impatient, the main drag used up, he steered me across the street, leading us toward what we called our “secret destination.” It was fun to play along with my father in this conspiracy, to hold this secret in common, though we’d both known all along exactly where the day would end. We were going to the bakery and we were going to eat chocolate cake.

On the way there my father mentioned that when he was a boy he had a favorite uncle who gave him a Morgan silver dollar every Christmas. He didn’t need to explain to me that the seven Morgans I’d just put in the bank were the direct descendants of that distant gesture.

“Where’s your uncle now?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” my father said. And then, in a way that registered very strangely for me, he added, “He was unmarried.”

I didn’t know what my father meant but I never forgot what he said. My ear seized on the distortion, heard the lurch in logic, the faltering fact: unmarried. He seemed to have answered a question I hadn’t asked, drawing on a depth that was wholly private. Briefly, he was alone. In the worshipping eyes of a son any father’s life is epic, I suppose, but nothing in my father’s life ever approached the coherence of narrative. He was, I know, a proud and high-minded man, but with the kind of rigid pride and impossible rectitude that’s a form of suppression, an immigrant son’s pride, the triumphant pride, namely, of having overcome the past. In his epic life the trail of evidence was scant, the facts meager and few; an odd scattering of fragments and then a vast surrounding silence. That unmarried uncle was one such fragment, but my father would return to this uncle so often, feeding off the same thin fact, that I began to collect the pieces, storing them up as zealously as I had guarded my silver dollars. And so, in time, this one false note, this strange detail, this favorite uncle, this unmarried uncle eventually acquired a name, he was Chris, he was Uncle Chris, an Uncle Chris who lived alone, alone in a single room, a room that was spare and clean, a small cheap room in a flophouse on Chicago’s near West Side, and one day, a winter day, my grandfather, Antonio D’Ambrosio, viciously beat his brother and left him, this brother, this Uncle Chris, the giver of silver dollars, bloody and unconscious in a hillock of dirty snow beneath the El tracks at Argyle.

The Argyle El stop served as my grandfather’s front, and all through elementary school my father, always a go-getter, worked the counter in the afternoons and on weekends. In his mind the front was the family business, a Father & Son operation, and it was his job to hustle commuter sundries, all the newspapers, magazines, cigarettes and candy that would show sufficient income on my grandfather’s modest but fraudulent tax returns. “I saw him beat the living daylights out of my Uncle Chris,” my father would tell me, years later, in language that had never escaped 1944. “It was ugly,” he said. “I ran,” he said. “I ran the hell out of there, I ran all the way to the lake and”—with a dismissive wave of his hand he shut the story down, a thing beyond words, pointless to try, what can you say? He ran and it was winter and in his fear he’d fled without his coat. Now whenever I visit Chicago I make the same run myself, chasing after my father, pursuing him all the way down Argyle, crossing the Outer Drive until I too hit the lake. My father doesn’t know I do this, and he probably wouldn’t care or even understand, and really, I have no idea why this lunatic errand matters to me, beyond the foolish belief that, one of these days, when I reach the lake’s edge, I will find him, I mean literally find him, still there, an eleven year old boy, cold and alone, with nowhere else to run.

Late at night my grandfather would crush saltine crackers in a coffee mug and fill it with cold milk. That was his favorite snack, and the sweetest memory my father ever shared with me. Whenever I imagine it I’m right there with him, looking over his shoulder in some half-lit, long-ago kitchen, watching a boy watch a man he loves spoon a gruel of milk and saltines into his mouth as he totes the vig on a loan or reads over the race results in the Chicago Tribune, tallying up the winners he’ll pay off and the losers whose money he’ll pocket. I have a somewhat desperate need to witness the scene and to know my father had that love, that small store of tenderness in his memory. My grandfather worked twelve hours a day, six days a week and then seven during World War II, when so many horses ran at Mexican tracks. He went to sleep at 2 AM, he woke at 8 AM. He rarely attended church but he tithed and then some, always the single largest contributor to St. Thomas of Canterbury’s coffers, back in the days when those numbers were brazenly published in church bulletins. In a bookie’s universe cash flows constantly, and then there’s the siphoning. His front at the Argyle El stop was prime real estate and it’s unlikely that the cops at the local precinct were the only people he greased. In that era, on the North Side of Chicago, he would have answered to Hymie Weiss, Bugs Moran and, later, Paul Ricca, heir to the Capone Syndicate.

I find it much harder to imagine the intricacies of my father’s confusion as he walked to the precinct, suddenly the man of the house, an envelope of cash in his pocket. Once he had the drill down, once he realized he wouldn’t find his father behind bars, in prison stripes, guarded by men with drawn guns, it only took him ten minutes to make his dad’s bail. The sham arrests kept the record straight, but the hero of the story was cash. Cash was magic, cash was powerful, cash was the savior. Although I imagine the short walk home was conducted in silence—after all, this was just another day on the job—I suspect that in some tacit but troubled agreement an economist was busy being born. I can guess what my father would say now, belatedly filling the silence, and here’s my weak imitation of his mind at work: to legitimize an illegal business such as bookmaking, you needed the approbation of the law, or at least the approval of the people who enforce the law. Those enforcers grant the bookmaker a license that isn’t legally theirs to give, but which, by virtue of their position, they have the power to create or destroy at whim. The law enforcers charge a fee for the mythical but economically significant license and, to protect both themselves and the licensee, they create an insurance policy, issued to the bookie, that provides ongoing protection for the life of the illegal business. Neither the insurance and its protections nor the license are free. There is a cost to everything. There are no free lunches.

