Western North Dakota—at the epicenter of the Bakken oil rush—has become a new Wild West of sorts, where fortunes are made, sought and lost with alarming speed. Thousands have been drawn to the Bakken over the last seven years, including Maya Rao, a talented reporter who has cut her teeth at dailies and currently covers regional issues at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She first ventured there to write a short piece for The Awl last year about the overwhelming experience of “being a woman in a place where women could be in demand as much as the oil.” After her first visit to the region Rao felt there were larger stories still untold, and she returned this past summer, spending a month working as a cashier at a truck stop just south of Alexander. Her efforts culminated in “Searching for the Good Life in the Bakken Oil Fields,” an immersive 6,000-word piece published by The Atlantic last month. Rao spoke with us about her gutsy decision to pick up and spend a month in the Bakken, her experience as a female reporter in a decidedly male-centric environment and carving out space for longer form enterprise reporting at daily papers.

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Can you tell me a little bit about your initial process? How did this story come into being? Did you always know it would end up at The Atlantic?

I had followed the oil boom for a while, but it wasn’t part of my beat at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, so I figured whatever I wrote would be on my own time. I got this idea that it would be an interesting story to try to find work in the Bakken for a month or so – the most amount of time I could get off from my job – because one big theme in the story of western North Dakota right now is what Americans do for work. I figured I would go up and see what I could do without the pressure of answering to any particular editor, since I didn’t know what I would find and was winging it, in a way. I went up at the start of June, and came back at the beginning of July, returning to my job and various family and social obligations. I panicked that the story was lost for good when I was in Manhattan for a few days in July and left my phone, which had all the recordings of my interviews, in a cab in Harlem one night. Somebody actually returned it the next day. I was done writing in mid-August, which is when I started pitching. I’m originally from the East Coast and knew that a publication in New York or D.C. would be as intrigued by this story as I was, since there’s been a lot of national interest in the Bakken.

There are many ways of covering the North Dakota oil boom. Stephen Rodrick suited up and moved to a “man camp” for a Men’s Journal story. Susan Elizabeth Shepard and Laura Gottesdiener wrote about their experiences working at strip clubs in Williston, North Dakota for Buzzfeed and Mother Jones, respectively. Is there something about the place that makes it particularly ripe for this kind of immersive reporting? How did you choose your cashier job?

So many mainstream stories have been done about the Bakken that I was attempting to do something more original and memorable, and I imagine that’s what the other reporters you mention had in mind. Over the years, I’ve been intrigued by articles talking about even simple retail jobs paying up to $17 an hour, and stores struggling with high turnover. There’s also been media coverage on the stresses that oilfield trucks are putting on local infrastructure. I felt that applying for a job at a truck stop would be a meaningful way to examine those issues up close. I initially applied to truck stops owned by corporate chains, but when I stopped at a friend’s house in Williston to talk about my project, his roommate mentioned a truck stop called the Wild Bison. I hadn’t even considered extending my search outside of Williston, and the Wild Bison was just south of a little town I had never heard of called Alexander. But I drove down the following morning and knew right away that it would be a great place to tell this sort of story: it was family-owned, sat along a key oilfield route, and I was able to get a job without many questions. That was important to me because I knew I couldn’t lie to anybody for this article.

At any point did you start to panic?

When I first went out there, my first week out there was so uneventful. That weekend I really started doubting if I had made the right decision. The truck stop had put me on a less busy cash register. I also began to worry about how I would juggle the ethics and logistics of writing an article, since I didn’t walk into the job announcing I was a reporter. I made an effort to get people’s numbers and talk to them outside of work hours, and also did a lot of reporting that had nothing to do with the truck stop but that I knew would help me understand the bigger picture. I spent a day going up and down Highway 85 – the road that the Wild Bison was on – just talking to people. I spent time with a drilling crew. It’s not in there, but it helped me understand the issues. It’s important to note too, that I went into this thinking if it didn’t work out [for publication], it was still something I wanted to do. I love learning about the American landscape – my hobby is taking road trips around the country – and I got a chance to do that just talking to my customers about the places they were from and what had brought them up here.

You render your fellow North Dakotans with a humanity that (unfortunately) isn’t always seen in this kind of piece. But you also have a great line in there, acknowledging that they might sound like the butt of some East Coast urbanite’s joke. Did you feel a certain pressure to avoid that kind of cliched depiction?

I came in thinking that if I’m going to work at this truck stop and they don’t know I’m a writer, I don’t want to take advantage of the situation. I didn’t want anyone to feel like they were tricked at all. Even interacting with my coworkers, I didn’t want to be in some position where they were confiding in me and

By the third week or so I was pretty open about what I was doing, telling my coworkers I was a writer interested in doing a story about life at a truck stop. With one truck driver, Aerosmith, I went over and over with him about it, saying ‘Are you sure you want your name in there?’ and making sure he realized this would actually be online. But he was fine with it; he showed it to a lot of his trucker friends.

I have spent most of my life in big metropolitan areas on the East Coast, like D.C. and Philly, and one reason I moved to Minneapolis in 2012 was to take on the challenge of reporting on a new area of the country and just getting outside that bubble. I’m aware that some people on the outside may think these people are on the fringes of society, but I went in thinking they were really brave and they were go-getters. I saw something in them that I wanted to be more of, and that Americans should be more of—going after something without excuse or complaint, going after something even if it’s difficult.

There’s a point in the piece where a co-worker warns you to be careful. Were you ever worried about your physical safety?

I just felt a familiarity with the area; maybe it sounds naïve. I’ve already done things like this so many times; as a reporter you’re always running into ridiculous situations, jumping in cars with people is part of capturing scenes and getting stories, and doing this I just felt I was in reporter mode. It seemed like she just felt sorry for me: ‘This poor girl doesn’t know what she’s getting into.’ She just saw me as a kind of quiet girl in a cashier’s uniform. She had a valid point, but I was careful about where I met people and I quickly distanced myself from any interviewees who seemed to misread my professional interest as something more personal. Not only am I an experienced solo traveler, but I’m willing to accept a certain level of risk to be a journalist. Women are obviously more vulnerable than men, but I wish that we could get past seeing women who do these kinds of things as foolish, brave or weird. Nobody would consider a man doing the same thing as remarkable.

I love the idea of “reporter mode,” almost like a second skin one can slip on, both protective in a way, and also an extra layer of awareness. Were you a Harriet the Spy kind of kid? Did you always know this was what you wanted to do?

I knew I wanted to be a journalist since elementary school, though at first it was initially just because I wanted to write for a living, not because I was passionate about news. I filled dozens of spiral-bound notebooks with hand-written novels between ages 9 and 12 – most of them were about a talking bear named Fuzzy who solved mysteries – and to this day I wistfully recall 1996 as one of my most productive years as a writer. I had no Internet, cable, or social life, so that explains a lot of it. Anyway, then I realized that creative writing was too isolated for me and became interested in the idea of writing for a clearer purpose – in a way that connected with the community. I was very fortunate to start my career off at a great newspaper in a great news town, The Press of Atlantic City, which offered a lot of opportunities to learn harder-edged reporting.

You started out at The Press of Atlantic City before moving on to The Philadelphia Inquirer and eventually the Minneapolis Star Tribune. It’s certainly been a shifting landscape at daily newspapers over the last ten years. Can you tell me a little more about this?

I’ve been a daily newspaper journalist for eight years. Of the newspapers I’ve worked at, only the Inquirer had significant financial difficulties, and that was also the paper that put the most emphasis on longform journalism, so it comes down to newsroom culture more than staffing levels sometimes. The Star Tribune also values good enterprise reporting, but they prefer stories to be more concise. Doing in-depth work for any daily newspaper has generally gotten tougher.

Working at a newspaper has a lot of benefits – you get to be part of a big team, with editors encouraging you to consider points you might not have thought of, and more experienced reporters offering their expertise. But as newsprint space has diminished, I’ve been excited to see that there are many opportunities to do in-depth journalism online. I don’t think print is the be-all, end-all, and some of the stories I’m proudest of, including this story about the Wild Bison, have only run on the web.

There’s a real sense of a certain kind of America in both this piece and your roadtrip story. Is there a specific America that you hope to capture in your work?

For most of my life, until I was 27, I lived roughly between Washington, D.C. and New York. It felt like the center of the universe. There’s a certain privilege to that – I received a great education, had exposure to people from diverse backgrounds, and had access to good professional opportunities. But I also had a great curiosity about the rest of the country and felt too removed. I wanted to tell stories about the kinds of people who usually wouldn’t receive attention, who are outside the big population centers. I am drawn to the ideas of self-reliance, resilience, no excuses and no pretenses – just triumphing over seeming limitations. The Great Plains and the American West, and the people who inhabit those places, really embody that for me and I hope to tell more of their stories.

Let’s return briefly to the topic of being a woman in the Bakken, which was the theme of your first dispatch from North Dakota and also certainly affected your experiences this time around.

My first piece in the oil field was kind of tongue-in-cheek. An acquaintance from when I first moved to Minneapolis in 2012 was talking about how his aunt in Williston could hardly go to the grocery store there without randy oil workers leering at her in the aisles and I just instantly thought, “That’s a story!” I wanted to go up anyway because I wanted to see all 50 states, and North Dakota was one of only about five left and within driving distance. After hearing some more snippets here and there about the guy-to-girl ratio I knew I had to see for myself. Most men up there are actually very respectful and are just keeping their heads down and working, but one thing I wasn’t prepared for was that when I exchanged numbers as part of my standard professional process in interviews, some men misread that and would continue calling even when I hadn’t answered the last four calls. It wasn’t that women were harassed everywhere they went or anything, but every woman I talked to had a horror story about a man hounding her at some point. One thing I’ve been really excited about, though, is the quality of reporting coming out of the Bakken by women. Female reporters have written about going undercover as a day laborer, a waitress, and in my case, a truck stop cashier – I’m actually really surprised that we haven’t seen more of this style of immersive reporting by men. While a male reporter would certainly blend in better, as a woman talking to men, I realized that one advantage I had was that people were less likely to feel threatened by me.

Postscript: I’m actually in the Bakken now to do some stories for the Star Tribune, and stopped in the Bison again – it’s the nearest place to the trailer park I’m crashing in to get a cup of coffee. I’ve been gone for less than four months and so much has changed. First of all, when I arrived at night, I didn’t even recognize Highway 85 anymore because while I was gone they had completed a bypass that takes you around Alexander’s main street. I also didn’t recognize any of the cashiers, and learned that Randy, the manager who hired me, had been let go by the new corporate management, TravelCenters of America. The previous owners had returned to Washington state. Fish, one of the worst offenders of truck-overloading, has since found a law-abiding job at Halliburton, while his trucking partner, Blackneck, left to be closer to his family. I saw Wayne, the homeless panhandler, at the same spot – he said he went to California, but it was taking a long time to get disability benefits and he was back visiting friends. Aerosmith is still trucking.

Note: This conversation was conducted by phone and over email, and has been condensed for length and clarity.

You can find more of Rao’s work here. Inspired by Rao’s piece, Longreads has also assembled a reading list of immersive reporting from the North Dakota oil boom.

See the reading list

Photo: Katie G. Nelson Photography

Excerpts from an Instagram essay, by Jeff Sharlet. See part one.

* * *

Ryan is working. He has brought out into the night—Minneapolis, a neighborhood called Dinkytown—a trash bag of packing peanuts, a cup of water so he can stick them to windows, and a portable loudspeaker with a microphone. “There’s always going to be obstacles to loving your child,” he broadcasts. “You must destroy them.” // He’s wearing a sombrero, beneath it a wig of yellow curls. Also, a toga, or maybe a muumuu. A garment of his own devising, yellow and green batik, tied tight around his chest, just below the nipple. He knows what he looks like. It’s a job, he says. “Being crazy.” Social security, ten years. // I’m interested in the window. “I think he’s telling the truth,” says a woman named Laura, who’s been helping him stick peanuts to the window of this cafe. “I’m a mother,” she says. // “I’m crazy,” Ryan says, “but I’m a great dad.” // His wife works here. Their daughter is named K___. “For a friend who committed suicide,” he says. Her middle name’s Nirvana, after the band. His wife has custody. “She told the court I came into the coffee shop and threw water at her.” False. “I was throwing water at somebody else, and she got splashed.” // Laura says, “Kids like water.” // “It’s discrimination,” Ryan says, “because I’m insane.” // “I have to go now, Ryan,” Laura says. “My baby needs me.” Her boy. He’s turning eight on Sunday. // Ryan’s working on the next window. He’s writing his baby girl’s name. K___. “It’s pretty, right?” he says. He smiles. “She loved me.” Past tense. “I’ll probably never see her again.”

* * *

Motorcycle, needs to be moved, 3 a.m. Jonathan’s job to move it. Can’t wait? “Nope. Right now.” Buckle it down. “No more calls, I’m hoping.” Long shift. “Started at noon.” 15 hours? “I’m the night shift manager.” So why noon? “Yeah, I know.” That’s the shift? “It’s just working.” Call’s worth $125. Who pays? “Owner. He made the call.” Must be an easier way. “I don’t know,” says Jonathan. “I don’t have a motorcycle.”

* * *

“Killing time,” Tracy says. She was playing when we arrived, and now it’s last call. Which is two a.m. at the Green Mill, a sports bar in Minneapolis. Must’ve been a crowd earlier—Vikings-Packers. Packers, in a rout, and nobody’s talking about the game. Hardly anybody here but Tracy. I ask her if she’s winning. “It’s Photo Hunt,” she says. “You just have to find things.” I thought she was gambling. Video poker. “Oh, no,” she says. “It’s just”—she finds what she’s looking for. “Now,” she says, “I’m looking for a shield.” She finds her shield. She’s not a regular, she says. “I just come here all the time.” Because it’s easy. “My boyfriend’s the bartender.” Big man, I’d noticed his shirt—Vikings, taut across the shoulders. Looks like he played. A kind face. I want to ask him for his picture. Twenty years on Tracy at least. // That’s not him, Tracy says. “I mean, he used to work here.” Now he’s at Chino Latino. She works there, too. Tonight’s his shift. He’s closing. She’s waiting. It’s last call. “He’ll be here soon.” She smiles, looks up from Photo Hunt, points out the door. “He lives right there.” Across the street. “It’s convenient.” // Later my friend Joan says, “Twelve seconds.” Twelve seconds for Tracy to mention her boyfriend. “I wasn’t—” I say. “Doesn’t matter,” says Joan. “Mention of boyfriend; someone’s expecting you; mention of proximity.” I say, “I didn’t mean to—” Joan says, “It’s not about you.” “It’s true,” says T, Joan’s boyfriend. Joan says: “ ‘I have a boyfriend. He’ll be here soon. He’s close by.’ You do it without thinking.”

* * *

My friend T drives an ambulance, so he wasn’t really interested when we came upon a city block taped off for an accident. He’d seen it before, knew nothing good comes of seeing it at all. He had other things on his mind. It was close to midnight, kitchens were closing, T wanted to eat. But the cop at the end of the block drew me in. Drew me in by turning away. Whole block taped off, just one cop. Fat guy drinking Diet Snapple. Leaning against his SUV. Bit of a chill in the air. Decided to sit inside. // So there was nobody at the tape, nobody on the street. Like a movie set, after the shooting. T’s girlfriend, Joan, and I walked down the middle of the road. Nothing to see but police tape. Tape on both sides. Tape around cars like presents wrapped in yellow ribbon. Tape around trees. // Then, middle of the block, the crash. No bodies, no blood, no people. Just cars, or what had once been cars. Now they were beyond such categories. Beyond physics, it seemed. We studied. Like we’d been given a problem to solve. We couldn’t solve it. (“You’d be amazed at the ways bodies survive,” T told us later. He said he’d seen bodies—people, alive—pulled out of arrangements like this one. “So, you know, maybe,” he said.) // After a while, a cop—he must have been a cop—told us to leave the “crime scene.” // T had been right. About the kitchens. We missed them by minutes. So we drove, looking for late night in Minneapolis, because T and Joan had driven down to the city to visit me, I was on a flight home in the morning and this was what we had for a social hour. Around 2:30 we found ourselves, by accident, back at the crime scene. The tape had disappeared. A few banged-up cars sat slightly askew from where their owners had parked them. There’d be surprises in the morning. The main characters were gone. Only chalk outlines remained. A drawing for each piece. I looked at T. Something about this felt different than gawking. Maybe. I took a picture: there was a wheel here, and part of an axle. You’d be amazed at the ways bodies survive.

* * *

“I think it counts as a church,” she says. One story, red brick, looks like a dentist’s office. Letters on the glass door, Institute of Religion. Latter Day Saints. Hillary left when she was 18. But the Church, she says, always remembers your name. // Hillary remembers her baptisms. Plural. Baptisms for the dead. A Mormon practice: saving the souls of those who’ve already died. Hillary was the proxy. There was a television screen beside a basin perched on the back of 12 carved oxen. She doesn’t remember what she wore. “Maybe there was a zipper.” And there was a man. He’d read a name off the screen, and dunk her. Read another name, and dunk her. “A guy I didn’t know, touching me, dunking me underwater.” Some people panic. “It’s kinda like being drowned.” // There were a dozen, maybe 15 baptisms. But there was only one name: Maria Salome. A dozen, maybe 15, Maria Salomes, 16th century, she thinks, she can’t remember. And one Hillary, age 13, going under, and under. // She’s 30 now. She’s moved around. She’s back in Minnesota. Working on a novel. Five, actually. A series. 1061 pages so far. Unread. She’s thinking of giving some pages to the man she lives with. The man and his wife and his two boys; Hillary lives in their basement. Old friends, there for her when money isn’t. She lives in their basement and she comes up for meals, she plays with the boys, and then around 11 she goes down and she writes, until 3 or 4 in the morning. She works hard. No romance. Just writing. Friends, occasionally. Her friends play Dungeons & Dragons; she watches. They play Magic, the card game; she asks them how. // In the book, which has no name, there’s a girl, 17, and a man, 25. Something bad has happened to the girl, but we don’t know what it is. There are scars. There are dark forces. She doesn’t want to give it away. // The last volume will end on July 16, 1999. “That was the day,” she says, “when I first knew I was going to die.” She was on a river, she remembers the water, it was gentle. “You couldn’t drown,” she says. She remembers everything about July 16, 1999.

* * *

No story, just the dead, in their tidy rows. Seen from a plane banking over a cemetery, on my way home.

* * *

Jeff Sharlet’s books include The Family, and C Street, and Sweet Heaven When I Die. He’s an associate professor of creative nonfiction at Dartmouth College. Read more of his Instagram essays at http://instagram.com/jeffsharlet

Alec MacGillis | The Cynic | September 2014 | 13 minutes (3,241 words)

Below is an excerpt from The Cynic, a new book by The New Republic writer Alec MacGillis about Mitch McConnell, who was just elected to a sixth term in the U.S. Senate and—with Republicans now taking control of the Senate—will become the new majority leader. Our thanks to MacGillis for sharing this with the Longreads community.

* * *

In 1984, Mitch McConnell hired Roger Ailes. Ailes was still a dozen years from founding Fox News, but his reputation was already well established. After meeting Richard Nixon backstage at The Mike Douglas Show, which he helped produce, he’d been brought on to tutor the dour candidate in the ways of television for the 1968 campaign. After stormy forays into theater and TV news, he was by the early 1980s specializing in creating ads for Republican Senate candidates. There was no mystery what you were getting when you hired Ailes as your adman—hard-hitting spots that went straight for the opponent’s weak spot. Factual accuracy was not a priority. To elect Alphonse D’Amato senator in New York, that meant highlighting his opponent Liz Holtzman’s unmarried status. To reelect Harrison “Jack” Schmitt in New Mexico, that meant producing an ad that accused his opponent, state attorney general Jeff Bingaman, of having freed a “convicted felon” on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. As Gabriel Sherman notes in his biography of Ailes, the FBI had “requested [the convict’s] temporary release into its custody in order for him to testify as a key prosecution witness at a trial in Texas for the murder of a judge.” Asked about the ad, Ailes said it was Bingaman’s job to point out the context of the felon’s release. “My responsibility ends with the act. Maybe folks can say I’m an unethical guy. But it’s not my job to make . . . Bingaman’s case.”

Ailes brought with him not only an unrestrained approach to the business of making ads but a penchant for personal drama. He was known to get into physical scuffles with coworkers and once punched a hole through the wall of the control room of the NBC late-night talk show where he worked. His personal style could hardly have been in starker contrast to that of the buttoned-down McConnell, for whom cutting loose meant sitting back with his aides in the county office after work to sip from the bottle of Old Forester bourbon he kept on hand.

But Ailes and McConnell shared one thing in common. And it trumped all difference, as well as any misgivings McConnell might have about hiring someone with an unscrupulous reputation. As Janet Mullins, McConnell’s manager for the coming campaign, later recalled: “Roger lived it and breathed it and wanted to win as badly as Mitch did.” Or as Ailes himself put it in his favorite office mantra: “Whatever it takes.”

* * *

The person unfortunate enough to find himself in the sights of McConnell’s new hire was a second-term senator named Walter “Dee” Huddleston, a World War II tank gunner who’d entered politics after several decades in the radio business. He had won the race to succeed the retiring John Sherman Cooper. Now Cooper’s protégé wanted the seat back.

Huddleston was well liked and politically in tune with his constituents, a quintessential Southern Democrat. But like Todd Hollenbach, he did not realize what he was up against with this mild-mannered young Louisville lawyer. This miscalculation was understandable, to a degree—if Mitch McConnell had seemed ill-suited to campaigning among his fellow Louisvillians, he seemed even more so out in the state’s outlying areas. He did his best to develop what Joe Whittle, the Republican state chairman at the time, calls his “mountain presentation,” but he was never going to be as natural with rural voters as, say, Gene Snyder, who, on visiting country stores, was known to pull out a knife and start whittling some wood.

McConnell, on the other hand, “hasn’t enough personality to wash a shotgun,” as Forgy, who in 1984 was again serving as Reagan’s campaign chairman, puts it. It didn’t help McConnell in the common-touch department that he was often carrying around a briefcase, an accessory that Forgy suspected was totally for show—a ploy by Ailes to make the youthful-looking forty-two-year-old look more senatorial. “I remember once, in Bowling Green, [Vice President George H. W.] Bush came to speak and said, ‘What’s he doing? Why does he have that briefcase with him?’ ” Forgy recalls. But regardless of the quips, McConnell persisted. “Most people wouldn’t be willing to carry around a briefcase that’s empty,” says Forgy. “You’d say, ‘Shit, I’m not going to do that.’ But he did it. . . . Whatever they were telling him to do, he did.”

No Republican had won a statewide election in the state since Cooper’s big win in 1966. To plot a path to victory, McConnell’s new pollster, Lance Tarrance from Houston—whom McConnell had courted with two separate trips to the Kentucky Derby—had segmented the electorate into five different groups: registered Republicans, younger suburban ticket-splitters, white conservative Democrats, white liberal Democrats, and black voters, who tilted Democratic. Even if McConnell got nearly all of the first group and the vast majority of the second, that still left him only at about 40 percent. The “key to everything,” Tarrance says, was the white conservative Democrats. If he could get more than a third of them, then he might pull it off.

Except McConnell’s numbers with these conservative Democrats were, if anything, declining over the summer of 1984 in the surveys Tarrance was doing. “We were sixty days out, and I told him, if this continues, we’re not going to get it,” Tarrance says. As Ailes recalled: “He was so far behind we almost had to flip a coin about who was going to give him the bad news.”

* * *

One Saturday night, Tarrance received an excited call from Ailes. “He told me he’d just finished with some wild and crazy ads that might blow up the campaign or might save it,” Tarrance says. Ailes sent the scripts to Tarrance by express mail. “They were brilliant,” says Tarrance. “Even though they were right out of Hee Haw.”

As Ailes later told it, he’d been watching TV at home that weekend when an ad for dog food came on, with a pack of dogs scurrying after a bag of kibble. This ad had stirred a recollection of a tidbit a campaign researcher had noted, that Huddleston had missed several important votes while giving paid speeches around the country (which senators were then allowed to do). Sherman, in his Ailes biography, describes the rest of the creative epiphany:

Ailes jotted down the word “Dogs!” on a piece of paper. During a strategy meeting, Ailes presented his vision. McConnell’s campaign manager, Janet Mullins, recalled the moment: “There was Roger, sitting in a cloud of pipe smoke, and he said, ‘This is Kentucky. I see hunting dogs. I see hound dogs on the scent looking for the lost member of Congress.’ ”

Thus was born a classic of the attack ad genre. Larry McCarthy, the Ailes associate who would go on to fame for crafting the Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential campaign, was put in charge of finding dogs and a trainer. This task proved difficult—McCarthy first came back with bluetick hounds, which were deemed not true Kentucky hounds. He went out for different ones. “If you’re going to be culturally calling someone on the carpet, you better have your cultural facts right,” says Tarrance. “We threw everything we had at this, because we had maxed out everything else we could do.” Finally, it was ready: A pack of bloodhounds straining on their leashes head off from Capitol Hill, through the woods, across a beach, past a swimming pool, with this voice-over, scripted by Ailes: “My job was to find Dee Huddleston and get him back to work. Huddleston was skipping votes but making an extra fifty thousand dollars giving speeches. Let’s go, boys!”

The charge that Huddleston was playing widespread hooky was, as Newsweek noted at the time, “baseless”: Huddleston was present for 94 percent of votes. McConnell himself later admitted that an accompanying radio ad attacking Huddleston for his attendance at committee meetings was “fundamentally unfair” and “kind of ridiculous.” But the line of attack rang true, given that the phlegmatic Huddleston was running such a lackluster campaign. Voters ate it up—especially the conservative Democrats who might otherwise be left cool by the Louisville lawyer with the briefcase. “People would say, ‘Mitch, what about the coon hounds!’ ” says Whittle, who was often with McConnell on the trail. And McConnell’s numbers with that key segment surged.

Still, McConnell had not yet closed the gap, and an air of desperation was settling over the campaign. Never had Tarrance seen a candidate as on edge as McConnell in those final weeks. “He was pretty psychologically uptight, that’s as nice as I can put it,” Tarrance says. “He knew this was his one chance to make a breakout. It was all on the line. He kept using the phrase ‘We need to find the silver bullet,’ something to put us over fifty percent . . . . I’ve never been on a campaign before or since with so much physical tension to find the key that would finally open the door.” He adds, “Everything you discussed with Mitch was how to climb the mountain. There was no laughing, no joking.” Tarrance and Ailes had no shortage of campaigns to advise that year, he said, but on none of them were they working nearly as hard as for Mitch McConnell.

The campaign decided their best bet was to go back to the dogs one more time, at the risk of overdoing it. They aired a sequel in which the hound dogs find Huddleston, played by a look-alike actor, cowering way up in a tree.

That might have done it. McConnell won, just barely, by a margin of five thousand votes—four-tenths of a percentage point, about one vote per precinct. At the Republican victory party in Louisville, Gene Snyder, McConnell’s first boss in Washington, was overheard remarking with wry wonderment that Kentuckians had just elected to the U.S. Senate someone who had fewer friends in Kentucky than “anybody elected to anything.”

* * *

McConnell’s margin of victory was particularly narrow in contrast to the more than 283,000 votes by which another Republican won that night in Kentucky: Ronald Reagan.

McConnell had an ambivalent relationship with the president. He was, after all, no Ronald Reagan Republican—in keeping with his John Sherman Cooper inheritance, he had backed Gerald Ford in 1976 and George H. W. Bush in 1980 over the conservative ex-governor from California (not only that, he had privately ranked Reagan fourth among Republican candidates in 1980). But with Reagan near the peak of his popularity in 1984 and running against Walter Mondale, a liberal Minnesotan with little appeal for Kentucky swing voters—especially those conservative Democrats who were the key to his election—McConnell had done his utmost to associate himself with the top of the ticket. Whittle, the state party chairman, had made it a refrain to tell voters around the state that Reagan “needs Mitch” in Washington. McConnell’s team, lacking campaign chairmen in many of the state’s counties, had asked the Reagan campaign if its county chairmen could double in that role for McConnell.

While the Reagan campaign agreed to that request, the eagerness for association had not been mutual. When Reagan came to Louisville for one of his debates against Mondale, a visit McConnell’s campaign hyped as much as it could, the president referred to the candidate as “O’Donnell.” But that slight had done nothing to diminish the tug of Reagan’s coattails. It was a political scientist’s axiom: if the top of the ticket is pulling 60 percent or more of the vote, there is a coattail effect for candidates farther down the ticket. “It helped a lot,” says Whittle. “Anytime you have someone like Ronald Reagan anyplace that’s conservative, it’s going to help the party down the line, down to sheriff. I hate to say that’s the whole thing, but in order to win Kentucky, you’ve got to get the Republicans out,” and Reagan did that for McConnell. Hollenbach, McConnell’s 1977 opponent, is blunter: “If you take away . . . Ronald Reagan, there is no Mitch McConnell.”

It was because Reagan’s impact on McConnell’s election was so obvious that people attending the GOP election night party in Louisville were so startled when McConnell, in his victory speech, did not acknowledge the president at all. After seeking to bask in Reagan’s reflected glow throughout the campaign, McConnell did not want to share the spotlight. “He never mentioned Reagan. He never said, ‘I appreciate the margin Reagan provided,’ ” says Forgy, Reagan’s Kentucky campaign chairman. When reporters asked Forgy that night about McConnell’s victory, he was candid. “I said, ‘Hell, Reagan’s coattails were as long as a bedsheet.’ ” When quotes to this effect appeared in the press the next morning, Forgy heard from McConnell. “He called me the next day and said, ‘Don’t say that anymore,’ ” Forgy says. “He didn’t want the Democrats to pick up on the fact that he was a political fluke—that he didn’t get there by an intentional process.”

McConnell was at a loss about how to discuss his victory. When Tully Plesser, his former pollster, called him after the election to congratulate him, McConnell told him that the press was “hounding him” about what he thought was key to his victory, and said that he had credited Ailes’s ad, rather than Reagan. Plesser told McConnell that this answer was wrong. “I told him to say that you won because your positions coincided with the interests of the voters. Not because a very skilled and manipulative operative pulled a stunt on your behalf.”

McConnell took this advice. From that point on, his account of his election to the Senate left out both Reagan and Ailes. This omission did not endear him with Ailes, or with others who had worked so hard on that high-pressure campaign. “McConnell read too much into himself instead of Ailes in the first case and Reagan in the second,” says Tarrance. The lack of gratitude became more glaring a few years later when McConnell put out word that he was going to make his 1984 team reapply for the job for his reelection, just as he had decided to shop around for new advisers after his county campaigns.

Tarrance found this obnoxious in the extreme. “We suddenly saw a different McConnell,” he said. “He was arrogant and disloyal to the people that put him there.” Tarrance flew up from Houston to meet with McConnell but found him “cold and arrogant and not very loyal to his team. He really pissed me off.” Tarrance told McConnell that he wasn’t going to take the job even if offered, and left. A McConnell aide called him at the airport to get him to change his mind, to no avail. Ailes grudgingly decided to stay on and do some ads for McConnell, though in a reduced capacity. “Ailes and I had put together a pretty good team, and it was like McConnell was breaking his team,” says Tarrance. “I’ll fight to the death, but not for someone I don’t believe in. Roger . . . said, ‘I’ll go and do it,’ but we both lost a lot of respect for him.”

The irony was, even as McConnell was seeking to downplay Reagan’s role in his election, he was working to align himself with the conservative president. Leading up to and during his campaign, the Ripon Society’s political arm, the New Leadership Fund, had touted McConnell as a moderate Republican on the rise. But on arriving in Washington, he confounded such expectations. He supported Reagan’s plan to arm the Contras against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. He won conservative plaudits for pushing tort reform proposals (he came up with a “Sue for a Million Award” gimmick to highlight egregious tort claims). He broke with the agreement Huddleston and his fellow Democratic senator Wendell Ford had crafted for picking federal judges in Kentucky, a judicial nominating commission that McConnell decided was undermining his and Reagan’s prerogative to select conservative judges.

And, to the dismay of Jessica Loving and his other abortion rights allies in Louisville, McConnell flipped to the pro-life side on votes such as blocking Medicaid funding for abortions in cases of rape or incest. (Years later, Loving ran into McConnell at a cocktail party at the University of Louisville and told him, “By the way, I’ve never properly thanked you for what you did—you were the best elected official for the pro-choice issue,” to which, she recalls, “he got this pained look, his face got paler than usual and his lips got thinner than usual and he said, ‘You know, I don’t really want anyone to know that.’ ”)

Most strikingly, perhaps, McConnell took up the fight for his party against legislation that was championed by his fellow Kentucky senator, Wendell Ford, calling for expanding voter participation by allowing citizens to register to vote when getting their driver’s license. McConnell was candid about his reasons for opposing the “Motor Voter” bill—expanded voter registration helped Democrats, he said. He went so far as to suggest that low voter turnout was preferable in general: it is “a sign of the health of our democracy that people feel secure enough about the health of the country and about its leaders where they don’t have to obsess about politics all the time.” (A decade later, he would take the lead in pushing for voter identification requirements in the big 2002 election reform bill, thereby opening a major new front in his party’s push to limit access to the polls.)

McConnell had warned of a coming rightward tack as he prepared to run for Senate, telling Keith Runyon of the Courier-Journal, the husband of his former county aide Meme Runyon, that running for statewide office would require some adaptive coloration. “He told me he was going to change, because his electorate would change,” she says. But in later explaining to Kleber, the historian, and Dyche, the authorized biographer, the sheer extent of his rightward shift on arriving in Washington, McConnell pointed to a different explanation. Even if he had not been a Ronald Reagan man, he had watched Reagan win, and win big. The Senate Republican caucus he was arriving in was notably more conservative than it had been in the previous session. “The Capitol Hill rookie did not need a political compass to notice that the GOP had enjoyed considerable electoral success as it had moved rightward. Having gone with that flow, he now found himself in Washington,” writes Dyche, paraphrasing McConnell. “Ronald Reagan . . . provided a powerful example that conservatism could work both in practice and politically” and McConnell “saw [conservatism’s] adherents endure both bad polls and bad press and still win.”

For someone who had almost lost, and didn’t want to come that close to losing again, the moral of the story was clear.

* * *

From The Cynic, by Alec MacGillis, copyright 2014 Stefan Alexander MacGillis. Reprinted by permission of Simon and Schuster Inc.

Meaghan O’Connell | Longreads | Nov. 6, 2014 | 57 minutes (14,248 words)

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It was Monday, June 2nd, and I was wide awake at 6 a.m. Maybe to some of you this hour doesn’t sound remarkable, but for me it was. It was the first day in a lifetime of six in the mornings, and I made the three-hour leap all in one go.

By this point, it was 10 days past my due date, and I had a very specific and recurring fantasy of being moved around town in a hammock flown by a helicopter. I wanted to be airlifted between boroughs.

When I told my fiancé, Dustin, this wish, he was quiet for a second. He had learned to reply to me with caution, but I imagine in this case he just couldn’t help himself.

“Like a whale?” he asked.

I laughed, standing on the curb somewhere. Actually yes, come to think of it: Like a whale.

On the morning of June 2nd I had been waking up “still pregnant” for quite some time—41 weeks and two days to be exact; 289 days. My mom was in town already, at an Airbnb rental a block away. Dustin was done with work. I was chugging raspberry red leaf tea, bouncing on a purple exercise ball whenever I could, shoving evening primrose oil pills up my vagina, paying $40 a pop at community acupuncture sessions I didn’t believe in, and doing something called “The Labor Dance.” The Dance (preferred shorthand) involves rubbing your belly in a clockwise direction—vigorously—and then getting as close to twerking as one can at 41 weeks pregnant.

* * *

I never did get far enough into adulthood where I was waking up at 6 a.m. for self-betterment, which is one among many things I thought I would master before having children. Add to that: novel writing, working out, makeup, clothing, getting up early. As I got closer and closer to childbirth I still held out hope for a few of them. I went to Sephora; I opened Google Docs; downloaded the Couch to 5k app for the tenth time; waddled around the track at my local park, my baby bump a-bouncing. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.

Anyway, it was 6 a.m. and I was wide awake and staring at the wall. Then ow. It was like the crest of a wave of a period cramp; the worst moment, if you have forgotten to take Tylenol and then are cursing yourself that you forgot to take Tylenol. I lay there with my mind racing for awhile, then got up and ate Frosted Mini Wheats the way I had done for much of my pregnancy. Dustin was sleeping. I had another one. Another “thing.” Ow. I was kind of smiling at them at this point. Whoa, no way. Could it be? I got in the shower, jittery with this new development. Ow-ow-ow. I grabbed the towel rack and wondered how many more showers I’d take that day. In all of my natural childbirth classes everyone was raving about the magic of hot showers. I suspected, or feared, that their analgesic powers were not as good as advertised. Ow.

I got back into bed and lay there naked and huge, staring at Dustin sleeping, waiting for him to wake up. I didn’t want to look at the time, but I looked at the time and the ows were 15 minutes or so apart. Ow, ow, ow I whispered into my arm. I grimaced; I cringed. So far the pain was about as bad as a stubbed toe. It was a “Damn!” pain, but it was still amusing. I was kind of proud of it, too, of my body. It had finally kicked itself into gear.

I was also a little excited because I didn’t feel like working that day, or going to another one of my doctor’s appointments at the hospital, a 40-minute commute away. The appointments are for overdue women. You sit in a room full of hospital-style armchairs (comfy but upholstered in cornflower blue, and with the kind of material you could wipe down with a washcloth) and you pull up your shirt to reveal your belly, while the nurse lubes you up and straps monitors to you and you sit with the other women whose bodies have not kicked into gear, and a chorus of fetal heart tones sing out in the room like horses galloping. The first time I sat there I cried with some kind of joy at this.

Today though, I was done with all of it.

Whether I woke Dustin up or he woke up on his own I don’t know, but when he did I lay there for awhile without saying anything. I must have waited for the next ow-ow-ow.

“Is this it?” he asked me.

I don’t know, I think I told him. I had suddenly felt very shy, like I was getting my first period and didn’t want anyone to know. “It could be nothing,” I said and we smiled. He got excited, I tried not to. “I don’t know!” I shouted, laughing at the truth of it. Then ow-ow-ow.

My mom came over and our plan was to grab breakfast at a coffee shop where I would stay and do work. She’d leave me be, then pick me up for my appointment a few hours later. She rang our bell and came and sat with me in the living room. I wondered if I could pretend to do work and then go into labor secretly, on my own. I waited and waited and squeezed a couch pillow in silence while she drank coffee and I pretended nothing was out of the ordinary, then finally I shrugged and tried to hide a smile and announced, matter-of-fact, that I didn’t think I was going to be doing any work that day.

“Stuff’s…happening,” I told her. She got excited, I told her not to. She ignored me. I covered my face in my hands. I flashed back to me walking in on her in the bathroom in 1995 and asking her for a maxi pad. She had tried to give me a tampon. I shook my head and ran out.

We all went for a walk to get things moving. I should be walking, was all that I could think. I did not want to fail at birth. In practice, this meant I drank half of an iced coffee and bent all the way over on street corners, burying my head in Dustin’s chest approximately every 10 minutes. We made it to a park that was just filling up with small children and their mothers who eyed me suspiciously; I was soon to be one of them. I side-eyed them back, and then muffled my shouts into Dustin’s shirt sleeve. I kneaded the flesh of his arms, pulled on his belt loops, yanked at all of his pockets, grabbed him by the hips, sipped iced coffee, trudged forward in the sun. I laughed at myself, shaking my head between contractions. It was, it seemed, really happening. The pain was getting much worse. It was now a much more painful, sustained toe stubbing. Like your body being twisted and wrung out from the inside. But temporary! You just had to ride it out. It was almost fun at this point—a personal challenge. “You’re going to stub your toe very, very hard every 10 minutes for the next few hours, but then you’ll have a baby!” It seemed okay.

“Annnnd here we go!” I’d say, then shove my iced coffee into my mom’s hands and slam my head into Dustin. I did my breathing, dutifully, skillfully, and I moved around rhythmically, alternating between belly dancer and mentally disturbed person slamming her head against the bus seat in front of her.

My contractions moved to seven minutes apart, and we walked home. Going through labor surrounded by my closest loved ones, who were not themselves going through labor was, well, it was embarrassing, but not in a way I really felt. There was the me of polite company who felt ashamed, angry and slighted by the whole affair. Then there was the bodily me, who was very busy having her organs tightened with a belt made of barbed wire.

I would float out above my body and smile in wonder and awe, and then I would be yanked back in, like a gust of wind through a subway tunnel. Knowing it was supposed to be happening was the only thing that kept me from screaming, from calling an ambulance, from being sure I would die. Also the temporary-ness. It was like doing battle, or having battle be done unto you, every seven minutes.

* * *

Time wore on. We moved from room to room, I ate piece after piece of watermelon. We never listened to any music. I don’t know, really, what we did in those minutes between contractions. Read our phones? Talked to each other? I know at a certain point I Googled “average length of labor first time mom.” I remember debating typing in “length” vs. “duration,” my eye on the clock. Do most people know the word “duration”? I wondered.

We finished packing the bag. I ate a yogurt popsicle, buried my face in pillows, and leaned over tables and countertops. I thought about how it was almost pornographic: my ass in the air, me moaning. Pornography of one.

I carried my big purple yoga ball around the house and was rolling all over it. I wore my blue and white cotton striped maternity dress, crew socks, and purple Crocs.

I labored in a dress? I labored in a dress.

We went for more walks and I was fine with having contractions around the neighborhood as long as no one from my building saw me. I tried to time our trips out the hallway with my contractions. Still, on our way out, I heard our neighbor say to Dustin, “Baby?”

“Not yet, we’re workin’ on it,” he responded.

I stood frozen in the doorway, and crawled back to my purple ball.

* * *

At some point, the contractions were three minutes apart. Then five. Then three. This happened for a while, and we were gathering our stuff, readying ourselves. It was was now 6 p.m. Dustin called the on-call OB and then hung up to call a car. That’s when the contractions stopped.

I stood up from being bent over the butcher block and looked at my phone, bereft. Ten minutes. Then 7. Then 10. Then 12. Then 15. They stalled out. I panicked. We walked. Ten minutes. Twelve minutes. Twenty minutes! Soon it was late. I argued with Dustin over how long a “normal” labor was. I thought about friends whose labors were six hours, or eight hours. That was normal. I tried crawling into the other room and looking in The Birth Partner when he was in the bathroom. I tried to visualize a worksheet my yoga teacher gave us in a workshop about average early labor durations and couldn’t find it on my desk. I spent whole hours wishing my mom would go home and go to sleep, but unable to communicate this. She did finally, and I felt such gratitude. Like maybe now it would work. Maybe she was a psychic block.

When that didn’t happen we tried to sleep, too. We slept in 12-minute intervals, then 15, then 20, then seven. All along the worst pain, rocking, cringing, shouting, kneading pain, waking me up every 12 minutes. I was so weak.

At midnight, I was exhausted and in tears and mad at Dustin for not calling again. I was cursing the piece of paper we had hanging on the fridge: 3-1-1. Three minutes apart, lasting a minute, for an hour.

“Maybe,” I whimpered, “this is just how labor is for me. Maybe I’m close. Maybe my contractions will never get closer together.” I sobbed, hopeless. “That happened to someone on Babycenter!” I said. I wanted to be monitored, to make sure the baby was okay. I was still feeling him kick but who knew? If he stopped, then what? It could be too late. We couldn’t see in there; couldn’t access it. This was what I hated most about pregnancy and what I wanted over with more than anything: the opacity of it all. I wanted him out where I could see him. But before that I had to be made to suffer. Before that: this.

When Dustin called the doctor again, seeming so grown-up in the next room, I got a contraction and made sure to moan extra loud for effect. Everyone told us the doctors gauge your labor sounds for signs of progress, so I hoped she’d overhear me and grant us access. Dustin paced and reasoned with her and then hung up and came back to me. She told him that normally she has patients wait until they’ve gone 24-36 hours and then at that point you can come in and get monitored for a bit. He put this to me gently, but without the despair I thought it required. He became, too, then, the enemy.

“No,” I said, crumbling. I was crying out of desperation. I needed a fix. I felt unheard; misunderstood. This was much different than physical pain. This could not be, I thought. It just cannot be. I wouldn’t make it that long. I’d never make it.

I don’t know how I endured the next eight hours, but it mostly involved making deals with myself. Keep going until 2 a.m. 3 a.m. Six. My mom came back over at 7 or 8 and I was feeling stubborn again. I didn’t want to go in, to ride in a horrible car during rush hour, only to be turned back. Everyone said the car ride was the worst part. I was scared of it, I cried at the thought. I wanted to set up shop, to have the baby, I wanted to be flown there by helicopter in a hammock, goddammit.

And all along: pain, pain, pain. The grooves of it were beginning to feel familiar, well-worn. Tired. Sore.

Gathering our stuff to get in the car gave me a second wind. I felt like a kid about to go on a big trip. I tried not to grin, feeling the bigness of the situation as I lived it; I was setting off to a terrible fate. I was screaming on the bed as Dustin would pop his head in holding something or other up in the air and asking if he should bring it. He picked up the yoga ball and looked at me and I looked at him and shook my head no. I was decisive, certain. No, no, no. I wanted to show up unarmed. I wanted to be taken care of. There would be no more bouncing.

We loaded into the car with me on the far left, Dustin in the middle, my mom on the right. I hadn’t imagined my mom with us, for any of this actually, but there she was and I wasn’t going to ask her to leave. She was quiet, like a ghost—a nice ghost—hovering, but unobtrusive. When she came over in the morning she said she had a dream we went to the hospital without her, implying she was worried about that. I took that to mean I shouldn’t ask her to meet us later. I said nothing; she climbed in.

It’s not that my mom bothered me by being there so much as I was constantly evaluating whether she was bothering me by being there.

We opened the door and I felt like Miss America, walking out onto the dais of my front stoop. The driver didn’t flinch when he saw me. I watched for it. The three of us slid into the back seat, Dustin in the middle. He patted my knee and leaned forward toward the cabbie. “She’s in labor,” he said with comic disregard. “You might hear some noises,” (driver roll up the partition, please) “but she’s not going to have the baby in the car or anything.”

​I gripped the handle above the car window, the one that must have been invented for women in labor. I got three contractions during our 40-minute commute to the hospital, through rush-hour traffic. I handled them silently, like a professional. We careened across Houston St., up the West Side Highway. The wind blew onto my face through the open window, saving me. I closed my eyes and breathed it in. It was as if I was on my way to the first day of school.

* * *

The problem with walking through the lobby of the hospital and riding up the elevators is that everyone at the hospital is having their own moment; it isn’t only you. This is not the story of you in labor, walking through the hospital. No one is even looking at you. People are dying, or visiting the dead, or coming in for surgery, or leaving from it. People are here to visit babies, ex-wives, get skin grafts. There is no evocative music playing as you glide through security. I’m having a baby! you might want to announce, as if your body doesn’t, but no one looks your way. The opportunity doesn’t arise.

The first place in Labor and Delivery you go is to “triage”, which is a not-nice name for a not-nice place. It is not triage for the whole hospital, just us women with a mark on our heads, or I guess in our bellies. As we burst through the doors of L&D—and there is no other way to enter it but bursting—my mom stopped us. “Wait, wait guys!” she shouted, laughing, but I was so over it. “I’m sorry but let me take your picture.” Only one person can accompany the woman-in-labor into triage, so my mom was about to be on her way back down the elevator.

In the picture, I’m swollen and huge and have this teenaged look where I’m trying not to roll my eyes.