Of course, graft and corruption and gambling make a grab at the free lunch and the D’Ambrosios did more than OK in America. They owned their six-flat outright, my father was enrolled in a fine Jesuit academy and was meeting Catholic “swells” from all around the city, and he had at his disposal a new black Buick with a necker’s knob on the steering wheel, which allowed him to coolly turn a corner and squeeze a date’s thigh at the same time. Then in 1950, Antonio D’Ambrosio dropped dead of a heart attack on the sidewalk outside his Argyle front. He was fifty-two years old. In the box on his death certificate for USUAL OCCUPATION my grandfather was listed as “Proprietor” and in the box for KIND OF BUSINESS a clerk neatly printed “Cigar Store.” He passed away a month after my father finished high school. I know nothing about those days except that my father had the key to a safe deposit box, and at the bank, when he was alone in the vault, in the quiet of the armored walls, with the day gate locked, he turned the key, opened the box, and found one hundred thousand dollars, cash. Or, in today’s dollars, my father turned that key and opened the lid on a million dollars. That, as my father would say, is a nice chunk of change.

My father didn’t want the burden, particularly the burden of his mother, my grandmother, who beat him pitilessly with a broom handle all through his boyhood. “The broom treatment,” he called it, without any elaboration. It’s not hard for me to imagine that those beatings did all the things beatings do to people. Still, the moment he turned the key and opened that safe deposit box his career in finance was determined, and my grandmother would live off the money, conservatively managed by her son, for the next thirty-six years. The bookie’s boy went legit, breaking with his father, and yet, a good son, kept his hand in a world whose fated, narcotic action is gambling’s kissing cousin. Instead of handicapping horses he played the market, trading racing sheets for Value Line, and his career in finance was, in some ways, an apologia for a life of crime. That early death broke my father, dividing him from his past, but the heavy tectonics of one of our most cherished myths—that each new generation will surpass the previous—did a lot of the heaving and sundering too. It’s a brutal business, making Americans. As soon as he finished his dissertation, looking for a fresh start, my father found a job in a world as remote from Chicago as he could imagine, in a place neither he nor anyone in his family could really picture, and was carried along on the buoyant currents of yet another American myth, moving as far west as he could go and still be standing on the continental US.

Which brings us to the secret destination. Warm from the sun, warm from the ovens, warm from the smell of rising yeast and freshly baked bread, all this safe and sleepy warmth was a kind of quiet, and in that white-tiled Dutch bakery my father’s voice, I remember, boomed a little too loudly, waking the place to life. He tapped the counter bell twice and when a stout woman with her hair in a snood appeared my father was already reaching deep into his pocket. As sophisticated as he was about every manner of financial instrument, cash was where it was at, cash was holy, and all his life my father kept bricks of it, bill-strapped at the bank, stored in a safe at home. His stash, he called it. He always had to have his stash. And whenever he plunged a hand into his left pocket it was time for ostentation. He’d stretch his arms out to clear his cuffs, hold his gaudy gold money clip chest high, lick his fingers and flick through bills, a c-note on the outside, of course, implying wealth in a fat wad that might in fact hide a poor truth, that the bulk of the bankroll was made up of singles, then he’d snap off one, two, three bills, whatever was needed. This wasn’t the father with the doctoral dissertation on railroad economics. This was someone else, this was my father in his fluency, flashing his cash and slapping a sawbuck on the counter as if we were back in Chicago, maybe the Empire Room at the Palmer House, and not a bakery in the boonies on a Saturday afternoon. I watched the whole performance from a tiny table by the window. We’d done our business at the bank and now we each had big piece of chocolate layer cake, thick with icing. It was yellow cake. I don’t know how they got it yellow but they did and the yellow was beautiful against the warm brown frosting. We loved that chocolate cake. This was a good day, a really good day, and I knew what was coming next. My father stared for a long while out the window, at what, I don’t know, but I waited, waited for his famous phrase, sure it would come, and when his reverie broke and he returned to the bakery and our little table, he smiled at me, then looked down at his cake, and there it was, sure as rain.

“This is living,” he said, “huh, Charlie boy?”