I had a contraction as soon as we walked through the doors, which is convenient for the sake of seeming legitimate and un-foolish, showing up here with contractions 10 mins apart. This made the woman at the first desk nicer to me.

“Are you in labor?” she asked sweetly. I was bent over the counter. I shook my head yes, like in the movies. She used her ink pen to point us to triage, a tiny corner office. It looked like the DMV. We handed the woman my insurance card, and I bent over chairs that are as awful as any waiting room chairs you’ve seen in your life. There were other people in there, people not in labor, and they looked at me with sad eyes. I didn’t have much time to think about them, which was possibly a watershed moment in my life, in labor and in such pain that I couldn’t care anymore what other people thought of me.

Maybe this was the first time in my whole life I was truly unselfconscious, my face pressed into Dustin’s chest, my ass stuck out into the little U-shaped room.

We were called into a little section of triage; it was a big room with a bunch of beds and curtains. They had been doing construction on it when I went in. There were ladders and fresh paint, and I worried about the paint affecting the baby. I was told to go in alone.

Someone told me to change into a hospital gown, and to put my clothes in a bag. The thought of doing this by myself was overwhelming, but I did it anyway, bit by bit. There was a stretchy, crop-top-like thing I had to put over my belly to hold the monitors in place. It would be the same material they use to make the baby hats, but I didn’t know it yet. At this point I didn’t believe, really, that either of us, me or the baby, would make it out alive.

I was finally on a monitor which I loved so much, with all my heart. It was behind me a bit, over my left shoulder, and I lay in the bed and looked up at it the whole time, craning my neck. It had my heart rate and blood pressure, and the baby’s heart rate and my contractions. I told them again and again about my pregnancy, which was totally uncomplicated—perfect even. I had been in labor for 28 hours. No one cared. No one gave me a medal or batted an eye. They wrote it down. I wondered if they believe me. I wondered if they can know the pain I’ve been in.

I wished for a way to communicate pain more precisely than a scale of 1 to 10. But the scale is subjective, I longed to say. We have no way to know. I hated this. I said 7, 8. I didn’t know. It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt, but I have never had my arm cut off. That was what I always imagine to be the worst pain: having a limb chopped off. I saved 10 for it, out of respect. I wanted to save 9 for the moment the baby tears its way out of my vagina. So what’s left is 8. I wanted to seem brave, so I said 7, but then I worried they wouldn’t understand the immediacy of the situation, so I came back with 8. I shrugged. I tried to communicate in a gesture that I didn’t agree with their method, with these yellow emoticons, with the Spanish above it. DOLOR. I stared at this sign so much, waiting for some answer to come from it. MUY DOLOROSO.

Eventually Dustin came in and holds my arm. He’s betrayed, I sensed, after having been left out there so long. The residents wanted to check me. I was told this wasn’t a teaching hospital, I wanted to say, but don’t. They asked me if it was okay with me if two people checked me. I thought it had to be for accuracy but no, it was for their own benefit. If there’s anything I’d take back from labor it would have been the fact that I let two people fish around in my vagina for their own benefit.

I’d been “checked” before. This is what they call it. They want to “check you.” You means your cervix. You are your cervix. “Check” means stick a hand inside of “you”—your vagina—and measure how open your cervix is. They do this with their fingertips, because that is where we’re at with science in 2014: We use fingertips as a unit of measurement. Then you are pronounced whatever number of fingertips wide the gap in your cervix is. You are your cervix.

“I’m a three,” means your cervix is dilated three fingertips. You get checked, typically, at your last few OB appointments. “I” had been found to be closed. Or “soft and closed” or “high and tight.” “Low and soft and closed.” It’s all fucking subjective, obviously, and also means almost nothing. You feel as if you are failing some made-up game you don’t want to be playing in the first place.

Being checked sucked at my OB’s office, but it sucked more after being in labor for 30 hours. Everything was swollen and under fire. After the first resident checked me he pulled out his hand and it was covered in goo and blood, and I couldn’t help but notice that after he walked over to the trash to throw away the glove he kept his two fingers in the fingering position. Maybe I was projecting, but he seemed a little grossed out. I hated him for this, and still do, this resident with a goatee who pretended to be chipper. I’ve never had a male doctor before and I would like never to again.

Next came the other resident, who seemed superior to him in rank if not humanity. She went in and did something horrible to me, in a way I won’t ever forget. She stuck her index and middle fingers up there and rammed them around every which way, like she was trying to tear a hole in me. I trusted, with some hesitation, that this was proper procedure, but it shouldn’t have been. I wanted to show up with painted signs and picket the way this woman had handled my vagina. I thrashed and yelled out while someone held my thighs open in goddess pose, feet touching. “Oh my god!” I yelled, taken aback. She pulled her hands out, satisfied. “You’re going to have some spotting,” she said in a tone that can only be described as smug. Like oh, you are gonna have some spotting. She snapped her glove a little, or she did in my memory of her.

They went away for awhile, and I suspected they aren’t pleased with me. I was “a three.” I had been in labor for 30 hours. Fuck the world, fuck humanity, fuck God. I looked up at Dustin, scared.

“They want to kick me out,” I said.

“Yep,” he said.

I feel like I have failed them, like I’m a fool, the cliched person who shows up to the hospital too early.

I wanted to hide. On another planet. Not so unselfconscious after all, I wanted, for the first time of many to come, to leave my body.

The medical professionals came back sighing. I saw my OB through a crack in the curtain, standing in the hallway chatting with everyone. She was in a dress and heels and glasses, holding a bunch of manila folders, having it all. I hated her for living her life while I was enduring this. Did she know that I was there? Did she resent my arrival? Was she mad at me for coming before 3-1-1?

The physician’s assistant who manually tore open my cervix came back and announced, “Dr. R has you scheduled to be induced today at 4 p.m.” She said this like I should have known. Dustin perked up at this, and got that attitude that embarrasses me.

“Oh really?!” he said. “How wonderful of her to let us know!” Normally I would have walked away and pretended I didn’t know him, but under the circumstances this was not an option.

And everyone laughed uncomfortably and shrugged as if to say, Sorry, this is how it works. I want to be mad but what am I going to do? Refuse? Stay in labor for a few more days?

(I wrote that as a joke, and yet there is a part of me that is sure that someone of sterner stuff would have done just that. I wonder if this is the moment that I failed, where my fate was determined.)

I sat with my anger at feelings so not-in-control for a few moments but then thought, Okay fine, if this doesn’t happen by then, then I don’t give a shit.

The kind nurse came over to my bedside and spoke in hushed tones, my conspirator, “Hey have you eaten anything?”

I wanted to tell her all the amazing Foods To Eat During Labor I’ve had, how I had them written in a list and stuck to the refrigerator. I wanted to say how proud I was of Dustin for keeping me fed and hydrated, and I wanted to tell her about the yogurt popsicles in the rocketship molds, but instead I said, “Yeah kind of? I mean I am in labor.” I laughed weakly.

She said something like, “Oh! Well once you are admitted you can’t eat or drink anything so you might want to go eat lunch then come back!” Which was of course, news to me and contrary to the hospital policy that was parroted to me again and again and at the multiple tours and classes we took.

I imagined myself at an Indian buffet, crashing face first into it and then tearing it down with the force of my rage at women’s biology. Instead I was grateful for the advice and nod obediently and say, “Okay I think we will do that!”

I took what felt like 10 years to get dressed again, and was half-tempted to wear my hospital gown out onto the streets of New York, because my god the pain. On our way out, the nurse tapped me on the back and, laughed, telling me to have a glass of wine and caviar.

* * *

We hobbled out into the lobby and found my mom who was surprised to see us again, but not as surprised as I’d have liked. I, defeated many times over, told her that yes we were going to be admitted, but I wanted to get lunch first. She watched our bags (“Are you sure?” “You don’t have to!” “But Mom, are you sure?”) and Dustin and I ventured, blinking, back out into the day which had been, inexplicably, going on without us.

Not five feet out the door the old “what do you want to eat” routine began between Dustin and me. It was considerably higher stakes than most days. I didn’t want caviar. I didn’t want to walk far, but I didn’t want to be still, either. I wanted to not exist, but this was not an option. Men in suits were out on their lunch break. We paced by a deli, which seemed like the only option. Everything seemed awful. I asked for a plain bagel with cream cheese. I urged Dustin to eat, too. He ordered some kind of sandwich, but never ate it. While he paid I walked outside and stood on the corner of 58th Street and Amsterdam, and had a contraction. I leaned against the brick wall and then leaned over onto my knees. We crossed the street and walked up some stairs and a security guard told me that once we went through the doors I could get a wheelchair. I didn’t want a wheelchair, because I wanted to be able to walk away from my pain. This was not something you could do, I had found, but I wasn’t ready to come to terms with that, to lose it as an option.

I took a bite of the bagel, then keeled over. I took a bite of the bagel with my hands on my hips and asked my mom to come with me into the bathroom. There was a lot of blood last time and I suspect there will be again. She looked and said it was normal, and I felt as if I were 12 years old.

I wanted to be somewhere and to stay there. I wanted to be surrounded by medical equipment.

We went back and the nurse from before saw us and said, “Back so soon?” and I felt like I had failed her. I hadn’t walked enough; I hadn’t eaten caviar. I nodded silently, and she asked if I ate something, and I said “Yes!” hoping to satisfy her. The woman at the desk pointed back at triage. “Again?” I ask and she nodded. I hung my head and we went back in there.

Eventually we get checked into a delivery room. It wasn’t so bad. My nurse was named Kathleen and she’s youngish and sweet and pregnant, too. She asked me the same dozen questions they asked me in triage. “Are you in an abusive relationship?” their voices, each time, fell to a whisper. Only with myself, I thought. Kathleen was proud, it seemed, of my uncomplicated pregnancy. Or I was the proud one, ticking things off: no, no, no. Either way there was pride in the room. There was a feeling that I was a good one. I bent over the bed, buried my face in it, and breathde deeply through a contraction.

Kathleen loved it. She said she was going to administer my IV. I asked her if I can get a hep-lock, which is like an IV but instead of bags and machines there is just a little tube stuck in a hole in my hand, taped onto me, ready for medication. She was taken aback. I was taken aback that she was taken aback. She said that if I want an epidural I’ll need an IV. I told her that I didn’t think I wanted one, that I wasn’t sure, but at that moment, the answer was no. Kathleen said, OK, but if did want one, I would need to take in an entire bag of saline fluids, which would take about 45 minutes. This scared me.

“Okay,” I said, thinking, ‘oh, this is why people get doulas.’ But I was my own doula! I would not foget how to assert my right to a natural, unmedicated childbirth. I kept an image of our Google doc, the one with our “birth priorities” in it.

Birth plan notes:

• avoid pain medication, incl. epidural. do not offer pain med unless
requested/INSISTED (go through Dustin)
• delayed cord clamping
• skin 2 skin, tests on chest if possible
• delay eye drops / bath for an hour
• intermittent monitoring
• no routine IV; hep-lock if necessary
• want to avoid episiotomy unless medically necessary
• I plan to do rooming in & breastfeeding

Nurse Kathleen said she had to ask if I could have a hep-lock. I said okay. She left and when she came back, I said, “Actually, I want the epidural.”

Dustin asked me if I was sure. “This isn’t want we talked about,” he said. “This isn’t what you wanted.”

I told him that I knew that, but that I also didn’t want a 36-hour labor. When I said I didn’t want an epidural, this is not what I imagined. He said okay.

Fuck everything, I thought. Bring on the cascading interventions. And they came.

* * *

I was on the saline drip and then Kathleen told me I had to stay in bed. Oh fuck. I breathed through a contraction and she said, “You are so good at your breathing. Did you take some special classes or something?”

They were going to break my water with a knitting needle; I knew it was coming for me. I couldn’t stop looking at the cabinet where they kept the hooks. I know it’s the one because it’s been labeled with a label-maker—they all were. AMNIOTIC HOOKS. I wanted to take a picture, but when you are in labor you don’t really have your purse on you. You are the patient, and things like purses and phones no longer exist for you, you who are Going Through Something in the grandest sense, a sense so grand you can’t even really know it yet, the magnitude of it. People keep trying to tell you, but what’s the point?

“I can’t really fathom it,” is what you say to strangers, well-rehearsed. The woman at the baby store said, “Oh, of course you can’t. If you could, you wouldn’t be here…” She trailed off. I loved it. Where did she think I would be?

Now I knew: curled in a ball on the floor, beside the bed, staring at the wall. Drinking.

Alone.

* * *

I hadn’t wanted an epidural for a few mostly ineffable reasons. Stubbornness, yes. Over-achieverishness, too, sure. I wanted to experience it, I guess, this most human/female/whatever experience—to know I could do it. But mostly: fear. Fear of someone sticking a thing into my spine. Fear of being punished for taking the “easy route.”

But the water breaking, the amniotic hook, was what did it. I don’t even think it’s a painful procedure, like popping your inner balloon, but the invasiveness—the invasion!—the very thought of it had me reeling. I wanted to pass out at the thought of it, when I had the capacity for thought.

That’s the thing about all of it, it’s something coming for you, if not one thing than another. People talk about riding the waves of contractions, submitting to all of it. And I think that’s true, it’s necessary if you want to do it, but I was washed up. I was a dehydrated corpse out in the middle of the ocean, bloated with saltwater. Hook me up to a buoy, man. Helicopter me out. Fuck this shit.

When the epidural crew wheeled on in with their cartoon shower caps and sneakers and watches and black-framed glasses and well-toned physiques—anesthesiologists, it turns out, are the only doctors who look like TV doctors—the very word “epidural” still filled me with a cringey panic. As if they knew, the three-person team of anesthesiologists talked quickly, all of them seeming a little drunk on power and slightly manic. The energy in the room immediately shifted. Before they came in I was a decrepit sea log being beat upon by the waves, my mother, fiancé, and nurse three seagulls floating just above the water, feeling helpless and horrified, bearing witness to the very kernel of existence.

After they came in, it felt like my body was a thing to be beaten, a war to be won. In that moment, it felt right.

* * *

Obviously the epidural is a very routine thing, but it’s also, as they were legally required to remind/reveal to me, a surgical procedure. Hence the shower caps. I was given one, too, in all my pain. No one made sure I tucked my hair in perfectly, which I thought about a lot as they started in on me. Would a hair fall into my spinal tube? They talked quickly, all of them drunk on power, seeming slightly manic. I felt like I was being inducted into something (and I was); like I was brave for choosing this; like here we go.

I thought there would be guilt, but there was none. It occurs to me that I could be writing this only so that you understand the state that I was in and you know the circumstances under which I got the epidural.

The nurse has you squeeze a pillow to your (very pregnant) belly, and hunch your back so that your upper body is a C. They have your birth partner sit on a little chair in front of you, at eye level. You focus on him. Never have I hunched and focused so hard. I could have hunched that baby right out. They paint that sterilizing iodine all over you and feel your spine and I worried that I was too fat for them to feel my vertebrae and fought the urge to ask them if they were absolutely sure they had placed the target in the right place. They used a permanent marker to mark where to get me—I saw this a few days later, when I was up and walking. There was also a bruise. A bruise on your spine! There is something viscerally disturbing about all of this, isn’t there? Can you feel the twinge in your spine? Are you about to pass out? Yeah, me too.

So they stick a big needle into your back and you jump and are sure you have just paralyzed yourself. The needle is to numb your skin and then a bigger hollow needle goes in with a tiny tube that gets threaded into your spine. It seems like you shouldn’t feel it, but you still totally feel it. Or I did. You feel like like you can kind of feel your cervix—not pain-pain but feeling enough to make you want to pass out. It felt like someone was stapling my back, but deep inside me.

Stay still, though, or else you’ll be paralyzed.

* * *

I bored my eyes into Dustin and broke a sweat I think, from fear. I felt as if I were in some kind of war (I was). I felt like this was my moment, my big test, and I was rising to the occasion. I would save the world.

Except I wasn’t. I was doing the most banal thing in the world. I was giving fucking birth.

The doctor spoke to me over my shoulder, “Okay I am going to put in the medicine now. You might feel a shock go through your legs, almost like you put your finger in the electric socket.”

What.

“Okay,” I nodded. Then my legs, hanging off the side of the hospital bed, shot up in the air on either side of Dustin. And yes, an electric shock shot through me. It was horrible. Horrible! Wild. I screamed, of course. Then laughed nervously. “Wow you weren’t kidding.” They taped it all up—a tube! Snaked into my spine! Taped onto my back. I was supposed to just lie down on top of it, to not even think about it. This was really hard at first, as anything spine-related, in my book, should be.

I didn’t have much time to think about it, though, because the anesthesiologists were out the door and the nurse was telling me to lie down so she could put a catheter in me.

A catheter? I didn’t not read this part of Babycenter, or else I did not remember it.

My legs, by this point, were just big meat sticks attached to my body. It’s as if your foot has fallen asleep, but it’s the entire lower region of your body. It is very hard to have this bodily experience without your subconscious screaming out that something is terribly wrong.

“I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS!”

I tried to move them, to make sure I still could, to shake them back into being. It didn’t work. I dragged my huge, lumpen legs across the crinkly paper of the hospital bed, and they fell into place.

I feared I was doing something awful to them and wasn’t feeling it. I feared the tube in my spine would be yanked around, would be boring a hole in my spinal tube and leaking fluid into the sack of flesh I was being rendered into.

And then a few minutes had gone by and I hadn’t had any pain.

I looked at the monitor. I was having wild contractions, up and up and up and down, and I didn’t even know it.

Disembodiment complete, I asked for my iPhone.

* * *

Dustin dug my phone out of the bag we packed and off I went, group texting up a storm. I asked my mom to take a picture of my new bag of urine which was hanging off the side of my hospital bed. My new home. She obliged, standing up, newly alive and cheerful. She took a photo of my monitor, my wild contractions. I was laughing, stuck in a hospital bed. I could have stayed like that forever.

I itched like crazy, a side effect. Did I want Sudafed? Sure, fuck it. I got Sudafed in my IV. I also, it was found, had a fever, which is a problem because of the baby. The nurse asked me if I had ever had a suppository, like I was going to protest at this point. I told her no, but I hadn’t ever given birth either, so?

I was already on my side; she yanked up my gown and went to town. I was laughing. She asked if it hurt. I told her I felt nothing. We laughed. Modern medicine! She gave me more Tylenol in my IV. Then antibiotics. And then soon my OB came in to break my water. The hook! I spread my legs for someone for what felt like the millionth time that day, in the way they preferred—bottoms of your feet touching each other, knees flopped open, legs in a diamond shape.

I don’t remember any of the great amniotic balloon pop except the warmth, spreading all over and under me. Like sitting in a bowl of chicken soup. It was beyond pee. And it kept happening, too, for hours. I’d shift and more soup. It did make me feel plentiful. I contain multitudes. Of amniotic fluid.

And then contractions really started going, up off the charts. They’d go high and then plateau up there, up in the pain that I didn’t feel.

Until I did. Until I did.

* * *

It was probably 6 or 7 p.m. at this point, 36 hours after labor had started. I had slept in a few 10-minute intervals the night before, but sleeping for 10 minutes when you know you’ll be awoken by soul-crushing pain is not exactly restful. And here was the soul-crushing pain again! And boy was I crushed by it, gripping the bars of my hospital bed as if I could pull myself away from it. I was still numb everywhere, but, rather inconveniently, the right side of my uterus, so I couldn’t move. I had gone through the personal nightmare of getting the epidural, I had mentally exited the battle of contractions, and yet here they were, chasing me down. It was like going through the pain of breaking up with someone and just when you thought you were free, they show up at your house, and, I don’t know, throw knives at you?

I screamed in the hospital bed, thinking of the other patrons, newly afraid when they heard what came out of me. I writhed as much as my numb meat body would writhe. The cool kid anesthesiologists came back—an Asian woman I wanted to be friends with (she must have been the student body president in a former life) came in clapping her hands and declaring that they would get me the pain coverage I DESERVE! I perked up. Finally someone was concerned with justice. I nodded yes and yes and yes. It was a feminist act, the pursuit of my pain coverage. Top me off ya’ll. And they did. They topped me off. And again. And again. And again. And they did. And they did. I was afloat on a pool of medication, nerve block and lidocaine and Tylenol and Sudafed and saline and god knows what else.

And still the pain “broke through.” The rest of me just got number. Numb except for about 5 square inches, where some demon (male, surely) was hitting me from the inside with a hammer. I wanted to die, and was yelling that fact repeatedly, feeling like no one was listening. No one seemed to understand.

“This is normal, baby,” Dustin said.

Did he know what this was? This was not normal, not by any definition of it. This should not be normal. Soon my heart rate was in the 140s, which was setting off an alarm on my monitor, and sending people in running who were all very concerned about my heart when they should have been concerned with my pain.

Then my OB wanted to “check me.” I was screaming and flailing about, even as I strained to be the perfect patient. I was crying again. She couldn’t keep my knees apart and I certainly wasn’t going to relax shit while the entire right side of my body had a vice around it.

She gave me a little talk about how sometimes people just have a “blind spot” when it comes to pain relief and no amount of epidural would “cover” it. I interrupted her multiple times to scream, but she just kept talking over me, not missing a beat. She was used to the likes of me, inured to it.

I shrunk back into myself. I was being pummeled. I writhed in bed and felt like a madwoman, climbing the walls, cursing Eve for eating that damn apple.

“Just knock me out!” I cried. I was joking, but the joke was that I said it out loud. I had never asked for something more sincerely.

“We’re not going to do that,” the doctor chuckled, making eyes at the nurse. I peered out at her from behind my pain, through a crack in the bedrails. The alarm on my heart rate monitor was sounding off better than I could.

After the coolest cool girl anesthesiologist “topped off” my epidural a few times, to no avail, my doctor was back in the room saying we’d need to do another epidural. That was our only option.

Wanting to try to go without the epidural was one thing, getting it and having it fail was quite another. It was unjust. It was traumatic. My stupid body. I thought. My awful gender. The limitations of medicine. Of sex. Of humanity. Fuck it all. I don’t deserve this.

And I meant that. I still mean it.

Of course outwardly I just nodded, and scrunched up my entire being, and felt a little glimmer of hope. Then fear. Then hope. Then pain pain pain.

My family still sat beside me, no longer much comfort. I felt very alone, inescapably tethered to my body. They watched me drift out to sea, safe on the shoreline.

In reality, Dustin hadn’t slept or eaten, and I’m sure he was in much emotional turmoil. He said, later, that he was sick and had a fever, but when they started worrying about mine, he decided not to tell anyone, not even me, for fear that they would kick him out.

I did not want to experience another epidural, but in the game show of this childbirth, I felt like, well, bring it on. The left side of my body was heavy and barely there. All of the extra epidural was definitely settling in there. We spun my body back and forth—I say “we” because there is no way I could have turned myself—hoping that the epidural, apparently a rudimentary thing, would drip, would run, over to the right. This did not feel very scientific. And it did not work.

Soon another doctor came in with a shower cap and tried to set me at ease. An old pro, I was pulled into a seated position and hunched over my hospital pillow, staring at Dustin again. The epidural felt viscerally horrific again, torture, but a few minutes in I felt better.

My OB came back in so she could check me properly. She groped and prodded and shoved things around inside of me, trying to see where the baby’s head was.

Oh yes, the baby. He was in there through all of this. The thought of that now seems bizarre. It felt so much about me, my body, my pain. He was still so abstract. We’d never seen his face, or heard him cry. A large part of me didn’t believe I’d ever see him. Certainly not alive. I continually reminded myself, near the end of pregnancy, that even if he died, I’d still get to meet him. He was still a corporeal reality. He would not disappear into me, as it seemed he might. It was not all a dream. He could not be taken from me. Despite the truth of this, he remained unfathomable, his existence a mere idea, a source of anxiety. The potential for heartbreak.

Soon, Dr. R stood up from her perch beside my, at this point ironically-named, birth canal and folded her hands together in front of her clipboard. (Did she have a clipboard? Everyone seemed to. Everyone seemed to have the answers to the problem of me written on their clipboards, just out of my reach.)

She told me, in a tone I imagine she usually reserves for informing family members that their loved one is dying, that my cervix hadn’t moved. I was still a 3 or a 4 or a 5, I don’t remember. It didn’t matter. Whatever I was, it wasn’t enough. Worse yet, his head was “floating.” This was not good. My child was bobbing within me, even after all of this. He did not want to to make the trip. Could I blame him?

It felt preordained, all of this. Was this the thing I was worrying about all pregnancy long, some sort of psychic? I was a water sign, after all. Swimming in it.

* * *

She repeated a theory she’d told me about a week or so prior, and my very last office visit. My baby’s head was lodged in my pelvis. My kid had Dustin’s head and I had my pelvis and they were not a good match. This was probably what was causing my “breakthrough” pain, my pain that defied intervention. As she said this, I felt it again, the pain sneaking up, and it scared me. I felt it the way you hear someone’s keys in the door before they walk in.

Epidurals cover pain, not pressure. I still haven’t quite wrapped my head around that. I still have my doubts. But there it is. His head was possibly—just a conjecture, of course—slamming into the right side of my uterus and tugging at my tendons, yanking the entire side of my body up and down with the contractions. There was nothing, really, they could do.

He was stuck. Or he might be. There was no way to know. No way to know? I thought. When she told me this in her office, that she couldn’t measure my pelvis to know whether he’d fit through it, I was dumbfounded. They can measure the thickness of my baby’s neural tube 11 weeks after he was conceived, but they can’t tell me if his head will fit through my pelvis? What is science even for?

This was when everyone started looking at the clock, started tapping their watches. It was just like all the natural birth advocates warned it would be, and what they trained us to fight against. Except now that I was in it I felt like tapping my watch, too.

My normally fast-talking OB started crossing her arms and dragging out her syllables. “Welllllllllll at a cerrrrtain point we have to take a step back and aaask ourselves…” It was time to further intervene. I was sad not at the thought of whatever was facing me, but that my body was not playing the game correctly.

My body had finally gone into labor on its own, 36 hours earlier. I was still in awe of it. And still it wasn’t enough. Things were kicked into gear but not high enough gear. (Or high enough gear, but not effective enough gear? I don’t know, the car metaphor kind of falls apart.)

My OB gave me two options: start Pitocin, a medication that “induces” labor which arguably I was already in, and had been in for a few days now, but it would make my contractions artificially strong and hey, maybe my baby, who had been squeezed for days now, would get squeezed on down through my vagina. Or I could get, you know, the thing. The thing we are supposed to avoid at all costs. The failure. The intervention to end all interventions: the c-section.

It was totally up to me.

At this point, I desperately wanted someone to strap me down and put me out of my misery, but I am also a stubborn bitch who did not want to fail at birth. I did not want to fail to give birth.

“So what if you induce me,” I said, from behind a wall of pain, “and it doesn’t work? Which it probably won’t, if his head is stuck?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say probably,” the doctor chastened me. “We don’t really know. My guess is he is stuck but there is no way to know. But yes, you could still end up with a c-section. I can’t really say either way.” She motioned toward the monitor. “The baby’s fine, his heart rate’s normal. You can still try. I’m not going to take that away from you.”

“Okay,” I said. “So we should do the Pitocin. Right?”

“I can’t tell you what to do,” she said, “It’s not my body.” I did not tell her that I wished it were. “If we do the Pitocin, though, I’ll want to put in an internal monitor to see if your contractions really are as strong as the external monitor said they are. Maybe they just aren’t that strong, that’s why you aren’t progressing, or maybe they’re strong and just not effective. The Pitocin could organize them.”

As she said this I felt my contractions breaking through the second epidural.

“Of course, yeah, that would mean possibly hours more of contractions, then the whole pushing stage…”

The pushing stage! The internal monitors! I don’t know why the thought of having an internal monitor placed inside of me seemed like the worst thing in the world, why it seemed somehow worse than having my abdomen cut open, but there it was.

The thought of staying awake 12 more hours and then actively pushing was unfathomable. I looked at Dustin. “What do you think?” I asked him, begged him to tell me. He was at a loss, too.

“Whatever you want to do, it’s your body.”

I hated this. Stop reminding me. It was my goddamn body, I had to endure the physical, at the very least someone else should have to do the mental arithmetic.

I wanted the c-section so badly. I wanted it like you want a glass of water at a stranger’s house, but you still feel like you should demur. I wanted it the way I wanted someone to stick a finger in my butt during sex, but would never ask for. I was thinking like a woman. I was in the most essentially oppressed, essentially female situation I’ve ever been in and I was mentally oppressing myself on top of it.

* * *

“I should do the Pitocin, right?” I looked around at everyone in a panic. I wanted to know everyone’s honest opinion. I wanted to know what they would think of me either way. Would I make a decision and would everyone roll their eyes at me internally? Would they think, “Well that was the wrong call to make!”

“We can’t tell you,” people kept saying. My doctor would shrug behind her clipboard, clearly growing impatient. I stared at her and said nothing. She didn’t offer to give me time. She just kept saying it wasn’t an emergency. And yet. And yet the clock was ticking anyway. It was an emergency of capitalism, of everyone being sick of my shit. Lucky for them I was sick of my shit, too. Utterly.

I wanted the c-section because I was tired. “But the recovery!” I said out loud. I knew you were supposed to think about this, to be haunted by this; it was supposed to keep you from “giving in,” but damn if I could think out beyond the pain and the urgency of my current situation. I did not give a shit about any recovery.

There was a chorus of, “It’s up to you”s. I writhed and flailed, staring at the ceiling and trying to concentrate, to make a decision. I had a diaper full of ice on my head, to combat my fever, and it kept slipping off. Everyone stared at me, waiting, and I wished that I at least didn’t have a diaper on my face while I made what feared could be a life or death decision.

I mean, I had bled, I had a tube up my urethra and a bag full of urine hanging off of me, someone had stuck a pill up my butt, my legs were numb, I was screaming and screaming and begging to be killed. But the diaper, man. It kept slipping over my eyes and I would peer out of it and say, “Well, what do you think I should do?”

A woman with a diaper on her face asks you a question, you answer it.

* * *

I imagined dying during the c-section. Bleeding out, or something similarly horrible and as of yet unimaginable. What if they went to cut me open and they cut the baby? This happens. Or has happened, which for the purposes of my monkey mind are one and the same.

It would be my responsibility.

“She died during her c-section.” “Well, she chose it, so…”

I would become an argument for not going into the hospital before 3-1-1. A use case discussed in birth classes everywhere. Ina May Gaskin would write anecdotes about me in the updated editions of all of her books.

But then part of me shifted. I’m not sure which part; some, “you don’t have time for this shit,” aspect of me. Some, do what you fucking need and fuck everyone else, fuck what anyone thinks, part of me woke up and I looked around the room, convicted.

“Okay give me the c-section. Let’s do the c-section. Yep.”

Everyone nodded, said, “Alright!” Like I had just read out from the playbook at the big game and my people had clapped their hands and gone running.

It happened about that quickly, too.

My doctor nodded. I did not detect any judgment. As soon as I said “Let’s do the c-section,” I got, for the first time, genuinely excited to meet my baby, as if this whole natural childbirth thing, long ago thrown out the window, was a sort of block. The smoke had been cleared and we were going to finally do the thing we came here to do.

Dr. R told me she would go write my name on the whiteboard, which loomed large in my imagination thanks to television sitcoms and she must have known it. Then I would be “on the schedule.” I got the impression this might not happen for a while, and I would have the opportunity to get used to the idea. i.e., freak out about it, Google it on my phone between contractions, make Dustin console me, find out if he thought it was the right decision, apologize ahead of time in case I had just volunteered to go to my death. Was I walking the plank?

(I was always walking the plank.)

What felt like 30 seconds later, a team of people scurried into the room. They must have detached wires and tubes from me. I think they placed the bag of pee between my legs. I think they moved me into a portable bed but I don’t remember. It was all so fast, this non-emergency.

No one gave my family any instructions, but they stood up as I got wheeled out and I imagine, rushed to grab their things. They left my purple clogs in the corner somewhere, unwittingly, and ran out.

* * *

Only one person could accompany me in the operating room, the nurses said to my family in the hallway. “Who will that be?” Dustin quickly raised his hand, “Me.” He was so serious; sure. My mom rushed up to me in the bed, put her head over mine and said she was so proud of me. She was crying but I think they might have been happy tears.

“You’re going to have a baby,” she said. “You made the right decision.”

I think I shrugged, but she was emphatic. I hadn’t asked her in the delivery room but maybe I should have. She cried and kissed me and told me she’d see me soon and I heard someone corralling Dustin somewhere to get suited up. They wheeled me along, through double doors, just like you imagine. Everyone was happy, though, and I got happy, too. I was no longer oppressed. I was liberating myself from the tyranny of the body.

It really did feel like that. It still sort of does. Man triumphing over man. Err, man triumphing over woman?

We passed another set of doors and someone handed me a tiny paper cup, the size of a shot. They warned me it would be truly horrible, but it was meant to fight off heartburn. Only as I write this am I hit with how ridiculous this was, worrying about heartburn before they slice me open. I’ve been in the worst pain of my life for nearly 40 hours now. It was 8:30 p.m., June 3rd. I had gone into labor at 6 a.m. the morning before. I was a fucking warrior. Heartburn? If you told me now that it was all a lie and it was really a sedative, or something to keep me from having a full-on fucking heart attack as I had been tachycardic all day (“She’s tacky!” nurses had been whispering)—well, that would make more sense.

The medicine was disgusting but I didn’t care. And at the time it just felt thoughtful, like someone was caring for once about my comfort.

And then, there I was, in the room. I couldn’t believe how much like an operating room it felt. Cold, bright lights, antiseptic, people scurrying around and chatting with each other. It was like being present at my own death, except once in a while someone would ask me a question and I would call out to everyone, trying to be funny.

“You’re smiling again,” the doctor said to me, “Guess you’re feeling more like yourself.”

Is “myself” smiley? I wondered. Does she think of me as cheerful? Was I less myself before, stripped of politeness? That seemed sad.

They told me that they were going to move me from my wheely bed to the table. “Oh boy,” I think I said, or something like it. I was a rock from the belly button down. They coached me somehow and I said, “I don’t think I can do much!” and the doctor said, “Don’t try to help us at all!” and she and another tiny woman heaved me, rolled me really, over to the operating table. I helped this shuffle my half-corpse to the center. It was a disturbingly narrow operating table. People had to be able to reach over me and into my body cavity, so I guess it made sense.

They were going to prep me first, and then let in “Dad.” Poor, sweet dad, stuck out in the hallway somewhere. Were they putting the scrubs on him somewhere, like they do in the movies? They said they didn’t want Dad to see the prep. They wanted everything all set up and covered up and hidden before he came in. Must be nice, I thought. Why spare him? I thought. I have to live it, why can’t he bear witness?

Someone spoke to me from a place I couldn’t see. “Sometimes they get squeamish,” he said. “Does Dad have any issues with this, Mom?”

Who were these Mom and Dad people they kept talking about? Certainly not us.

“No,” I said, trying to defend his reputation. “Or, I don’t know,” I remembered that he actually was squeamish, or so he had told me.

“Well, its hard to say,” I said. “We’ve never done this before.” I said. Everyone laughed. I decided I would try to make jokes while splayed out naked, disembodied. A woman had an electric razor out and was shaving my pubic hair. I played out jokes in my head, some version of expressing that I should tip her. I decided against it, I stared at the ceiling. I felt in awe of the whole thing.

Had I slipped onto the set of the scary scene in E.T.?

It was horrific, but wonderful, too. I felt at peace in a way, like things were being taken care of, finally. This I could endure.

There was a new anesthesiologist, who introduced his assistant to me. She was southern, pretty, youngish, and on her first day back from maternity leave. Her baby was four months old, a girl. She missed her, but it was nice to be back. She ended up with a c-section, too, she told me. “You’re going to feel really, really weird stuff, okay?” she said. “I mean REALLY, REALLY weird. It’s so weird. But you’re going to meet your baby really soon. It’s so exciting!” I nodded to her, she was my new mother. I was trying to keep it together for her. They must have put a shit ton of medicine into my IV, I want to think they told me what it was but I don’t remember.

Pressure, though. You feel pressure. How is this possible, pressure and not pain? I could feel them tapping my pregnant belly. I told my new mother that I felt strange lying on my back. “I know, right?” she laughed, “But it’s okay.” There weren’t any more monitors. He could be dead inside of me and no one would know. I tried to wrap my head around that, to prepare myself for that news, while simultaneously trying to convince myself it wasn’t possible.

I remember being very worried that I had to lie flat on my back, which you aren’t supposed to do in pregnancy, for risk of the baby resting on your aorta and compressing the blood flow to both of you. I imagined coming all this way only to have the baby die because I was lying flat on my back on the operating table.

Before Dustin could come in, they hung up a sheet blocking my view of my naked body and my bulging belly. My arms were, truly, spread out wide, the table shaped like, I’m sorry to say, a crucifix. The drugs made me shake. I was cheerful and scared and so, so excited all at once. It felt like I had run a marathon and was getting a baby at the end, right when I was ready to eat a big meal and take a nap. My teeth chattered. My arms flopped around on the crucifix table. I asked if this was normal. It was totally normal. They said it was partially hormonal and partially the medication. It was very worrisome, and embarrassing, too. I kept apologizing. No honey, no. This just happens. It’s ok. Shake-shake-shake. I tried to treat my body like a science experiment, to float above it and simply observe. Everything was amazing. On some level I loved being there, witnessing this horrific act.

“Okay,” the new mother said, “Your husband is coming in soon.”

“Fiancé,” I corrected her. I normally would have gone with it, with “husband,” but this seemed like official business, like our passports would be checked at the end and they’d look at me and shake their heads. A liar.

I hated saying fiancé during pregnancy, I felt it conjured obligation, guilt, etc., but it was the truth.

“Oh, okay. Your fiancé will be here soon. Is he the father?”

I laughed, shaking like a late-stage Parkinson’s patient. “Yes!”

“Well, no judgment!” she said. My new mother proceeded to tell me about a friend of hers who had a baby and married someone else while she was pregnant. This might sound inappropriate, but I loved hearing it. It made me feel good about this world I would soon bring a person into. I laughed and shook. A man’s voice called out to me from somewhere in the room.

“Boy or girl?”

“Boy!” I said, trembling, grinning. We were shouting out to each other like acquaintances in a loud bar.

“What’s his name?”

“We don’t know yet!” I laughed. We all laughed. People in scrubs and masks shook their heads.

“Gonna wait and meet him, huh? I like that!”

He didn’t have a name yet, because nothing had felt completely right, the way we thought it would. We wanted, or I wanted, a revelation; a name that was traditional, simple, strong, but that all of society had somehow forgotten; a name that we alone had unearthed. I wanted everyone to kick themselves, wishing they’d thought of it first. I wanted it to be hiding in plain sight.

This never happened.

* * *

The anesthesiologist’s assistant offered me “something,” as in, I can give you something. A sedative. I nodded, shaking. Yes. Give it to me. I don’t even know what it was, but she put it in my IV, I think. Or else it was a shot. I was basted like a turkey at this point. Nothing fazed me. Drugs were now my friend.

The curtain was up and my woman was explaining to me how they would get the baby out. They would not be, as I imagined, plopping my uterus on my stomach and tearing me open like a Christmas present. They cut a three-inch hole on my bikini line. I have never worn a bikini in my life, and I certainly never will now, but the cut was right where my pubic hair stops. Or where they would stop, if they hadn’t just been shaved off. It’s a natural wrinkle. A fat roll? It’s hard to remember what was there before. You can’t see it, is my point.

In order for the baby to get out of this little, well, this little slit, he would have to be pushed out. He would have to be born.

My doctor gave birth to my baby.

I don’t even particularly like my doctor.

I love her as a character. I love her from afar. I admire her. I would never choose to interact with her. She makes me uncomfortable. She is cerebral, nervous, she over-explains and my jokes are off-putting to her, but I think she likes them. Every interaction with her I am left feeling like, What was that?! Why was that so hard? We don’t connect, she and I. Somehow, this helps me trust her better. Our relationship is strictly professional, unmuddied by affection.

So my doctor, the anesthesiologist’s assistant said to me, would be climbing on top of my abdomen and literally pushing my baby out of me. She’d be leaning in (heh) and kneading him down from the outside. Shove, shove, shove so that he finally stopped bobbing and was forced out, once and for all. She would have to climb up on the operating table because my doctor is five feet tall.

She is a five-foot tall black woman with size 10 shoes, another thing I love about her. On one of my final appointments, where we conjectured about the size of my pelvis, she asked me my shoe size. “Five,” I said, “Sometimes 4.” She shook her head laughing. She clicked her tongue. She told me her shoe size and extolled the virtues of her pelvis, through which I am almost certain she has never given birth. I know this because when I Google her I find her wedding announcement, and that she found love, for the first time, at 43. Another thing to love about her, of course.

As the anesthesiologist’s assistant explained how strange this would feel, the tugging him out, I think they started cutting. They whispered so that I wouldn’t hear which meant I imagined they were whispering something like, “She’s bleeding out, what should we do?” “I don’t know, but look at this gigantic tumor here!” “Wow is this woman fat. I mean I know she’s pregnant, but STILL!”

While I shook and smiled at the anesthesiologist’s assistant and strained to decipher the whispering, I felt butterflies on and off, thinking I’d meet him soon, that this might really be it. Was he really going to live? What horrors would they find on him that they couldn’t find via ultrasound? Just then someone yelled, “Where’s Dad? Did we bring in Dad? Bring in Dad!”

* * *

Before I could turn my chattering skull to the left, there he was, hovering over me as if in a dream. I’ve never been so happy to see him in my life. My love. Everything was better in this room with him in it. Everything was best with him in a shower cap, looking like they did in the movies, all in shades of hospital teal and baby blue. He had a gown on, too, over his clothes. And a surgical mask. Would I have known this was our moment if he was not dressed in this costume, this signal?

He sat on a stool near my head and held my hand, tangled in IVs. We cried; I shook. His surgical mask was wet with tears and snot. You can see it in all the pictures.

Our baby. His baby. I felt that the first time, then. That this baby was ours, yes, but it was also mine and then it was his, in ways that our relationship couldn’t encapsulate. Maybe it will grow to contain it but then I knew, this baby was his baby, too. Privately.

My woman, my new mother, joked with us and assured us and directed Dustin. She told him to get his camera ready. He only had his cell phone—our new camera, bought with this moment in mind, was in the hallway with my actual mother. She told him that he could stand up and look when they were pulling the baby out, that when she said so he could take a picture.

He got it ready and smiled at me, crying behind his surgical mask. He tells me now I was so out of it, not myself, but I didn’t feel that way at all. I felt tuned in, fighting forth from behind a cloud of bodily horror. I was a brain in a vat, one with the universe.

“Ok!” she said, tapping me, “they’re going to start pushing him out! It’s going to feel really weird, ok? But that’s normal!” She held my right hand, Dustin my left. I tried not to play with her engagement ring. The diamond was huge. Her hands were perfectly manicured. I loved her in that moment, this woman I’ll never see again. I would never recognize her even if I did.

They started to tug. The force of it had my half-dead body swaying like a canoe. My eyes, I’m sure, got huge. I stared straight ahead as if to focus on the task at hand. The task at hand was to not scream, to not use whatever strength I had left to fling myself off of the operating table. The task was to endure the most bizarre experience of my life, the feeling, painless, of someone yanking all of your organs out. I am a vessel, only. I am something to be pillaged. I am a cabinet, a pantry door. I am lying naked on a table in a cold room under bright lights, my arms splayed out to form a T, and a team of people are gathered around my body, peering into it.

The doctor, my doctor, put a knee up on the table for leverage. I saw her head bob a bit above the curtain. She made a little joke, I don’t remember what, her voice straining with effort. We laughed nervously. My baby was in there, soon to be out.

And then I heard a cry.

What I felt then, above all, was recognition. This isn’t possible, it’s an incorrect feeling if feelings can be described that way, but this was the part of my brain that lit up. His cry was a familiar face in the crowd. I was lying on my back staring at the ceiling, shaking, with tears streaming down the sides of my cheeks. His cry, I was surprised to find, sounded like him. He sounded like his own person, distinct. Before then all baby cries sounded the same to me, but his cry was a voice. A self.

I couldn’t see him but this fact didn’t even really bother me. I did not pull him out of me and straight to my chest. He did not crawl up my stomach and latch onto me, the way it happened in my Ina May-fueled fantasies. No one shouted, “Catch your baby! Reach down, Meaghan, and catch your baby.” I was not on a birth stool. Although Dustin was, now that I think of it, telling me I was “doing so good.”

I was doing so good. In that I wasn’t having a panic attack. I was enduring. My baby had lived. I had lived through this.

They hoisted the baby up and Dustin stood up from his stool and took a picture with his iPhone. We were crying and kissing through his snotty surgical mask and the anesthesiologist’s assistant squeezed my hand and kept telling me that, “Oh, he is really, really cute.”

All of the doctors and nurses commented on how big he was. I didn’t see any of it but in photos he looks big and blue, like a slimy teddy bear in my doctor’s hands. I can see my umbilical cord snaked around the blue sterile paper. There is a hole in my body. This is also in the photo. My doctor is smiling, one hand on my kid’s swollen balls and another behind his neck. He’s screaming. Why is my doctor in my son’s very first photo? I’ve only seen it once. I liked to look at it, like hearing about a party I didn’t go to. “Are those my boobs?” Dustin and I squinted at the photo for a very long time. “No that can’t be right.” We turned the phone this way and that. They were my thighs. “Wow,” I said.

I never saw my placenta. On one hand I don’t give a shit. Why did we even talk about saving it? Paying someone hundreds of dollars to encapsulate it? Was this just another thing to occupy us before the sea change? Another thing to put on the to-do list? It is so ridiculous. I am not that ridiculous of a person in other aspects of my life, but when it came to childbirth, I was apparently some sort of witch. No matter, I never got it together enough to pay someone to freeze dry my placenta and put it into pills, much as it disappointed my curious friends.

Soon I heard a great suctioning noise, which correlated either with someone suctioning liquid out of the baby’s lungs or liquid out of my body cavity. We were the same in that way; underwater.

They called Dustin over to watch him get weighed, measured. “What were his APGAR scores?” I asked later but Dustin had no idea. I couldn’t believe this. Our child’s first test. I needed to know.

The baby looks so alone in the photos, lying by himself on that scale.

* * *

A minute or two later there they both were, back with me, the baby wrapped in a blanket, subdued in his father’s arms. I tipped my head back, my chin up, to get a good look at him. I struggled to lift my arm, to touch his cheek. I put my face to his face. I am sure I didn’t know what to say, how to touch him. “Hi baby,” is what I’m sure I said. I’m sure I kept crying. He looked so cute, so distinct, so himself. The anesthesiologist’s assistant took a photo of the three of us with Dustin’s phone.

The baby and Dustin went somewhere for tests or baths or who knows what, and I was still on the table. They would reappear later in the recovery room, where I’d be back on monitors, still numb, setting off alarms with my high heart rate. I would breastfeed, my baby like a piranha, knowing better than me how to be an animal. My mother would say that she couldn’t stop crying. I would ask how to get some food. It was one in the morning. “So is anything open anymore?” I’d ask, meaning the cafeteria.

“Oh you can’t eat for 24 hours,” the nurse said, and I think she savored saying it. She’d bring me ice chips, ask me if I could feel my legs. Dustin would stand back as a nurse gave our nameless baby his very first bath. He said she was rough. It made him so angry. He said if he would have known he never would have allowed it.

“So they’re basically putting you back together right now,” the anesthesiologist said to me, matter of factly. I appreciated her honesty. The horror of it felt appropriate. I nodded, brave. All of it felt right, actually; to become a mother like this.