Of course, of course—the past followed him out west, and now we had our own history, easily as troubled as the one he’d left behind in Chicago and far more violent. Every time I visited my father I was certain it would be the last. Months would go by, even a year, and I wouldn’t know whether he was dead or alive, and then I would see a sign—a leaf falling just so, a plastic sack blowing through an empty intersection—and corny as those omens were, the spookiness was real to me, always there, lurking below the surface of my days, and would haunt and harass me until the only cure was to call him again. Or I’d pay him a visit after dwelling on some silly, old, odd, obscure chain of memory. Other times I’d show up intending business, bringing a family grievance to the table. He’d sent my sister a letter smeared with his blood. He’d tried to sell his mentally-ill son a cemetery plot. He’d shown up at several of my readings wearing a Chicago Cubs hat dangling with fishing lures, a crown of thorns fashioned from spinners and spoons and treble-hooked crankbaits, and then he’d just stand there, thirty feet away, staring and saying nothing while I signed books, in a grotesque martyrdom that I somehow understood.

One day I was drinking coffee on a bench in Victor Steinbrueck Park, at the north end of the Public Market, next to a Japanese man, who was reading what I believed to be a biography of Hitler. The title was Hitler, anyway. His son sat between us, a little boy of roughly four; he was bored and antsy, pestering his father with questions that went unanswered. “What year did you first exist in, Daddy? When did you first come alive?” In his frustration the boy kept trying to close the book, slapping at it and mussing the pages, and the father kept pushing him away. I finished my coffee and walked to the south end of the Market and called my father from a payphone outside Delaurenti’s, an Italian grocery, asking if he’d eaten. He hadn’t. I brought spaghetti and meatballs, buffalo mozzarella and roasted peppers, green olives stuffed with pimentos, and a jar of hot pepperoncini, indulgences out of his past, hoping the feast might provoke that old famous phrase, but the food didn’t matter. Nothing in this world seemed to matter anymore. Instead he kept referring to the mystics, as if in fact those mystics were in the room. “As the mystics tell us,” he would say. “all is well, all is well.” In rejecting the material world, he seemed to have found an alibi, an elsewhere, glorying in a triumph that was hard for me to hear. He would eventually make himself destitute, giving all his money, every scrimped nickel, to the Catholic Church, becoming a ward of the dioceses. This contemptus mundi included his kids; he wanted it known that he did not need us for his happiness, did not need us at all. He no longer spoke to any of his seven children. He rarely left his apartment. He was a physical mess, obese, wheezing, unable to lift himself from his chair without tremendous exertion. Now and then I could see the old fire in my father’s eyes, and with the urgency of some thought roiling inside him he would struggle forward, but he seemed trapped in his body, wholly bound by his physical decline. The great and engaging brilliance, and the passion that made it so infectious and forceful, was struggling, it seemed, toward an apophatic mysticism, negating facts and fictions and emptying itself of pride and all its projects. He was done with all those corrupt and violent appetites, but alone, divested of business and free of family, the unknowing was agonized. After we’d eaten, as I washed and dried the dishes and a hard rain whipped against the windows, my father said, “You know, I’ve never been to the rainforest. Isn’t that a hell of a thing?” It seemed terrible to have come so close to the ocean and never set foot in the Pacific, as if his journey west were never completed, but when I offered to drive him out to the coast he waved me off.

“As the Desert Fathers tell us,” he said. “all is well, all is well.”

At the end of the night he led me down the hall to a closet and gave me what remained of a box of red pens and asked if I wanted his old safe. It was beige, about the size of a milk crate, and weighed at least 100 pounds. I took it, I said yes, just because he’d spent the night renouncing the world, trying to let go, and I felt that I might offend his pride by refusing this parting gift. I carried the safe down the corridor and sat on it, breathing hard, while I waited for the elevator. It was one of those nights in Seattle when the wind downtown was strong enough to blow flowerpots off the decks of high rises and the traffic signals danced a crazed tarantella over the empty intersections. The streets down there were always drifting with deranged characters but that night even people with nowhere to go had found somewhere to go. The weight of the safe was ponderous and uncooperative, too heavy to hoist on my shoulder for long, impossibly awkward to carry in front of me. The die-cast edges cut my fingers, and it took me forever to lurch and waddle the five blocks home. Every fifty feet or so I dropped the safe on the sidewalk, gasping for breath. Then I’d sit on it and roll a cigarette, smoking in the rain. I wondered if passing cops would think I was a thief, in an inept heist, making an even more pathetic getaway. I wish I could say that I did the sensible thing, ditching the safe in a dumpster or abandoning it on someone’s stoop, but I didn’t, I carried it as far as I possibly could. By the time I got back to my apartment I was too wet and miserable and exhausted to haul the safe up the stairs, and I had no use for it anyway. I didn’t have the combination and I didn’t own anything valuable. I left the safe in the alley behind my building, in a patch of dirt beneath a tall cedar, and it stayed there for a long time. No one took it because it was heavy and it was empty. And then one morning I looked out my window and it was gone.

* * *

Copyright © 2014 by Charles D’Ambrosio. First appeared in Loitering, published by Tin House Books.

Charles D’Ambrosio is the author of two collections of short stories, The Point and The Dead Fish Museum, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the essay collection Orphans. He’s been the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award and a Lannan Fellowship, among other honors. His work has appeared frequently in The New Yorker, as well as in Tin House, The Paris Review, Zoetrope All-Story, and A Public Space. He teaches fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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