* * *

Meaghan O’Connell is a freelance writer and an associate editor at The Billfold.

Edited by Mike Dang.

Illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

* * *

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Julia Wick | Longreads | November 7, 2014 | 11 minutes (2,674 words)

“I am bone of the bone of them that live in trailer homes.” That’s the first line of Sarah Smarsh’s essay “Poor Teeth,” which appeared on Aeon earlier this month. Like much of Smarsh’s work, “Poor Teeth” is a story about inequity in America. It is also a story about teeth, hers and her grandmother’s and also the millions of Americans who lack dental coverage.

Smarsh has written for Harper’s, Guernica and The Morning News, among other outlets. Her perspective is very much shaped by her personal experiences: She grew up in a family where most didn’t graduate from high school, and she later chaired the faculty-staff Diversity Initiative as a professor at Washburn University in Topeka. I spoke with her about her own path to journalism and how the media cover issues of class. 

* * *

Class is really at the heart of your work. How has your perspective been shaped by your own experiences?

I’m native to the working class, which over the course of my Reagan-era childhood became the working poor. I’m from a long line of farmers, carpenters, factory and restaurant workers, and I’m the first person from my family to go to college—the first among the ones who raised me to finish high school, actually. So I have a built-in awareness of unchecked privilege or unasked questions and unheard voices, as relates to the economy, in any piece of writing.

Before I could read words, my mom was holding a coupon next to the canned nuts, telling me to run to the baking aisle to check the price on bulk walnuts. So, when I was a budding investigative reporter, nobody had to teach me to follow the money.

How do you see privilege manifesting itself in journalism?

Reporters often find themselves writing about social or political problems. Health, education, crime—the troubles in these sectors, largely, are the troubles of poor people. But most often those human subjects are talked about rather than spoken to. In choosing my sources I’m always conscious of whether I’m talking to official types or to people my grandma would call “common.” They’re experts in different ways, and while educated policymakers may know more about systemic solutions for, say, allotment of food stamps, you can bet your ass that the high school dropout who refuses to apply for food stamps knows more about the cost of food.

Also, media treatment of economic disparity as an issue distinct from other current events is itself symptomatic of privilege. Poverty isn’t a beat. Money is foundational to just about every human experience in our lopsided global economy. If you don’t realize that, you’ve probably never gone without it.

That’s a really powerful distinction you’ve brought up, between expert sources and those on the ground.

I’ve seen that many times, how journalism colleagues of mine will—by and large not consciously, I think—select the sharpest quotes from an interview with, say, a hospital spokesperson and conversely select the least flattering language from whatever sorry S.O.B. provides the anecdotal lede about not having health insurance. I’m sure I’m not immune to these things. Prejudice and projected narrative are forces in all of us. But I try to be aware of it, and that sometimes cracks the projection and lets someone else’s truth through. That’s one reason nonfiction is such a transformative art form. It allows—it requires—a honing in on specificity, where so many realities throw off the blanket fictions.

You do a really beautiful job of that in your essay “Poor Teeth.” Reading your piece I couldn’t help but think of Linda Tirado, whose essay “This Is Why Poor People’s Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense” went viral, and how she ended up removing her partial dentures on camera in a YouTube video in response to critics who had charged her with fabricating her story.

Yes, the most interesting thing to me about that was the incredulousness she was met with. Why was she called upon to essentially prove her story? I presume her story was met with such disbelief because it’s hard for some people to reconcile a certain level of intellect with a story of real poverty. Those two narratives are usually kept separate in media and pop culture. And if you believe those generalizations, that poor people are stupid, unemployed and lacking Internet access, then Tirado’s powerful argument essay blogged between work and college classes is either going to blast open some psychological schema or be labeled by your brain as fiction.

If there’s a lack of class diversity, specifically, among the voices we’re hearing, how do you see it affecting coverage of poverty as a whole?

There often is a tone in writing about the poor. There is a presumption that people of a certain class are mired in misery. When you’ve actually lived in those spaces, you can attest that there are plenty of beautiful and delightful things about being there. Blessings I wouldn’t trade for anything—freedom from expectation, the wildness of a childhood that wasn’t micromanaged, honesty and humor about one’s own dysfunctions where people with more to lose often spend time pretending to be perfect.

Most journalists, I’d wager, don’t have direct experience with poverty but are somewhat aware of their own privilege, and that translates to treating reporting of poverty preciously and yet at a distance—this pity tone, which is just an indirect outlet for their own fears and biases. Do you think you’re telling the untold story because you drove your own car into the ghetto to get some quotes and a few shots of shivering children for a 10-inch write-up on the cost of natural gas and a family who had their heat turned off? If you’d stuck around you might have seen that family build an electric-blanket fort in the middle of the living room, huddle over a game of Monopoly and crack up all night long about how screwed they are. You’re not qualified to pity anyone, and you’re not necessarily envied in the ways that matter most.

How can the media address these issues?

This is why we need more diverse voices in social discourse. Not the usual suspects aiming to give voice to them, but their own voices writing the stories. It’s no longer enough for even the most earnest upper- or middle-class white male reporter to write about marginalized or disadvantaged populations. We need writing from those populations, to witness them being all sorts of individual human beings. Access to higher education is the most crucial step toward that goal.

We also need diversification of sources—journalists asking themselves, who am I interviewing for this story? Who’s this professor I’m about to call? And then admitting, “Oh, heck, I’m terrifically liberal and even have two black friends, but what do you know, the source I planned to interview is another upper-class white dude who went to the Ivy League.”

Diversity among sources is one area where TV journalists are ahead of print journalists, I think, which is probably because they’re dealing with the visual, and many of the demographic markers we’re discussing are visually discernible. In print, since the race or background of the source usually is irrelevant, it’s not made known in the writing. But writers better make those efforts even though they’ll be less seen or congratulated for it.

Economic class also is a marker that isn’t always visually discernable.

When there’s a concerted effort toward diversification in any system, socioeconomic class is often forgotten for that reason. When I was an undergrad I benefitted from a federal program that encourages first-generation, low-income and minority students into graduate school and the academy. As a white person I was always the racial minority at those events and often would be asked to explain myself. When I was a graduate student at Columbia, I attended a diversity conference on campus, and a young woman said to me, “No offense, but why are you here?” I was glad she asked. I was yapping about diversity of class perspective any chance I could get, speaking at tuition protests on campus and the like. When I was a professor I chaired my university’s diversity initiative and made sure that class was included in the institutional definition of “diversity.” I’m heartened to see a swell of attention to this issue lately in academia, actually. If journalism, literature, publishing, all the letters are going to be enriched by direct perspectives of those who have lived on the so-called wrong side of the tracks, education is how it’s going to happen.

Tell me about how you got started as a reporter.

My first efforts at journalism happened when I was a kid tagging along with my grandma, Betty, at the county courthouse in downtown Wichita. She was a probation officer for the criminal courts, and we couldn’t afford a babysitter, so I roved all over this veritable Wichita skyscraper of eleven floors unsupervised, witnessing the drama of the courthouse. The new female D.A. was all shoulder-padded up, clicking across the marble lobby floor. Paroled murderers, drug dealers, sex offenders and such walked past me into my grandma’s office for meetings, and I’d eavesdrop—an experience that taught me the nuance of reality. I heard these broken men talking about their own victimizations and struggles. My grandma—who herself was the victim of many perpetrators over the years—would deliver tough love. She’d understand their reasons but not let them give excuses. She’d say, “Don’t give me that dysfunctional childhood bullshit. My family invented dysfunction.” But then she’d hug them and they’d shuffle off crying.

Betty wasn’t one to censor and, to keep me busy while she worked, she’d suggest I pore over her caseload files—all paper then, which is kind of noir-romantic now. I was eight, paging through grisly police reports about homicides while this great old judge—the first African-American judge for the county district court in Wichita—was smoking a cigar. I’d read files to bone up for that day’s trial, and Betty would give me a legal pad and tell me to take notes during the proceedings. Then I’d go through the public entrance to the courtroom and watch the court stenographer and Betty walk in through the bench entrance, followed by the judge. Betty would wink at me from the bench while I wrote down my observations of the defendant and arguments. Later I’d sit at her office typewriter and type up my “report” on district-court letterhead and present it for her review. Then we’d go back to her tiny place in poor-ville near downtown and watch cop shows all night. It was awesome.

Journalism has always been, at least to some degree, seen as a bastion of the elite, but it seems like an unfortunate side-effect of the industry’s current turmoil is that it’s raised the barriers to entry, where writers are asked to take an unpaid internship for six months before getting a job, or to write for free in exchange for “exposure.”

I feel like I’m a relatively young writer and that shift has happened within the course of my career. I entered J-school fifteen years ago. I took unpaid or underpaid internships, at great short-term sacrifice, but it was before digital had totally transformed everything, so at least there were a good number of salaried print and broadcasting jobs to hope for in the long-term. I actually never thought of journalism as an elite institution. I saw it as brave, justice-oriented types going out into the night and getting their hands dirty for a middle-class income.

Right out of college I got my first job making $25,000 dollars a year at an alt-weekly in Kansas City. I lived low-rent and pinched pennies, but I felt like the profession was delivering on its promise, that I’d get to reveal people and things through writing and get a little money for it. Now, as you note, the uprooting of the print industry and the scrambling for viable online business models has cut writing budgets so dramatically that an economy has arisen around this convenient idea that exposure alone is pay.

That’s a damaging shift if we care about diversity in the media, because it’s a very certain club that can work for free and still pay the bills.

So you started with an internship? How did you make it work?

My first internship was at the New York NBC affiliate in their investigative news unit. It was unpaid, and I’d always worked by necessity over the summer, but how could I miss the opportunity? A young alum of my J-school, a brilliant angel of a woman I’m still friends with, showed me this online invention called a listserv, specifically for communication among University of Kansas alumni in New York. She posted my plea for housing there. A native New Yorker who had gone to KU’s architecture school invited me to stay for free with him and his wife all summer in Brooklyn. I did all sorts of things to make it happen and still at a financial loss.

Let’s talk for a minute about your essay “Dear Daughter, Your Mom.” It’s a literary personal essay about class, gender, work—and, at the story level, Hooters—all relayed as a dear daughter letter. How did you come up with that framing?

I almost always know the last line of something I’m writing before I write anything else. I heard the ending, and I knew the essay was about an integration of two things, the self and the child self.

I’d been thinking a lot about “your mom” jokes, which at times have genuinely cracked me up, along with “that’s what she said” and the like. I was realizing that, however funny they struck me in some ironic feminist way, at their heart those jokes are sexist degradation of the womb as a de-sanctified victim. Then it occurred to me that “dear daughter” letters—Maya Angelou, Tina Fey—were the opposite trope, a feminist declaration of the mother as protector of her womb’s sacred contents. I thought about the logical signature at the bottom of such a letter being “love, your mom,” and I saw the two things to be integrated in the essay—the joke and the letter.

The other thing about that piece that really struck me was the way that it was handled. In another publication the headline might have about been the working at Hooters part, which is such a small component of the story, and would have really stripped it of so much. But there was absolutely no click bait aspect to it.

When I wrote it I wasn’t really thinking of where it would run. It wasn’t until I finished that I realized, oh, this is a piece that publications will want to package salaciously around its built-in T&A storyline, even though it’s not an essay about working at Hooters. Many respected publications package even high-quality work with click-bait now. The piece at hand was the most sacred and vulnerable thing I’d ever sent into the world, and I knew I wasn’t going to let that sort of cynicism anywhere near it. That whittles down your list of places to pitch very quickly. I was really happy it landed at the Morning News. I asked that the headline not include the word “Hooters,” as I didn’t want it to become an advertisement, and that the image that ran with it not be related to the female physical form. Not to suggest that they would have done those things anyway, or even that it would be wrong in some context, but that’s what felt right for me, and they honored it.

While that’s on the gender point, I think there’s a lot of class commentary also inherent in negotiating how we’re packaged as writers, how our work is packaged. A lot of writing sort of sells out the self in order to get a paycheck, because that paycheck is needed. Which is kind of a literary parallel to working at Hooters. And I trust that the writers in that camp have their reasons. We’re all trying to figure out how to get fed.

Suzanne Snider | Tokion | June/July 2006 | 12 minutes (2,918 words)

This story by Suzanne Snider—which details the fantastical rise and fall of John DeLorean, a former titan of the American automotive industry—first appeared in the June/July 2006 issue of Tokion. Snider is the founder/director of Oral History Summer School, and she is currently completing a nonfiction book about rival communes on adjacent land. Our thanks to Snider for allowing us to feature it on Longreads. 

***

By 1999 John DeLorean was bankrupt and swimming in $85 million debt, but he still hoped that his namesake De Lorean car would eventually come back into style. The thought wasn’t entirely absurd – Volkswagen was enjoying phenomenal success with its ‘new’ Beetle and the retro-styled PT Cruiser was a hit for Chrysler. Then again the De Lorean Motor Company’s signature car, the DMC-12, only had a ten to 11-month run of less than 9,000 cars. In other words, the 1982 De Lorean car was retro by 1983. By 1985 the De Lorean was a joke in Back to the Future, so dated it made for a perfect time machine.

The timeline of DeLorean’s personal history is so tied to the history of automobiles that, even after his death in 2005 (at age 80, after suffering complications from a stroke), his various supporters and detractors are still debating his accomplishments and foibles. Both lists are long. Some argue for the flashy and obvious, such as the DMC-12’s gull-wing doors and rust proof stainless steel body. Others point to a design accomplishment that is far more ubiquitous but rarely attributed to DeLorean: the lane-change turn signal.

Yes, that’s right: before DeLorean, drivers stuck their arms out the window to indicate a turn. DeLorean’s other innovations made major impacts as well, though the actual tally of those inventions and patents ranges from 3 to 200, depending on who you ask. Most agree that a short list would include a recessed windshield wiper, the overhead-cam engine, and racing stripes.

One more thing: John DeLorean was also the person responsible for the world’s first muscle car, the ’64 Pontiac GTO, a car that initiated one of the most successful and drastic industry makeovers in automotive history.

Unfortunately, you can go back to the old cars, but you can never go back to the old Detroit.

Photo by Alden Jewell, Flickr

***

In the 1970s and ’80s, a star map of car kings would have been laid out around the suburbs of Detroit, with frequent sightings in Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe in particular.

In Southfield, Michigan, you’d find the middling businessmen whose stars had not yet risen. For children in these communities, car culture permeated daily life, even for those of whose families were not directly involved with the industry. This is where I grew up, and this was the case for the most part with my family. Or at least it was the case until my father became the De Lorean Motor Company’s bankruptcy attorney.

I was nine years old in 1982, when my father flew from Detroit to New Jersey to meet with John DeLorean, in order to “answer some questions about bankruptcy.” I had no idea what exactly DeLorean was famous for, but I knew he was a celebrity and that my mother was nagging my father about what he would be wearing to DeLorean’s 454-acre horse farm. My sister and I were more focused on inviting DeLorean to her Bat Mitzvah at Detroit’s Renaissance Center, a set of black skyscrapers built in 1971 as a response to the city’s 1967 riots and the subsequent white flight to the suburbs.

Perhaps my sister and I already knew deep down that Detroit (or at least her party) needed John DeLorean more than DeLorean needed Detroit. He was a good face for the industry, even if the rumors were true that he had paid several cosmetic surgeons to construct the countenance. To us, he looked like a swashbuckling soap star who happened to do something with cars.

Dancing at the Renaissance Center in the early ‘80s was a little bit like driving a De Lorean in the ‘90s: when the luxury turns into embarrassment or when you throw a massive party and nobody really shows up. DeLorean never made it our party: not long before my sister became a woman in the eyes of the Jewish religion, he was busted on charges that he tried to obtain more than 50 pounds of cocaine. The bust happened five days before Ronald Reagan officially proclaimed his “war on drugs.” DeLorean had been caught on tape boasting to undercover agents that the coke was “good as gold.”

My father had been called in to represent DeLorean before the bust, and he continued to work with DeLorean afterward. My father remembers one particularly grueling day, which began in New York City at 8 a.m. The Bank of America was ready to seize DeLorean’s cars, and DeLorean thought my father could buy a little time. While they flew to Los Angeles, one of DeLorean’s “associates” reportedly arrived at the horse farm with hired guns, and the modern-day bandits proceeded to draw and point their weapons at the Bank of America employees who had arrived to seize property.

Meanwhile, my father was playing by the rules in an oxford and bow tie, meeting with the bank’s representatives, followed by a meeting with a Swiss financier. DeLorean and my father continued meetings until, at midnight in Los Angeles (3 a.m. New York time), DeLorean was finally ready to meet with all of his company’s car dealers. Even my father, a hardy insomniac, could not keep the pace. Looking back, he realizes DeLorean may have had a chemical advantage.

Anytime my father attempted to suggest or impose restrictions or rules on the business, DeLorean reminded him that he had designed a car that everyone said he could not design, that he had built a factory that everyone said he could not build. Though the government’s drug-related charges were all dismissed in 1984 on grounds of entrapment, the De Lorean Motor Company was already history. When my father filed Chapter 11 paperwork in October 1982, none of us totally appreciated all that was dismantled: DeLorean’s vision, his patents and a litany of other sub-miracles that DeLorean had performed, post-GTO and pre-blow.

Most of all, it was the end of the story of John DeLorean as part of the American Dream—how a humble kid from Detroit could rise to the very top.

***

Before John Z. DeLorean had a capital “L” in his last name or an pseudo-European space—De Lorean—in his company name, he was plain John Delorean, the son of immigrants, born in 1925 and raised on Detroit’s east side, a lower-middle class neighborhood.

DeLorean’s mother was Hungarian and worked for General Electric. His father was from Romania and worked at the Ford foundry doing factory work. Despite a troubled relationship with his father, DeLorean was a motivated and successful young student who managed to gain entrance to one of the most elite public schools in Detroit: Cass Technical High School, popularly known as Cass Tech.

Originally conceived as a trade school for young men in 1861, Cass Tech grew so rapidly and successfully that in the 1920s students were asked to leave after two years to find jobs, in order to make room for those on the waitlist. Finding a job was relatively easy for Cass Tech’s students since the school functioned as a feeder into design divisions of the Big Three automakers. The young DeLorean’s course in life seemed to have been set. Yet, in the first of many odd twists in his biography, DeLorean initially decided to bank on his skills playing the saxophone.

Upon graduation from Cass Tech DeLorean won a music scholarship at the Lawrence Institute of Technology. But in 1943, before he could graduate, DeLorean was drafted into the army. Three years later he returned to Detroit and spent several years working odd jobs before completing his undergraduate degree and enrolling for an engineering research opportunity at the Chrysler Institute. Positions at the Institute were highly coveted—Chrysler offered these post-graduate positions the starting salary of a company engineer. Completing both a Master’s degree in Automotive Engineering and, later, an MBA from the University of Michigan, DeLorean officially joined the Chrysler team in 1957. But after only one year at Chrysler, DeLorean moved to the Packard car company, and then quickly on to General Motors’ Pontiac Division.

And that is where he spearheaded the GTO, America’s first muscle car, ushering the entire American auto industry into a new era of unbridled competition and massive profits.

Program for the 1960 Detroit Auto Show via John Lloyd, Flickr

***

The concept was simple: big engine, small car. But the execution was not.

In the early 1960s General Motors imposed a strict mandate prohibiting the production of “high performance” car models that suggested racing or high-speed. This rule was detailed in a January 1963 memo that banned the use of GM cars in all racing activities (repeating a more general American Manufacturer’s Association rule dating back to 1957.) To specifically delineate non-racing cars from racing cars, GM required that the company’s cars weigh at least ten or more pounds per cubic inch of engine displacement, specs that insured cars would not be speedy enough for racing.

As Pontiac’s chief engineer, DeLorean was just one of several ambitious engineers determined to shove a 389 cubic inch motor into the company’s Tempest LeMans, an already existing 3400-pound car. If they weren’t going to exactly be building racecars, they were still going to build performance-cars. Pontiac was already rallying from its reputation as a less-than-sexy division of the GM company, and DeLorean and company were already working on their Tempest LeMans transformation when the 1963 mandate came down, a set of restrictions that were viewed by DeLorean and others as an affront to Pontiac’s recent progress and future plans.

But DeLorean saw something that the other engineers bent over their drafting boards did not see: a loophole. DeLorean came up with the idea to offer customers a Tempest LeMans with options… Options like, say, a V8 engine. With only this flimsy loophole justifying his obvious defiance of the spirit of company law, DeLorean’s crafty design team created the new GTO, a name taken from Ferrari’s GTO (where it stood for “Gran Tourismo Omologato.”)

***

Photo of Pontiac GTO by Les Stockton, Flickr

When the Pontiac GTO entered the market in 1964 (with a GTO options package for just $296; the whole GTO LeMans ran around $4000), it defined a new class of automobile. From 1964 through 1974 American car manufacturers cranked out a long line of legendary, high performance cars—the Plymouth Road Runner, the Chevrolet Chevelle and the Dodge Super Bee, Charger and Barracuda, among others. It’s actually nearly impossible to find a precise definition for a muscle car—the term was not even used until the 1970s—but the Muscle Car Club nevertheless proposes a set of distinct parameters that unifies the cars of this era: “A muscle car, by the strictest definition, is an intermediate-sized performance-oriented model, powered by a large V8 engine, at an affordable price. Most of these models were based on ‘regular’ production vehicles.” In other words: DeLorean’s team had created the blueprint for one of the most legendary and beloved car types in American automotive history.

Though GM blazed the trail for muscle cars, the company was unprepared to compete with Ford’s contribution to the new breed or class of car: compact ‘pony’ cars. In April, 1964 Lee Iacocca introduced the Mustang, and within the next two years, Ford produced over 1.5 million Mustangs, a previously unimaginable total. Though similar to the GTO, the Mustang offered the same power in an even more compact body. It wasn’t until the introduction of the Chevrolet Camaro and Pontiac Firebird in 1967 that GM was able to reenter the very race the company (and DeLorean) had started.

Of course, today’s car consumers can only dream of such a ruthlessly competitive and innovative American automobile industry. With the 1973 OPEC embargo on oil, and the emergence of emissions testing, muscle and pony car production all but ended by the mid-‘70s. Worse yet, the aggressive creative ethos that had spawned these cars also died a slow death throughout the decade.

But the rules were different in the ‘60s. For his act of defiance in creating the GTO, DeLorean was handsomely rewarded by his superiors. Leapfrogging ahead of several promising engineers (with more seniority) he rose from division head at Pontiac to be head of all North American operations and Vice-President of GM. At Pontiac, DeLorean had already been the youngest GM division head, only 40 years old. As head of North American operations, his star continued to rise, to the tune of a $650,000 per year paycheck, a steep increase from $20,000 starting salary.

***

Photo by Alden Jewell, Flickr

By 1973, he had the fame. The title. The money. At which point he promptly resigned.

“They were celebrities.” That’s how Eddie Alterman, a childhood friend of mine who is now an editor for car-centric MPH Magazine, remembers the Detroit-area car executives of that era. “But they were also like the Roman army: they were tall, goyish and had to inspire confidence in their troops.” With a bit of sympathy, Alterman notes that “they all had huge egos,” and in the case of DeLorean, his vanity drove his taste in cars, clothing and women. That last item on DeLorean’s list included three wives, plus reported dalliances with Ursula Andress, Candice Bergen and Raquel Welch. But the same ego that was necessary to excel at General Motors and every other car corporation may have been the very source of his downfall once he pulled apart to form his own corporate entity.

DeLorean’s departure from GM was controversial, to say the least. Where could he go from GM? Gossips floated conspiracy theories about his resignation. It might have come down to style—not fashion, strictly, but a more general personal manner. My father notes that, “In those days, the execs at General Motors were all dressed in white shirts. But DeLorean was into more flamboyant clothing. He was tall, good-looking, wore his hair long…” And as my father discovered, “He had his shirts hand-made, with the collars cut extra-long.”

DeLorean founded the De Lorean Motor Company in 1975, with the express goal of creating a relatively affordable $25,000 sports car. The first factory didn’t open until 1981, however, and it opened in an unlikely location: Dunmurry, a suburb of Belfast in Northern Ireland. The prototype for the DMC-12 was completed somewhere between 1976 and 1978. What was DeLorean doing in the seven years in between? Ostensibly, he was raising money, tapping into a social network that included Hollywood, where he convinced Johnny Carson and Sammy Davis Jr. to invest in the De Lorean Motor Company. In fact, Johnny Carson’s dedication to the De Lorean business was memorialized when Carson was arrested for a DUI while driving in—what else—a De Lorean.

The British government offered to give DeLorean something close to $120 million dollars to build his factory in Northern Ireland, and the Dunmurry factory remained one of the achievements of which DeLorean was proudest. The factory brought together the area’s Protestant and Catholic workers together in one workplace for the very first time, although there was a separate entrance for each group. (This design scheme supposed owed more to geography than factory-imposed segregation, since the building sat exactly on the border between the two communities.)

Ultimately, there were other drawbacks: since Northern Ireland did not boast a highly trained labor-pool, many of the De Lorean cars had to be rebuilt in the United States. Despite its gull-wing doors and perfectly rustproof stainless steel body, the DMC was criticized as poor-performance. “The De Lorean was a substandard car (with) a cool-looking body,” as Alterman puts it. Undaunted, DeLorean planned to make a plastic-body car that would sell for $20,000.

Before that could happen, DeLorean ran into trouble with his other import business—the one from South America.

***

When we look at the De Lorean today, we see what we—or at least John DeLorean—thought of the future, in the past. Like a tin-foil spaceship you made for your fourth grade diorama project, the De Lorean car now looks both inspiring and primitive. But do not underestimate the power of nostalgia. These days every car corporation in Detroit and elsewhere is banking on baby boomers snapping up new models that affect the look or spirit of cars from when they grew up: new Mustangs, GTOs, Chargers and Camaros, not to mention the new Beetles, Mini Coopers and PT Cruisers.

Why now? With gas prices higher than ever, hybrids on the horizon and SUVs still hogging the road, is the muscle car really still part of the zeitgeist? Perhaps the hope among the big 12 car manufacturers is that a swell of money from new muscle-car consumers would revert Detroit to its past glories. Frankly, that is unlikely: the means of production have long since been exported out of the city.

Detroit’s greatest prospect, Alterman suggests, is alternative fuel as opposed to cars. “The biggest hope for this area is if it becomes agrarian again: if we process bio-fuels. People developing bio-fuel (engines) are either based in Silicon Valley or Detroit. You have to make it near where you plan to distribute it, because it can’t go through the country’s gas lines.”

To casual observers, that prospect might seem far-fetched—it would most likely require a forward thinking visionary to turn the automotive business in this radical direction. Of course, Detroit car manufacturers do not appear ready to accept this idea, even if their resistance is built more on nostalgia and image than reality. As it turns out, nostalgia is the proverbial engine driving American car production and car consumers.

Despite the questionable outlook for Detroit’s car industry, Alterman still offers that we are indeed back in a golden age of car design. “There’s never been more stuff lining up in the auto world’s favor. This is the golden age of choice. The sky is the limit.”

That attitude is indeed the DeLorean legacy.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

* * *

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

“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

“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

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.

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

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

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 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

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.

* * *

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.

 * * *

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.

Mark Armstrong | Longreads | November 18, 2014 | 5 minutes (1,301 words)

 
Thirty-six years ago, on Nov. 18, 1978, a charismatic preacher from San Francisco named Jim Jones led his followers into one of the most horrific massacres in American history. More than 900 people—including 303 children—were slaughtered, in a place called Jonestown. It was a community first built as a socialist utopia for parishioners from the Peoples Temple. But Jones had other plans, planting the seeds of “revolutionary suicide” that ended with mass cyanide poisoning.

I spoke with Julia Scheeres, author of the book A Thousand Lives and our latest Longreads Exclusive, “Escape from Jonestown,” about the newly public home movies from inside and how the phrase “drink the Kool-Aid” became a terrible reminder for its survivors.

* * *

How did you first become interested in Jonestown, as a topic and then as a book?

I was writing a satirical novel about a charismatic preacher who takes over a small Indiana town when I remembered Jim Jones was from Indiana and Googled him for inspiration. I then learned that the FBI had recently released its files on Jonestown. These included 50,000 pieces of paper that agents had collected from Jonestown after the massacre and almost a thousand audio tapes. Once I started browsing the materials, I couldn’t tear myself away. This story seemed more urgent to tell than a religious farce.

The more I understood what actually transpired in Jonestown, the more offended I became by the notion that Jones’ victims “drank the Kool-Aid.” I felt a duty to defend them, to tell the true story of what happened in Jonestown. The central argument of A Thousand Lives is that Jim Jones murdered his congregants—it was mass murder, not mass suicide. He fantasized about killing them for years before they moved to Guyana and lured them there by making them believe they could return to California whenever they wanted. Once he had them sequestered in the middle of the South American jungle, he refused to let anyone go. “If you want to go home, you can swim,” he told disgruntled residents. “We won’t pay your fucking way home.” I found many heartbreaking notes from residents begging Jones to let them go home, offering to send down paychecks for the rest of their lives, etc. The hardest to read were from parents who, once they realized Jones was intent on killing everyone, were at a loss for ways to insulate their children from Jones’ madness. A third of the 918 people who died in the Jonestown massacre were minors. They didn’t “drink the Kool-Aid;” they had it forced down their throats.

And it wasn’t even Kool-Aid. The poison was mixed with a cheap knock-off called “Flavor-Aid.” That unfortunate phrase has worked its way into the cultural lexicon, but few young people know of its Jonestown origins or how offensive it is to Jones’ victims.

Have survivors spoken to you about experiencing that phrase in their lives now?

Julie Ann Runnels. (Photo via San Diego State University)

As you’d imagine, the phrase offends survivors. It reduces a mass tragedy to the level of banality. Jonestown residents didn’t willingly drink poison—they were forced to do so. Jones gave them a choice: drink cyanide or be shot to death by armed guards. Living was not an alternative. Many decided to drink the “potion,” as Jones called it, with their families. Those who refused to comply were forcibly injected with it. A 12-year-old girl named Julie Ann Runnels kept spitting the poison out, so two of Jones’ lieutenants forced her to swallow by it by pulling her hair and clamping their hands over her nose and mouth. She did not “Drink the Kool-Aid.” She was murdered—as were all the 303 children who died that night. We need to stop disrespecting Jones’ victims with this odious and wildly inaccurate phrase.

In the home movies you obtained, Jones gives a tour of the compound, and he also goes out of his way to emphasize the supplies they have, their success with farming, their ability to sell sauces and create a business for themselves. Was he trying to recruit more people to come at this point, or just make those back in the U.S. feel comfortable about their family being there?

From the first days of the settlement, Jim Jones ran a propaganda campaign worthy of Joseph Stalin. He showed his San Francisco congregation highly-edited films portraying Jonestown as a land of plenty. In one video, the cameraman shoots a woman eating a big piece of fried chicken. He zooms in on the chicken for several seconds, telling the woman “move your hands,” so he can get a better shot. Then he re-shoots the segment with an even bigger piece of chicken. The whole point of the home movies—which were for internal use only—was to lure as many of his congregants to Jonestown as possible.

It was only after people arrived in Jonestown—a two-day journey by boat—that they realized they’d been duped. There wasn’t enough food. Families were split up. And their pastor was suddenly promoting “revolutionary suicide” and refusing to let them go home.

It’s striking to me, when viewing the home movies, how aggressively Jones manipulates the messaging from each community member on film. In the group testimonials home movie, you can hear him in the background feeding them lines, reminding them to call him “father.” What do survivors say about his daily behavior in Guyana and his enforcement of these ideas?

I’m glad you noticed that. Residents were told what to say on film and in letters home. For example, Grandma Bates, an elderly African American woman, boasts on camera that she’d “never been so healthy or happy” as she’d been since moving to Jonestown. But when a newly-arrived friend visited her in the crowded dorm she shared with other seniors—some sleeping in triple level bunk beds—Grandma Bates confided that she’d suffered several illnesses in Jonestown.

Jones withheld hundreds of letters to and from residents. It was heartbreaking to discover them in the FBI archives—all those missives from family and friends in the States who were desperate to know whether their loved ones were okay—if the rumors that people were being held against their will were true or when they’d be returning from their “mission trip.” Toward the end, Jones insisted that all letters home be written in front of censors—he wanted the outside world to believe the lie that his Socialist utopia was a success until the bitter end.

Can you tell me a little bit about how your own upbringing informs your work when looking at stories like what happened at Jonestown?

As I state in the Introduction to A Thousand Lives, had I walked by Jim Jones’s church and heard his sermons on social justice and seen the diverse congregation, I certainly would have been drawn to the doorway.

My first book, Jesus Land (first chapter), is a memoir about growing up in a small Indiana town with an adopted African American brother. My parents were strict Calvinists—we went to Christian school, church three times a week, read the Bible after supper, etc. Race (racism) and religion (as unifier and oppressor) are dominant themes in both books. As is the quest to belong. David and I struggled to belong in a rural environment that was overtly racist. The African Americans who joined Jones’ church, The Peoples Temple, struggled to belong in an overtly racist society. Few folks know that Jim Jones was a civil rights leader in Indianapolis—integrating lunch counters and churches—and that the majority of his victims were African Americans who heeded his message of social equality. How terribly they were betrayed for believing in this dream.

* * *

Read “Escape from Jonestown”

View more home movies from inside Jonestown

Belle Boggs | The New New South | August 2013 | 62 minutes (15,377 words)

Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)

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.”

Willis Lynch’s order for sterilization.

I never figured out why they did that to me.

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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.

Some 60,000 American citizens were sterilized, often under coercion or without consent.

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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.

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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 Republican-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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

The Eugenics Board’s records show that Lynch had been targeted as ‘feebleminded’ on the basis of an IQ test.

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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.

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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.

‘This was my epiphany, the blast that shattered any last illusions I still had about my state.’

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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.”

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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.

By July 1935, the state had sterilized 223 men and women, most of them residents of state-run institutions.

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* * *

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.”

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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.

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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.”

‘I think I was just ashamed, or hurt, I don’t know which.’

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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.”

With reproductive trauma, the losses happen over and over again.

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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.

‘The job of parenthood is too much to expect of feebleminded men and women,’ the pamphlet reads.

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“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.”

‘That is so easy. I would have given up my life. My whole life.’

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* * *

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.

‘Through talking, I starting shedding off pieces of my shame. I had to get rid of all that shame if I wanted to live.’

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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.

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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.”

‘I’m so proud that God gave me a voice. I demand to be heard.’

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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.

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Originally published by The New New South, August 2013. 

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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

Adele Oliveira | Longreads | Nov. 2014 | 15 minutes (3,798 words)

In 1994, when she was seven years old, Mara Wilson appeared on The Today Show with Katie Couric to promote a remake of Miracle on 34th Street, in which she starred.

Right away, it’s easy to see why Wilson, who’s also known for her work in Mrs. Doubtfire and Matilda, is a successful and endearing child actor. She wears a red-checked gingham shirt underneath a wooly red cardigan, and her feet stick straight off the armchair on which she sits, too short to reach the ground. Wilson is missing teeth, and despite lisping, her diction is perfect and she’s polite and sincere with Couric, who mispronounces Wilson’s first name. Couric asks Wilson if she’d like to be like Natalie Wood someday—Wood played Wilson’s role in the original 1947 version of Miracle on 34th Street. Wood started acting as a child, and in Couric’s words, grew up to be “a very famous, well-known, talented actress.”

Wilson hesitates, and you can see her thinking as she wrinkles her nose. “I don’t know,” she shrugs. “I might not want to be an actress all of my life.” Wilson says she wants to be a “script writer” and that while she hasn’t yet written down any of her stories, “I have a lot of them in my head.”

For a certain generation of Americans who grew up alongside her, Wilson remains perfectly preserved in memory, forever this guileless and articulate little girl. But at 27, Wilson is more compelling as an adult than she was a child. Her writing is sharp, funny, and critical of the film industry and expectations placed on women who live their lives in public. In October, Wilson signed a deal with Penguin Books for an essay collection, due in 2016.

The essays, many of which will focus on her childhood career and its aftermath, will illuminate Wilson’s uneasy relationship with fame and her decision to stop acting. It’s a question that’s followed her since Thomas and the Magic Railroad (her last major film) was released in 2000, so much so that Wilson has an FAQ section on her website, for queries like “Are You Still Acting?!” along with answers to other oft-posed questions like why her hairstyle hasn’t changed since the mid-’90s (it has), and whether or not she’ll be friends with you (probably not if you’re asking).

In conversation, Wilson is well-spoken, striking a balance between confidence and self-deprecation. She’s also astoundingly regular, and so unlike the public personas of other former child stars, likely because she got out of film early. Wilson’s recollections of her early career are largely positive: when Robin Williams died in August, she wrote movingly of working with him when she was five on the set of Mrs. Doubtfire.

Wilson is close to her family (three older brothers, one younger sister, and her dad) her mother was sick with cancer while she was shooting Matilda, and died soon after. She loves cats, and baking, and living in New York. Unique among the former child star set, Wilson has a day job at a non-profit, Publicolor, which repaints public schools in New York City. She’s a reader, like Matilda, but like any good millennial, also, “on the Internet way too much.”

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Is it weird to still be well-known for something you did when you were a child, and maybe don’t even remember in great detail?

It was a little strange when I was younger. There’s such a long time between when you film and when the film comes out, and that seems even longer when you’re a child. I couldn’t take much pride in it. When people would approach me, I didn’t feel like I deserved it; it didn’t feel like an accomplishment. Sometimes it even felt a little intrusive. My father would say, “They’re your fans! They like you! Appreciate it!” But I couldn’t until recently. Now I love doing signings and meeting people. There’s still a bit of a disconnect, because it was so long ago, but they’re always so nice, and I can finally appreciate that I made a difference.

Similarly, I imagine it’s frustrating when interviewers ask you about the same things over and over again, when you moved on a long time ago.

I’ve gotten used to it. People don’t see a lot of public figures speaking for themselves, which is one of the reasons I write. They have to build a narrative from what they know, what’s been filtered through the media. It’s still really hard for me to calibrate exactly how famous I was or am—every time I think I was no more than a minor figure, someone tells me I changed their life, and every time I think I made a difference, something happens that makes me deny it.

Our culture has such a dysfunctional, complicated relationship with celebrity. It has to be odd to have millions of people who feel like they know/knew you because they saw you on-screen as a kid. Were you at all similar to the characters you portrayed?

My parents tried to give me the most normal childhood they could. I was the fourth child out of five (three older brothers, one younger sister) in a Jewish-Catholic lower-middle class home: I shared a room until I was 13, went to public school until I was 16, and still went to Girl Scouts and temple on the High Holy Days. Growing up in Burbank, California, a lot of other kids were actors, too. It was just like taking dance classes or being on a softball team.

I think out of all my characters, the most I had in common with was Matilda. I’ve learned she’s an archetype in a lot of young women’s lives, one of the few young girls who loved reading and learning and was celebrated for it. I’ve been reading since I was four and I’ve always loved learning. I was never as smart or well-read as Matilda, but I did find a lot of strength in books like she did, especially in harder times, like when my mother died. I also have a rebellious, outspoken streak, as anyone who follows me on Twitter knows.

Though you’ve been working creatively since you stopped making movies, many people probably still know you best from your film career. Why did you decide to leave film, and what have you done since then?

I unofficially stopped acting when I was in my early teens and I went away to [Idyllwild Arts Academy] a boarding school for the visual and performing arts. I really liked doing theater, and found that it was a lot more forgiving and exciting than film. I realized that I liked working behind the scenes, as well, and I went to NYU for an interdisciplinary theater program. While I was there I learned what I was good at and what I was not—I wasn’t a very good director; I can’t draw a straight line so I wasn’t a good designer, but what I did very well in was playwriting and a class we had called “creating original work” where we had ten minutes to go up on stage and do whatever we wanted. You could tell stories, you could do comedy, burlesque, whatever. I told a lot of autobiographical stories, and I always wanted to be a writer. I made up stories even when I was on film sets; in between shots I would go back to my room and write a story down. While I was at NYU, I performed a one-woman show called, Weren’t You That Girl about my childhood acting. It sold out every night, and I thought, ‘OK, maybe this is what I want to do.’ And after college, I got into live storytelling.

Right, like this summer, you did a show called What Are You Afraid Of.

I’ve always been a really anxious person, and I thought to myself one day, I could do a show just about all the things I’m afraid of. I thought about calling it The Chicken Shit Show, but What Are You Afraid Of was more marketing-friendly. I ended up pitching it to Union Hall in Brooklyn, where [we perform] the third Sunday of every month. We’ve also done a couple shows at Joe’s Pub.

Do you interview people, or tell your own stories?

It’s a little bit of both, actually, and comedy. In the opening, we talk about somebody’s fears, usually mine. Sometimes I do other people’s—like for example, one time I talked about my sister, who has a fear of getting water in her ears. I think it’s important to laugh at your fears, but also to understand them, because we fear what we don’t understand. So what I do is I talk to an expert on the subject. For the one about the ears, I talked to my friend’s dad, who’s an ear nose and throat doctor. Or I just did one about Ebola, and I talked to a friend of mine who’s a virologist.

Timely. Do people always come up on stage?

Sometimes we have people come up on stage if they feel comfortable with it. Once, I talked to a nurse about food poisoning, which I worry about a lot, because I bake all the time and I eat lots of raw dough. We did a show about a fear of nudity, and I had my friend who’s a burlesque performer and sex educator talk about nudity in public and do one of her acts. But a lot of times, the people are a little nervous, so we’ll record an interview. And then we’ll have storytellers and comedians tell a story about a time they were scared. Everyone has something they’re afraid of.

Do any of those fears show up in your memoir? Would you even call it a memoir?

It’s memoir-ish, or personal essays through the lens of memoir. I’ve always been a very anxious person, so that’s undoubtedly going to come up. I’m going to talk about my OCD and my anxiety growing up. It’s very hard to be a perfectionist growing up in the film world. It reinforces all of your worst fears about perfection and doing things right. It got me into what I think is a pretty toxic mental pattern for a kid, and it’s taken me years to break out of that. I think that even if I didn’t want to write about it, it’s been such a big part of my life that I almost feel like I have to. Fortunately, I do like doing that, helping people by sharing what I’ve learned about anxiety.

I think public vulnerability is very much something that people who came of age with social media see as the norm. Can you talk about what you choose to reveal in your work and why?

There’s a lot of exposing oneself and exhibitionism in humor and in writing these days, and there’s something strong it that, in taking a stand and putting yourself out there, but I think at some point it’s not so much owning your vulnerability and it can be kind of dangerous. It’s about control. There are things that I definitely want to keep to myself. The thing is though, I’ve grown up in the kind of world where I didn’t think that anything was private, I assumed that somebody was going to find out about everything at some point. So I’m not that private of a person, and I don’t think certain things are a big deal, but the things that I do keep private are very special to me. When you do talk about yourself, it’s really about how you frame it. A lot of the things I talk about in What Are You Afraid Of have had some time, even if it’s just a week, for me to sit around and think about them. Sometimes it’s more raw than others, but the way I’ve always put it is that for something to be art, it needs to be filtered. Coffee grounds plus water doesn’t automatically equal coffee.

Your mother passed away shortly after filming Matilda. That must have been so hard. Are you going to write about this time in the book?

My mother’s death affects me every single day. It’s something I didn’t want to talk about for a long time, but I think I’m finally in a good enough place to be able to write about it.

So many former child stars like Amanda Bynes or Lindsay Lohan, have a difficult time with things like addiction and mental illness when their careers wane. How did you avoid the “dark side” of fame?

Some of it, I think, is just luck. But I had a good family, which helped. My parents protected me from a lot, and weren’t stage parents. It was my choice to act, and it was my choice to get out of it. A lot of other child actors don’t have that choice. They also weren’t dependent upon me for money, which is never a good idea, in my opinion: It shifts the power dynamic in the family. My parents weren’t my best friends, they were my parents. They said I would be using that money to get an education, and I did. I also was just never into partying or anything extravagant, which saved money and sanity. Therapy was also a good idea!

Do you have an audience in mind for this book? Fans of your films?

Young women, specifically those who grew up watching Matilda, though I don’t want the book to be just for people who saw my movies as a kid. A lot of young women related to Matilda because she was the bookish girl who was powerful. That’s something you don’t see a lot. You see a lot of ignored bookish girls, like Meg on Family Guy, who’s ignored over and over. Or you see Lisa Simpson get up on her soapbox, but everyone rolls their eyes at her. I’m sure some young men will like the book, as well, but I do see this becoming a favorite of like, 20-year-old girls.

The latest post on your website, is structured as a bunch of answers to questions your younger self is posing to your older self. I really liked it; I thought it was funny and sweet. You’re kind to your younger self, and while the answers to the questions that aren’t explicit, the reader can infer that your younger self is asking things like, ‘so, have you lost your virginity yet?’ Are you going to play with form like that in the book, like using lists or letters?

Thanks, it was fun to write. Playing with form can be fun, and I might in the book. I’m definitely going to write little vignettes about being different ages. The good thing about essays, my editor says, is that everyone’s essays are different.

You’re active on Twitter, which is very different than sitting in your room, alone, writing. Is Twitter an important way for you to communicate?

Twitter is a really good platform for connecting with people. I’ve met friends, authors, and comedians on Twitter that I would haven’t met otherwise. I’ve gotten roommates through Twitter. I got my cat through Twitter. And it’s partly about instant gratification. I can be funny on Twitter and get a reaction right away, which you don’t get when you’re writing a book. I can be political or philosophical. Recently, my number of Twitter followers surpassed the population of my hometown. Sometimes I think about standing on top of a building in Burbank with a megaphone telling everyone what I think. Is it something I really want to say? There are a lot of problems with it, and they’re not good of taking care of harassment. It’s imperfect, but it’s my favorite social media platform.

You’ve also written about voiceover work as a creative outlet. And I have to say, I’m surprised by your voice, which is kind of silly, because of course you don’t sound the way you did when you were a little girl. Anyway, you have a nice voice, and it’s deeper than I was expecting.

I’ve always loved doing voice-over work. I did some when I was a kid: I was on Batman Beyond, and did commercials and such. I was always pretty good at the ADR/dubbing parts of post-production on film and TV; in fact, Danny DeVito had me do some background voices and dubbing for other characters in Matilda. As I got older, people always told me I didn’t have a voice like a teenage girl, and it’s true, my voice is very deep. (It suits me a little more now.) Now I do some commercial work and have a recurring role on [the podcast] Welcome to Night Vale.

What is it that you love about voice-over work?

Voice-over is so imaginative—I’ve heard it called “a theater of the mind.” Any character you come up with, you have to do on your own, with the text and your imagination. I’ve found I can build an entire character off of their voice. When my sister and I were little, we’d always come up with all sorts of weird voices and base characters on them. There isn’t the focus on looks like there is in film. No one cares what I look like, and I appreciate that. There are so many actresses and models who get paid to look pretty, and one of the reasons I left Hollywood is that it’s really hung up on appearances. One of my mottos is that it’s not my job to be pretty for you. I like to get dressed up; I like to look nice, but I don’t want to do it for a living. When I’m doing a voice, I can be an old woman, a little girl, a man, all these things I am not in real life, and I love that.

You identify as a feminist, yes?

Yes, I do.

It’s still difficult, sometimes, to be a feminist. Which is crazy to me—we live in 2014; most of the women I know identify as feminists. And yet there’s still so much vitriol and sexism levied against women, online and in person. How do you contend with that?

It definitely does, but I think calling yourself a feminist is one of the most badass things you can do. It’s very empowering. What you’re saying is, ‘I don’t want to be judged for my gender; I want to be judged for what I do and who I am.’ That’s something that has always appealed to me. There are still so many misconceptions about feminism. It’s nice when I can surprise someone: They’ll say, oh, Mara, you’re really nice, you bake us cookies, and you’re a feminist. Fortunately, I don’t come into contact with too many people who are anti-feminist, but I’ve had friends and family say that they’ve looked at feminism in a new way, reexamined things that they’ve taken for granted. I’ve also seen that happen with male comedians and writers I know. When you say that you’re a feminist, you have access to so many other awesome, powerful women.

It’s disturbing when stars like Bynes and Lohan are discarded, how quickly they’re torn apart in the public sphere—their looks, their career choices, their love lives/sexuality—it’s open season on all of that from the self-appointed commentariat, and there’s a lot of misogyny in it. As someone with a similar background, is this difficult to see? What can or should be done about it?

The most important thing to do, I think, is not give in to it. I see so many women who are smart, compassionate, even considering themselves feminists, who will still tear other women down for their appearances. Tearing down men is awful, too, but I think women have it so much harder. Just don’t do it. It isn’t anything they can do much about, and it makes you look shallow.

People assume the nastiness of celebrity culture is perpetuated by people less kind and intelligent than they are, but it’s perpetuated by anyone and everyone. I’m not going to say “stop judging celebrities” altogether, because I know it’s part of the contract they have with the world, that people can judge them in exchange for their power and status. But I will say, if you judge them and tear them down all the time, maybe ask yourself why you do.

Now that you’re writing a book and fulfilling a major life goal, what else do you still want to do?

Oh God, there’s so much. In the past few years with writing, I’ve been, as my dad would say, throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks. You were asking me earlier how I go about deciding what’s going to go in the book, I think another thing is figuring out what’s interesting to people? A lot of writers don’t really consider the audience; it’s just catharsis. And that’s fine, but like I said, I think art needs to be filtered if it’s going to be put out there as a literary piece or a work of art.

I have a lot that I want to do. I want to turn What Are You Afraid Of into a podcast. I was talking about possibly doing something educational on YouTube. I had two young adult books that I was working on for a while that I put aside. I love playwriting, and I miss it. I have many ideas, and they’re not a finite resource. I’m a generalist.

* * *

Adele Oliveira is a former newspaper writer turned freelance writer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has contributed to Salon.com, The Kirkus Review, and Bitch Magazine.

Photo courtesy Mara Wilson.

* * *

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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:

* * *
Originally published in Radio Silence, October 2014. Subscribe, and download the free iOS app.

Ben Yagoda | Longreads | December 2014 | 12 minutes (3,094 words)

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One day early in 1954, Mary Martin and her husband, Richard Halliday, were driving on the Merritt Parkway, near their home in Norwalk, Connecticut. On the car radio came Frank Sinatra’s new hit, “Young at Heart.” It was perfect! That is, the song had the exact sentiment and feel they wanted for the pet project they’d long been planning, a musical version of J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play Peter Pan (original subtitle: “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up”). Right on the spot, they decided they’d hire whoever had written the song to compose the score for their production.

It turned out that the words were by a young New Yorker, Carolyn Leigh, and the music by the veteran West Coast jazzman Johnny Richards. The next morning the phone rang in Leigh’s apartment, and a man who identified himself as Richard Halliday said that he and Martin wanted her to write the lyrics for Peter Pan. “Naturally, I thought somebody was kidding,” Leigh told a reporter. “That sort of thing just doesn’t happen. So I arranged to call him back at his office, and I did and it was him all right.”

Leigh told Halliday she had a new partner, a young composer named Morris “Moose” Charlap, and in short order the two had a meeting with Martin, Halliday, and Jerome Robbins, who was to direct and choreograph the show. Leigh, who at that point had only seen one musical in her life, recounted years later, “I remember singing a line to Jerry, ‘If I can live a life of crime, and still be home by dinnertime,’ and we got a nod of approval from him.”

She and Charlap went on to write the score (with a little help from some songwriting veterans), and on October 20, 1954, Peter Pan—with Martin as Peter—opened on Broadway to enraptured audiences and rave reviews. Several months later, NBC broadcast the production live on television. It was an even bigger sensation, attracting 65 million viewers—still the fourth biggest audience of all time for a scripted TV show.

NBC hopes to recapture the magic on December 4. Building on the success of last year’s live The Sound of Music, starring Carrie Underwood, it will present with an all-new live Peter, starring Allison Williams (“Girls”) as Peter and Christopher Walken in the role of Captain Hook.

Allison Williams as Peter. Photo Courtesy: NBC Universal

If may seem odd that Martin played and now Williams is playing Peter—a boy who stops aging precisely at the moment before reaching puberty, and who has a playful but tender romance with a real girl, Wendy. But this casting convention dates from the first production, in 1904, and speaks to the play’s subtle but profound exploration of topics like gender, sexuality, identity, and even mortality, and is doubtless part of its deep appeal to so many children. So is flying, which is central to the play and which suggests the kind of freedom that, in our real lives, we only taste in dreams.

Peter Pan fever strikes kids intensely but randomly. One youngster who got a bad case was Mary Martin. “I cannot even remember a day when I didn’t want to be Peter Pan,” she wrote in her autobiography. “When I was a child, I was sure I could fly. In my dreams I often did, and it was always the same: I ran, raised my arms like a great bird, soared into the sky, flew.”

Living in Hollywood in the 1940s, Martin became fast friends with another actress and devotee of the story, Jean Arthur; whenever they were invited to a costume party, whoever was first to call the other on the phone got to go as Peter. Arthur got first dibs on playing the part on stage, in a successful 1950 Broadway production featuring Boris Karloff as both Captain Hook and Mr. Darling and including a handful of songs by Leonard Bernstein.

Photo: Boris Karloff as Captain Hook via Wikimedia Commons

In mid-twentieth century America, Peter Pan was in the air, figuratively and literally. Walt Disney was yet another fan, and he bought film rights from the Barrie estate in 1939. Ten years later, he embarked on his animated version of the tale and it was released in 1953. Predictably, the darker themes were bleached out, but the “What Makes the Red Man Red?” production number grows ever more cringe-worthy.

The following year, Halliday and Martin (who was coming off her celebrated performance on Broadway in South Pacific), were approached by Edwin Lester, a West Coast producer, about putting on a new musical production. Their first hire was Jerome Robbins, who had choreographed ballets and Broadway musicals but had never before directed. Robbins also worked on collating the various versions of the script that had been done through the years, trying, as he said, to “find a way of doing it freshly and less stickily, less cutely, more robustly.”

In writing the score, Leigh and Charlap were flying blind. “We had no idea what we were doing,” Leigh later said. “We were only praying to get through it alive.” They achieved that and more, producing a series of songs that perfectly matched the spirit of the production: “I’ve Gotta Crow,” “I Won’t Grow Up,” “I’m Flying,” the lullaby “Lazy Shepherd” (ultimately changed to “Tender Shepherd”), and a heart-wrenching number in which Peter recalls what happened “When I Went Home“:

… the door was barred
And the windows barred
And I knew with an awful dread
That somebody else
Was sleeping in my bed.

Carolyn Leigh. Photo via the Library of Congress World Telegram and Sun.

Martin was 40 years old but hardly the most mature actress to have essayed the part. It wasn’t difficult for her to transform herself into Peter: she merely got a short haircut and “flattened my already more-or-less flat front. I never was what one would call amply endowed. Not until I reached fifty.” For Cyril Ritchard, with his background in British “panto,” switching back and forth between Captain Hook and Mr. Darling was a breeze. The supporting cast featured some intriguing players. Martin’s daughter, twelve-year-old Heller Halliday, was originally cast as Wendy, but Robbins argued against it, in part because of the potentially creepiness of the scenes in which Wendy and Peter played “mother” and “father” to the lost boys.

“I was very disappointed,” says Halliday in her Chestertown, Maryland, home, filled with photos of her mother in Peter Pan and other productions. But Robbins had something else I mind for her. She says, “He said, ‘Well, you’ve studied ballet for all your life,’ and so he choreographed a ballet for me.” This was a dance she shared with animals and trees in Neverland.” Heller was also featured in the closing number of the show, a duet with her mother of “I’ve Gotta Crow.”

The part of Wendy went to a young New York actress named Kathleen Nolan, who would later play Kate in television’s The Real McCoys and, later still, become president of the Screen Actors Guild. Joan Tewkesbury, later the screenwriter of Nashville and other Robert Altman films, was an Ostrich, one of the many anthropomorphic creatures who came to life in Robbins’ staging.

One of the first people Robbins called was Sondra Lee, a tiny blonde dancer whom he’d choreographed in the musical High Button Shoes. “When I heard from Jerry, he said he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with me, but he wanted me to do this project that he was doing,” says Lee, now a venerated acting and dance teacher, in her Upper West Side apartment. She was initially cast as one of the Lost Boys, but soon after rehearsals began, Robbins gave her the role of the Indian maiden Tiger Lily, Wendy’s rival for Peter’s heart. Lee recalled in her autobiography, I’ve Slept with Everybody, “Our dances were based on children’s games. They were difficult to sustain: you needed so much energy. All the pounding and jumping—it was all pure dance, but we still looked like children playing.”

Possibly as much as any Broadway musical before or since, Peter Pan was infused with dance. Late in the process, Robbins cast Paul Taylor—then a young ballet dancer, later a distinguished choreographer—as “one of Captain Hook’s dancing, singing, brawling, slightly simian pirates.” Taylor recalled in his autobiography that during rehearsal, Robbins seemed “like an enthusiastic camp counselor explaining the rules of an enjoyable rainy-day indoor game.”

Soaring through the air had always been an essential part of Peter Pan, but Robbins saw flying in terms of dance and emphasized it more than ever before. He turned to a young Englishman, Peter Foy, who felt traditional flight equipment produced nothing more than (in the words of the website of the company he created, Flying By Foy) “nervous stunts or a series of static tableaus.” For this production, by contrast, he strived to “create flying sequences that looked natural, coordinated the actor’s movements and could be smoothly integrated into the play’s story line.” To achieve this, he invented what he called the “Inter-Related Pendulum,” which involved two separate suspension points, each controlled by a separate operator, and allowed for dancing in air. As the Times noted in its 2005 obituary of Foy (who would go on to elevate the Flying Nun, and many other characters, into the heights), “Properly flown, actors do not simply dangle. They sail and spin and somersault. They move as their characters would: a horizontal streak for Superman, a soaring diagonal for Peter Pan.”

Despite all the talent, the show opened in San Francisco to bad reviews. Variety deemed the prospect of a Broadway production “debatable” and the music “indifferent.” (An exception was “When I Went Home,” a “second act socko number.”) The paper complained, “In its present form it would be a little difficult for anyone unfamiliar with the Barrie story to understand just what it is all about.”

Deciding they needed to transform Peter Pan from a play with music to a full-fledged musical, the production team invited three veteran songwriters to come to San Francisco to look at the show: the lyric-writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green and the composer Jule Styne. The trio agreed the show could use some more songs and that they could supply it. However, Comden and Green had only an eight-day window before they had to go back to Hollywood to continue work on the MGM musical It’s Always Fair Weather.

Photo: Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Wikimedia Commons

The atmosphere was awkward. The two original songwriters watched as the three new ones holed themselves up in a hotel room. “You could hear the faint tick tick tick” of the typewriter, says Sondra Lee. The new team eventually produced a series of numbers that, in some cases, found their way into the production by edging out old ones. That irked Leigh and Charlap, of course. “The producer now has Comden-and-Green-and-Jule-Styne-itis;–and dislikes pretty much nearly everything we do,” Leigh wrote to her agent.

The production was a continual work in progress. “The Indian dance had 20,000 versions,” Lee says. “One night we hit the stage, and no one could remember what we were supposed to do. We all looked at each other and said, ‘Just go somewhere!’”

The show opened in August in Los Angeles, to better reviews, and then it was on to New York, where the tweaking continued. As time went on, the beauty and rightness of the songs—especially Charlap and Leigh’s original efforts—became apparent to all who heard them. According to the singer Sandy Stewart, who was later married to Charlap, Richard Rodgers sat in on rehearsal one day and said to the young composer: “You haven’t written a score, you’ve written an annuity.”

Ironically, the Charlap-Leigh song that had the greatest emotional effect on audiences and the cast, “When I Went Home,” was replaced by a Comden-Green-Styne lullaby, “Distant Melody.” The change stunned Sondra Lee. “I couldn’t believe it,” she recalls. “I thought the song was the story of Peter Pan. It was the story of something children want from their parents that they don’t get, and the fear of being abandoned. I went to Mary, who I hardly knew, really, and just said, ‘Why did you cut that, that song?’ She said, ‘Nobody really responded,’ by which she meant that nobody applauded. I said, ‘Well they didn’t applaud for the Gettysburg Address, either,’ which I don’t think she really got, because it never went back into the show.”

Peter Pan opened at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theater on October 20, 1954. Everything went smoothly, except for Paul Taylor’s big moment, when he was beaten up by a kangaroo, then thrown off the rear of the stage. On opening night, he veered off course and crashed into the proscenium, breaking his nose.

If the reviewers noticed the mishap, they didn’t say anything. In the Herald Tribune, Walter Kerr wrote, “It’s the way Peter Pan should always have been and wasn’t.” The show played to sellout or near-sellout houses; Martin would win the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, and Ritchard for Best Actor. Martin was completely immersed in the production and the role, and was especially cognizant of children’s reactions. (Not so Robbins, who hadn’t signed on to direct a kids’ show; Martin reported that he especially hated it when the kids would shout, “Look out, Peter!”) After each performance, she stayed in costume, and character, until she had greeted and given fairy dust to the very last young audience member.

One innovation of the production was little noticed at the time, but was a harbinger of things to come. Peter Pan was the first Broadway production where the actors’ voices were amplified through portable microphones.

Watching the success of the show with great interest was Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, president of NBC. One of the ways he’d tried to establishing the network’s identity was through the “spectacular”—one-off, highly promoted programs that had an air of prestige (and, not coincidentally, directed power and attention toward the network and away from individual sponsors). Spectaculars were almost always musicals, and Peter Pan, with its star power and family appeal, fit perfectly. NBC and its parent company, RCA, were also heavily invested in the new color-television technology, and even though there were only 15,000 color sets in existence, the musical would be an ideal way to promote the concept. So as to play up the feeling of specialness, the Broadway production would have to close, but that wasn’t so bad: even though it was playing to near-capacity houses, expenses were so high that recouping the initial investment was a long way off. The $225,000 fee the Peacock was offering would take care of that in one fell swoop.

Peter Pan closed on Broadway in February, after a 152-performance run. Five sets were reassembled at a Brooklyn studio, and, after a brief rehearsal period, the production was presented live to the nation on March 7. (It couldn’t be filmed because Disney controlled motion picture results, and all that remains is a grainy black and white kinescope.)

The show succeeded beyond anyone’s dreams. Its 65 million viewers, according to Collier’s magazine, constituted not only the biggest TV audience ever but “the largest audience ever assembled for anything at any time.” The critics recognized that it was a historic event. Variety’s review led off, “Television grew up last night even if Peter Pan wouldn’t,” and said the production “was so brilliantly staged and performed that the millions around their sets must’ve been willing to forgive TV for lesser attempts at the spectacular.” Times critic Jack Gould, in a rave of unusual proportions, called it “perhaps television’s happy hour,” not only because of the brilliance of the staging, the songs, and performers but because of the synergistic possibilities it suggested: “The greatness of the ‘Peter Pan’ telecast stemmed from a marriage of media under ideal circumstances. The advantages of ‘live’ television and the advantages of living theater were merged as one.”

Photo: Scene from the 1960 television production of Peter Pan. Wikimedia Commons

There was an encore live television performance in 1956, and, in 1960, a taped production—the last time Mary Martin would be Peter. During rehearsals, she was playing the role of Maria in the Broadway musical The Sound of Music. Each night, after the curtain fell, she would sprint across West 44th Street from the Lunt-Fontanne to the Helen Hayes Theatre to don the familiar outfit and strap on the flying wires.

Just before the production aired, Martin had her very last flying dream. She was soaring through the Holland Tunnel, “straight through, between the car tops and the tunnel top. Never touched a thing, not a single car or the tip of a finger. It was the best flying dream I ever had. Bliss.”

Once again the reviews and ratings were excellent. The production, finally preserved on tape, was rebroadcast in 1963, 1966 and 1973, just often enough to give the show landmark status in baby boomers’ cultural landscape. Rights issues, as well as the perception that the production, and the now less than state-of-the-art production values, were too old-fashioned to cut it anymore, kept Peter Pan off the air until 1989, when a VHS tape was produced and marketed. Now, boomers’ children could be entranced by the show; and, for the first time, it could be binge-watched.

On December 4 (provided they can stay up that late), some boomers’ kids’ kids will have a chance to experience a refurbished Peter Pan of their own. The producers, Neil Meron and Craig Zadan, have interpolated some Comden-Green-Styne songs from other shows, with new lyrics by Amanda Green, Adolph’s daughter. She’s also overhauled “Ugg-a-Wugg”—ethnically insensitive to today’s ears, if not outright offensive—with new words and a new title, “True Blood Brothers.”

And when the show airs, a Leigh-Charlap song, the one Variety called “a second-act socko number,” will be back in its rightful place. Meron and Zadan decided their audience would be able to handle the sadness of “When I Went Home.”

“We felt that would work for our production, because we wanted to go into our characters a little bit more,” Meron told Entertainment Weekly, referring to the number’s melancholy quality. “We wanted to show a little bit of what went on inside of Peter. We restored the song, and it’s gorgeous.”

* * *

Ben Yagoda is the author of About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, Memoir: A History, and The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song, to be published in January 2015.

Editor: Mike Dang

* * *

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.

Carrie Frye | Longreads | December 2014 | 16 minutes (4,064 words)

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As a child, Horace Walpole frequently heard it said of himself that surely he would die soon. Born in England in 1717, the last of his mother’s six children, he was fragile and prone to illness from birth. Two siblings before him had died in infancy, and so in the family order it went: three older children, loud, healthy and opinionated; two grave markers; and then young Horace toddling up behind—half child, half potential grave marker.

Naturally, his mother, Catherine, spoiled him. His father, Sir Robert Walpole, was the King’s prime minister. This often kept him away from home, as did a long-time mistress who acted, more than his wife did, as his hostess and companion. For her part Catherine had her own dalliances. It was that sort of marriage. The Walpoles of old had been middling country gentry—ancient name, quiet prosperity—before Robert had come along and, through a blend of shrewdness and charisma, wolf-halled his family into riches and the nobility. When Robert was young, the hope for him was that he might one day make a fine sheep-farmer; he died the first Earl of Orford, after a 20-year run as prime minister, a colossus of English history.

His son Horace worked himself into history another way. In his early 30s, he bought a box-shaped house—just an ordinary sort of house, sitting on a bit of hill in a fashionable country suburb—and decided to transform it into a Gothic castle. Room by room he went. Stained-glass window of a saint here, ancient suit of armor stowed in a wall recess there.

Then one summer, sitting in his castle’s library, he wrote a novel called The Castle of Otranto. Its setting was a medieval castle, not unlike his own mock-castle in many of its details, but grown, in the way of novels and dreams, into something grand and imposing. There the villainous Manfred schemes to block the return of the castle’s rightful heir, a young man named Theodore. Commonly pegged as the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto turns 250 this year. It’s a strange, great, terrible, campy novel, slim but with some paragraphs so long and dense that you have to slash your way through. If Gothic literature had a family tree, its twisted gnarled branches chock-full of imperiled, swooning heroines and mysterious monks, with ghosts who sit light on the branches, and Frankenstein’s monster who sits heavy, with troops of dwarves, and winking nuns, and stunted, mostly nonflammable babies, at its base would sit Horace Walpole’s Castle. (Presumably with some lightning flickering dangerously nearby.)

***

A lantern designed (and watercolored) by Richard Bentley, courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

At nine, Horace was sent off to Eton. After the death of George I, he marched in a procession as a proclamation of the new king was read, crying and crying as he thought of the old king, but also trying to amplify his tears so that if anyone looked over at him, they’d see that the prime minister’s son was crying harder than other boys. There is so much of the future man in this anecdote: the spectral sense of himself as a figure that others might observe; the family pride that made him want to make a good showing; and then, not least, that we know the story at all, which is because he told it on himself.

As an adult he was pale—so many people noted this, he must have been ghostly indeed. Very pale, very thin, with a bright, bright gaze. Average height. He had an effacing, gliding kind of walk that was either affectation (early life) or gout (later life). His voice was not strong but pleasant. His friends called him ‘Horry’—they gossiped about him, envied him, loved him, needled him. “He is now as much a curiousity to all foreigners as the tombs and lions,” wrote one. He was extremely charming, confident and buoyant in manner. He had one of those temperaments that sees the sadness in comedy, and the comedy in sadness, and so at the risk of tipping too far toward sadness, tips determinedly the other way. He seems to have had little appetite for food or alcohol. He never married. As for his romantic heart, who knows? He was adept at self-camouflage. According to the biographer Timothy Mowl, he likely had a secret “off-and-on” relationship with Henry Pelham-Clinton, Lord Lincoln, a very handsome old school friend, for a few years after they left school. There were a few, rather wispy relationships with women around this time, too. Read his letters and a sharp sense of romantic detachment makes itself felt, one that doesn’t feel entirely like a pose. It’s as if having hovered so near death as a child, he remained part-ghost as an adult, pale and thin, with few food or drink requirements and looking on the passion-stricken follies of others with amused wonder. (His spare diet made friends view his struggles with gout, which were chronic and debilitating, as especially cruel.)

He attended Cambridge, leaving, as one chronicler notes, “without the superfluity of a degree.” He then went on the Grand Tour customary for young men of his class. His traveling companion was Thomas Gray, his long-time friend (they’d met at Eton), who was not yet the great poet he’d become but still a painfully earnest, studious son of an abusive London “scrivener” and a kindly woman who kept a milliner’s shop. Gray made the trip filled with uncertainty of what he was going to do with himself on his return. There was a vague notion that he would study law, but the idea filled Gray with dread. Meanwhile, Walpole had the guarantee of a lifetime income of at least 1,200 pounds a year, thanks to sinecures arranged by his father, and the assurance of a future place in parliament. Walpole paid for the trip, and Gray, probably feeling at times near invisible as he trailed behind the prime minister’s son at assemblies and receptions, seems to have tried to repay this debt with edifying suggestions on how Walpole (blithe, careless) might improve himself.

(Here is Walpole in a letter to a friend, written during their crossing of the Alps: “Precipices, mountains, torrents, wolves, rumblings, Salvator Rosa—the pomp of our park and the meekness of our palace! Here we are, the lonely lords of glorious desolate prospects.” Gray’s mood was similarly exalted.)

While in Paris, Walpole watched the evening funeral procession for the Lord Mayor of Paris, reporting that some of the monks set to watch over the body as it lay in state had fallen asleep late in the night and “let the tapers catch fire to the rich velvet mantle lined with ermine and powdered with gold flower-de-luces, which melted the lead coffin, and burned off the feet of the deceased…” (There’s our future Gothic author!) Then during the Alps crossing, near Mount Cenis, his spaniel (“the prettiest, fattest, dearest creature!”) was snatched up by a wolf.

Near the end of the trip, after two years of jostling travel, tensions broke into the open. The friends quarreled, and Gray made his way, all stiff pride, back to England alone, with Walpole, behind the scenes, trying to find ways to get money to him without his knowing the source. (They reconciled a few years later, and remained friends thereafter. Walpole helped usher Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” into print, as well as publishing a couple books of his poems.)

In Florence, Walpole had one of his wispy affairs. His mistress was Elisabetta Grifoni, wife of a marchese and one of the city’s noted beauties. After his return to England, he sent her a few presents, and the two corresponded for a time, the letters rapturous on her side, congenial and increasingly perfunctory on his. In his fine biography, R.W. Ketton-Cremer describes how Grifoni, in a last attempt to rekindle Walpole’s interest, inquired into sending him a hamper of hams and cheeses. Here let’s pause to picture that tepid young man, standing in his rooms, staring with dismay at an enormous ham. Luckily, she didn’t send the package, and the two eventually ceased to write.

Walpole kept her portrait in his bedroom for the rest of his life, but, as Ketton-Cremer notes, “this need not be taken as a sign of romantic devotion, as he referred to the work in later years as ‘a frightful picture by a one-eyed German painter.'” So love goes.

***

A Gothic chair design by Richard Bentley and Horace Walpole, courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

It was unlike Walpole to call off a correspondence. Generally, once he started writing someone he continued writing them until either they died (and thus stopped reading their mail), or the friendship died (rare for him, but it did happen). Known as one of his century’s great letter writers, he’s still considered among the best practitioners of the art.

If you know Walpole only through Castle of Otranto, these letters are a revelation. The Castle, whatever its virtues, is a block-y piece of work. It can be praised, but the praise would not, say, be directed at its psychological complexities or… the sophistication of the dialogue. (“‘I respect your virtuous delicacy,’ said Theodore; ‘nor do you harbor a suspicion that wounds my honor.'”). As a novel it is, as all progenitors should be, sort of a grand lumpy thing, like an early god. Not the letters, though. These are marvelous little masterpieces: subtle, witty, and dripping with description and gossip and observation. They read like the literary equivalent of a cat curling itself around your ankles, showing off, sure, but glad to see you all the same.

Some bits have grown murky and mysterious with time. “… I am retired hither like an old summer dowager; only that I have no toad-eater to take the air with me in the back part of my lozenge-coach…” (A ‘toad-eater’ was a paid companion. Well!) The vast majority, however, with their swirl of high and low, of official statecraft and candid backroom gossip, feel peculiarly modern.

***

A scene from one letter, written during the Grand Tour with Gray:

It is 1740 in Florence, at the house of the British envoy. An elderly Italian of noble background and shabby dress enters. He gives every appearance of nervous fright. It seems that he’s been summoned to a duel by an English subject named Martin, a painter living in Florence, for the discourtesy of “having said Martin was no gentleman.” The older Italian notes to the envoy that he would happily duel Martin except, you see, he has a strict rule of only dueling fellow gentlemen and Martin is not a gentleman and ipso facto thus therefore cannot be dueled thank you good day. Exits, still nervous as a cricket.

Horace and Co. rumble along in a carriage to the place appointed for the duel.

We had not been driving about above ten minutes, but out popped a little figure, pale but cross, with beard unshaved and hair uncombed, a slouched hat, and a considerable red cloak, in which was wrapped, under his arm, the fatal sword that was to revenge the highly injured Mr Martin, painter and defendant. I darted my head out of the coach, just ready to say ‘Your servant, Mr Martin,’ and talk about the architecture of the triumphal arch that was building there; but he would not know me, and walked off. We left him to wait for an hour, to grow very cold and very valiant the more it grew past the hour of appointment. We were figuring all the poor creature’s huddle of thoughts, and confused hopes of victory, or fame, of his unfinished pictures, or his situation upon bouncing into the next world. You will think us strange creatures; but ’twas a pleasant sight, as we knew the poor painter was safe.

***

From another letter: “This sublime age reduces everything to its quintessence; all periphrases and expletives are so much in disuse, that I suppose soon the only way of making love will be to say ‘Lie down.'”

And another: “Indeed, the ambassadress could see nothing; for Doddington stood before her the whole time, sweating Spanish at her…”

***

The word “posterity” crops up again and again in Walpole’s letters. “No one,” the scholar W.S. Lewis writes, “was ever more aware of unborn readers.” Posterity was Walpole’s desire; his eye was always fixed on it, and these letters were his way of courting and wooing it. Even more than most of us, he wished to be remembered, and he seems to have been willing to sacrifice many of the ordinary happinesses of life in order to live on after. As he wrote to one friend, “How merry my ghost will be, and shake its ears to hear itself quoted as a person of consummate prudence!”

His regular correspondents were directed to safe-keep his letters. One, in Italy, returned them in bundles at regular intervals (“for a work in progress”). The letters were transcribed if a fairer copy was needed, shaved here and there, and annotated by Walpole himself. (One of the funniest of these self-annotations makes note that the “Patapan” referred to is “Mr. Walpole’s dog.” “‘That’s my dog!’ wrote Mr. Walpole, for future generations to know.”)

***

One of his first improvements was to put in some battlements.

Then he added some pinnacles. So, as you bumped along in a coach on your approach to old Horry’s cottage, you’d have seen a castle skyline peeping over the treetops. Intended to look as permanent as if they belonged to an ancient keep, these additions were made of plaster and lath. As Lewis notes: “It was said before he died that ‘Mr. Walpole has already outlived three sets of his battlements.'” (Not bad for a former potential grave-marker.)

Then he started on the interior. At first, his friends greeted his plans to re-do the house in a Gothic style with some mock-horror. As the biographer Ketton-Cremer notes, this was not because it was a new idea, but because it was a slightly out-of-date one. A fashion for Gothic recently had enjoyed a brief, bright flare of popularity in England and the style was now viewed, in Wapole’s set, as a little outré and (dread!) middle-class. So beyond the obvious eccentricity of the undertaking, his ambitions must have seemed strangely out of step at first—as if he’d taken the most Pinteresty of Pinterest boards for inspiration.

Strawberry Hill engraving.

Never mind! Walpole didn’t care. He convened the Committee of Taste with his friends, Richard Bentley, a gifted and fanciful designer, and John Chute, a talented hobbyist architect. The two advised him on the changes to be made to each room. An elaborate chimneypiece for the parlor was designed. Beautiful chairs and tables, too. Wallpaper was custom-painted in London, using a pattern borrowed from the tomb of Prince Arthur, Henry VIII’s brother. And so it went, room by room.

It was, remember, not a big house at the start. Many rooms were cramped, with one staircase so narrow it was a scrape to get up it. One addition, however, was built on an especially grand scale. This was the Hall, considered by Walpole as his castle’s “chief beauty.” He reveled in its “gloomy arches” and “lean windows fattened with rich saints in painted glass.” Its staircase and shadows, its coat of armor and broadswords, will feel familiar to any Castle of Otranto reader. Walpole lifted them and put them straight into his book.

“Gloomth” was the word that Walpole coined for the effect he wanted in his house. That is, a mixture of warmth and gloom. So the swords and shadows of the Hall were offset by cheerful gardens outside, with sunning cats and well-annotated dogs, with comfortable places to roost around the house, and then, as the decades went on, Walpole’s own accreted layers of bric-a-brac. He was a helpless collector, a hoarder of beauty.

During these same decades, Walpole was serving in Parliament as a member of the liberal Whig party. He was active about it, too. While his weak voice prevented him from making the stirring speeches that would have placed him center-stage, he was a wheeler-dealer behind the scenes, peddling influence and advice. (Notably, he was one of England’s earliest critics of the slave trade.) He took wild, self-confessed enjoyment in the scuffling and skullduggery of politics. Reading his letters on the topic it’s amusing to watch the fluff-and-icing, dowagers-as-flounders absurdity of his style melt away, revealing something harder, stonier: “They say the Prince has taken up two hundred thousand pounds, to carry elections that he won’t carry—he had much better have saved it to buy the Parliament after it is chosen.”

John Carter, ‘View from the Hall at Strawberry Hill,’ courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

By contrast, Strawberry Hill was a balm and a retreat, a stage-set fantasia. Walpole saw its creation, rightly, as one of his chief achievements, and it was important to him that it last. He fretted a great deal about what would happen to it after his death. And all the time came constant reminders of its vulnerability. Those eroding plaster battlements. The paper of the Hall that looked like stone but was not stone. In 1772, a massive explosion at a nearby powder mill broke eight of the stained-glass windows and, as he wrote to a cousin, “the north side of the castle looks as if it had stood a siege.” To another friend, he lamented: “…. My poor shattered castle… never did it look so Gothic.” Meanwhile, the river threatened with frequent flooding, and straw was often strewn on the parlor and bedroom floors to absorb drips from leaks.

In other words, while wanting to build something permanent, Walpole had built something dazzlingly impermanent. It could dissolve, erode, be shattered. Or it might be lifted up in a flood and float away, a toy castle swirling on the waves. It’s the sort of thing that if you think about too long can completely sink you in gloomth.

***

His mother Catherine had died when he was 19. He’d been close to her, and her death was one of his life’s great blows. His father died less than a decade later, the victim of an over-strong preparation given to him by one of his doctors. His complaint had been bladder stones; its cure killed him. It was an agonizing death, and Horace stayed with him through it.

Robert Walpole had himself built a great house, Houghton Hall—a magnificent country mansion, ideal for hunting and entertaining, that housed his gorgeous collection of paintings. It’s emblematic of the father and son, the contrast between these two houses, one so grand a landmark, the other a cock-eyed Gothic whimsy. After the senior Walpole’s death, the earldom passed first to an older brother of Horace’s and then a nephew. Each earl in his time added to the estate’s teetering amount of debt. The third Earl of Orford is described variously as “eccentric” and “mad.” He was, at best, a careless steward of his inheritance; at other times, a disastrous one. The once-great Houghton Hall began to decay. Walpole, visiting after an absence of sixteen years, walked its gardens—now choked with nettles and weeds, and overrun with rabbits—with dismay.

Later that day he wrote to one of his oldest friends. The letter stands out for its tone of pure heartbreak:

I hated Houghton and its solitude—yet I loved this garden; as now, with many regrets, I love Houghton—Houghton, I know not what to call it, a monument of grandeur or ruin! … I have chosen to sit in my father’s little dressing room, and am now by his scrutoire, where, in the height of his fortune, he used to receive the accounts of his farmers, and deceive himself—or us, with the thoughts of his economy—how wise a man at once and how weak! For what had he built Houghton? For his grandson to annihilate, or for his son to mourn over?”

I hated it, I loved it. I am nothing but a mourning ghost here. This monument looked permanent, and it wasn’t.

***

Three years after this visit, Horace wrote Castle of Otranto, that tricked-out novel of fathers and sons, heirs and dynasties, and castle-crushing.

The story originated, he later said, out of a strange dream: “I had thought myself in an ancient castle… and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write.” (In their meticulous book Strawberry Hill, Anna Chalcraft and Judith Viscardi share the conjecture that Walpole might have been taking laudanum, then a common prescription for gout, at the time.)

An early copy of The Castle of Otranto listing the novels author as Onuphrio Muralto.

His fascination with the story grew as he wrote. He would sit down at his desk usually at “ten o’clock at night till two in the morning, when I am sure not to be disturbed by visitants. While I am writing I take several cups of coffee.” In two months his work was complete.

He was nearing 50, and he’d written a novel in which a giant helmet, “an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being” and covered in black feathers, falls from the sky and crushes—splat!—the sickly son of the house. And that’s by page 3. Did any other members of Parliament have such a manuscript on their desks? Likely not. Fearing ridicule Walpole had the novel published “as a translation from 1528 by the Italian, Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St Nicholas at Otranto.” Once it became a sensation, he revealed himself.

***

The library at Strawberry Hill was the house’s quietest room. Its beautiful bookcases, stretching higher than you could reach, were designed by Chute. Each is topped by a Gothic arch, the elaborate carving of its wood painted gray to look like stone. As Chalcraft and Viscardi describe, Walpole’s collection was extensive. In it was Shakespeare, The Iliad and the Odyssey, “folios of works by Hogarth, Bunbury, Vertue, Tennier,” as well “Sir Julius Caesar’s travelling library, containing 44 small volumes in Latin.” There were books of engravings and history. Also his father’s pocket book. Shelf after shelf of gleaming leather bindings.

All those books, think of them lying there in the quiet. A line of little monuments to the ghosts who wrote them.

An engraving of the library at Strawberry Hill.

***

Carrie Frye is writing a novel about the Arctic. She lives in Asheville and is the former managing editor of The Awl. Find her at Tingle Alley, or follow her @caaf.

Fact-checked by Brendan O’Connor. Edited by Mike Dang.

Rilla Askew | 2014 | 21 minutes (5,065 words)

When my godson Trey was a toddler growing up in Brooklyn, every white woman who saw him fell in love with him. He was a beautiful child, sweet natured, affectionate, with cocoa-colored skin and a thousand-watt smile. I remember sitting with him and his mom in a pizzeria one day, watching as he played peekaboo with two white ladies at a nearby booth. “What a little doll!” the ladies cooed. “Isn’t he adorable?”

I told Marilyn I dreaded the day he would run up against some white person’s prejudice. “His feelings are going to be hurt,” I said. “He won’t know it’s about this country’s race history, he’ll think it’s about him. Because so far in his young life every white person he’s ever met has adored him.” Marilyn nodded, but her closed expression seemed to say I was talking about things I didn’t really understand.

She and I had been a part of each other’s lives for three years then. We’d met at Brooklyn College, fall semester, 1989. A couple of weeks before school started, a black teenager and three friends had been surrounded by a mob of 30 bat-wielding white kids in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst. One of the white kids pulled a gun and shot 16-year-old Yusef Hawkins dead. The Reverend Al Sharpton was then leading marches through Bensonhurst, where whites lined the streets, hoisting watermelons over their heads, shouting Go home, niggers! as the black marchers pressed forward, arms linked, chanting No Justice No Peace! The media was in a feeding frenzy. You couldn’t escape that racially charged story anywhere.

My students’ papers that semester, and their conversations, centered heavily on race. One of my classes—the one Marilyn was in—was made up almost entirely of young people of color. My other class was mostly white students, many of them from Bensonhurst. The white youngsters knew with absolute certainty that the killing of Yusef Hawkins was never about race. It was about territory, they said. Those white kids in Bensonhurst weren’t racists, they had black friends, even. They’d thought the black guys were in their neighborhood to beat up white kids, and anyway, the shooter was a lone wolf, a crazy kid, he didn’t represent the real people in Bensonhurst, so why did that loudmouth Al Sharpton have to invade their neighborhood and stir everything up?

But the African-American and West Indian students saw things with different eyes. I read it in their papers describing the thousand daily cuts and fears and indignities. They knew, with equal certainty, that Yusef Hawkins died because of the color of his skin. In those months I understood for the first time what should have been obvious but wasn’t—at least not to me, growing up when I did, where I did, the 1960s in Oklahoma, on the white side of town. In this country, the witness we bear the world, how we see, what we see, isn’t determined by facts or objectivity but by the color of our own skin.

Marilyn was one of those West Indian students, a beautiful Jamaican girl, just 18, shy and scared, because she’d just found out she was going to have a baby and she didn’t want to tell her mother. She confided in me, and I talked with her, told her she was going to need to tell her mother, that was all. Towards the end of the semester she called me up and asked if I would be godmother to her child, and I said yes, and Marilyn and her family have been my family ever since. A quarter of a century now. The night I went to her baby shower at her mother’s apartment was the first time I was ever inside a black home. I remember leaving my white neighborhood, driving deeper and deeper into the interior of Brooklyn until I reached unfamiliar streets, where every passerby, every car occupant was black. I remember climbing their apartment house stairs with an overly friendly smile on my face. I remember the brightness of the kitchen, the spicy smells of cooking, the formality with which Marilyn’s mother welcomed me and led me to the living room, offered me a drink. I remember how out of place I felt, sipping my drink alone on the couch while the getting-ready activities swirled around me.

As other guests arrived, the living room began to fill with the rippling sound of patois gliding over the stutter of steel drums, the syncopated monotony of reggae rhythm. They were mostly women—relatives, family friends, a couple of Marilyn’s girlfriends from high school—but there were men too, her brothers and their friends passing through the living room in their high-top fade haircuts or Jheri curls and Kangol caps, stopping by the kitchen to pick up a Heineken or a wine cooler, to load up their plates from the mountains of food. Marilyn arrived very late, for the surprise party that was clearly not much of a surprise. She sat beneath a crepe paper parasol, smiling self-consciously from time to time at all the attention, but she said very little, her face calm, serene. She looked at me and smiled. I felt it then, that acceptance. To Marilyn I belonged there, in her home, along with all her other family and friends.

* * *

Trey was born on a cold February morning the same week Nelson Mandela walked out of a South African prison after 26 years. New York’s first black mayor, David Dinkins, elected in the aftermath of the Yusef Hawkins killing, had been in office six weeks. A Haitian woman had recently been beaten by a Korean store clerk on Church Avenue in Brooklyn, or she’d fallen down shrieking, pretending to be beaten, when the clerk accused her of shoplifting. Two different versions.The boycott of Korean grocers by the black community in the West Indian district was in full sway.

As for my godson, I completely adored him—just like every other white lady who ever saw him. Weekly I’d drive across the borough to pick him up to come stay the night. In Marilyn’s neighborhood I had to park far from their door and walk several blocks with Trey in my arms, and along those blocks there would be many people, all of them black. They glanced at us with curiosity, but they didn’t stare. Still, the exposed skin on my face and hands felt drawn and hot, stinging, a fire of whiteness, a burning Caucasian husk.

Inside their apartment I didn’t feel that way. Inside, there was no color difference between us, in the same way there was no difference between Trey and my husband and me when he came to stay the night—except on the street when a white passerby, usually female, would glance casually from my face to the baby’s. At once she’d dash a quick bright smile across her face, a smile that said something like oh, pardon me, I didn’t mean to stare…well, my, aren’t you just the cutest thing?

I’d push Trey in his stroller to the park, where I would be the only white woman with a black child, though there would usually be several black women with white children—nannies, caretakers, who eyed me, I thought, with resentment, suspicion. What’s this white lady doing with this precious black child? Or so my acute race consciousness told me. The city roiled with place names signifying race trouble: Bensonhurst, Howard Beach, the Central Park Jogger, Crown Heights. Every racial incident felt acute and personal to me. Complicated. Unresolvable. Guilt-filled.

When Trey was 2, the L.A. riots broke out. I longed to drive across town to be with him and Marilyn and their family. I wanted to say to them in an erupting world: It’s not me. Not us. But I had a fever, some kind of viral infection, and I was too sick to go. Through four wrenching days and nights I watched the news, the fires raging, the images of people running, a white man being pulled from his truck by black rioters and beaten, the talking heads giving their fatuous interpretations, the sad, helpless moment when Rodney King stood in front of all those microphones, saying, “Can’t we just get along?” I watched again and again the videotape of the white cops standing over the struggling black man on the pavement, beating him mercilessly, the image repeated in endless news loops.

As Trey grew older, his hunger for a father seemed to be the driving force of his young life. He was 5 when Marilyn met Erick, a recent immigrant from Jamaica, a good man, a hard worker, crazy about her, and—just as important—crazy about her son. A year later she married him. Erick became the father Trey needed. He raised Trey as his own.

By the time our boy was an adolescent, big for his age, very grown looking though he was still just a kid, I understood too well what Marilyn’s expression had meant that day in the pizzeria. Of course it wasn’t middle-aged, middle-class white women giving him grief. It was the white security guard at his school, for instance, who found Trey wearing his cap indoors one day in violation of school rules. The guard tried to confiscate it, but Trey resisted—that Yankees cap was a gift from Erick, he was afraid he wouldn’t get it back if the guard took it, and so Trey held on.

The guard grabbed him in a headlock, clamping his arm around my godson’s throat, choking him, and Trey, unable to breathe, grabbed hold of the man’s arm, trying to break free. The guard shoved him against the wall, jerked his hands behind him and handcuffed him. Then he took Trey, not to the principal’s office for wearing a ball cap in school, but downtown to Brooklyn Central Booking, where my godson was charged with assaulting a school security officer. Trey was 14 years old.

When he was old enough to drive, Marilyn and Erick bought him a car. They were doing well by then, both advancing in their careers; they owned a home near the Belt Parkway, had two beautiful daughters in addition to Trey. A growing, happy middle-class family. Every afternoon when Trey left school in his car, two white patrolmen would follow him in their cruiser, sometimes a few blocks, sometimes several miles, before turning on their patrol lights. They’d make him get out while they searched the car, after asking his permission, which Trey always gave, in part because he knew he had nothing to hide, in part because he was afraid of what would happen if he refused.

The officers never found anything to arrest him for, but they kept trying, because they seemed to think a black teenager would not be driving a late model car unless he was a drug dealer. After the search they’d issue a ticket for whatever excuse they’d used to stop him: failure to keep right, failure to use a turn signal. Garbage tickets, Marilyn called them as she wrote out the checks to pay the fines.

At 17 Trey was arrested for petit larceny—accessory lights stripped off a vehicle by a couple of black youths who matched Trey’s description. Matched, in fact, the description of hundreds of young black men in Brooklyn: braids, dark baseball cap, saggy jeans. The police homed in on my godson because of all those tickets; they put him in a lineup with four grown men over 30, Trey the only teenager with braids in the room. Of course he was the one the complainant picked out.

The arrest cost my godson a night in jail, cost his parents thousands of dollars in attorney fees, even though we all knew he didn’t do it—and not just because we know Trey is no thief. He was in the dentist’s office at the very time and date written on the complaint. Marilyn was with him. She told that to the white detective at the precinct.

“Sure, lady,” the detective said. “Take it up with the judge.”

After court appearances that dragged on for a year, Trey finally pleaded guilty to a crime he didn’t commit in order to guarantee he wouldn’t have a record. That was the deal the lawyer worked out: a plea of guilty in exchange for the record being expunged if Trey stayed out of trouble. I want to tell you something: it is nearly impossible for a young black man to stay out of trouble in a country where skin color is the marker for suspicion and violence and grief.

I want to tell you about seeing my godson handcuffed and put in a holding cage with other young black men at a Brooklyn precinct for driving while black. I want to tell you about sitting with Marilyn and Erick in a Brooklyn courtroom in a sea of black and brown parents while their sons are brought before the judge. I want to tell you about what stop-and-frisk does to a young man’s soul, tell you about a judicial system that is far less about justice than it is about arrest numbers and fines and plea bargains that parents agree to in hopes of keeping our sons out of jail.

Trey is grown now, in college, the father of a little girl. The police still stop him on the street, search him, search his car. He knows to stand absolutely still, keep his hands where the cops can see them, be cooperative, polite. 

These days Trey isn’t the one who comes upstate to visit but his younger sisters, Rosie and Grace, my goddaughters, 14 and 9 now, beautiful, smart, funny, laughing girls. We always get them for the Fourth of July, our annual tradition. This past summer, though, Marilyn had to delay our plans. I could tell from her emails there was something going on. She was distracted, busy at work, she said, but I sensed it was more than that. Still, I thought it couldn’t be anything too troublesome or she would have called to talk. Finally we set the date for me to come pick up the girls. Marilyn told me she wouldn’t be going to work that day, she had something she had to do. “What’s going on?” I asked her.

“I’ll tell you this evening,” she said.“I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.”

Marilyn was upstairs when I got there. Erick was in the kitchen with the girls, getting ready to leave for his softball game. He plays in a summer league, is a terrific player, always wins trophies, and usually when he heads out to a game, he’s joking, high spirited, teasing his daughters. This evening, though, he was very quiet. I could sense a kind of, I don’t know…a darkness in him. A weight I’d never seen before. Marilyn, too, when she came downstairs, was more silent than usual. They had that air of grownups trying to make things seem normal in front of the kids. Trey wasn’t around. The girls, for their part, seemed fine, though, their normal happy selves.

I had a tight feeling in my chest, a cold sense of dread. “Where’s Trey?” I said, half afraid to ask. “Oh, he’s at school,” Marilyn said. “He has a night class.” Okay. If not Trey, then who? What? I remembered then that Erick’s younger brother was visiting from Jamaica. I was afraid it might have to do with him, because Erick was the one enveloped in a dark cloud.

After he left, Marilyn sent the girls upstairs so we could talk. She went to a closet and brought out a brown paper bag stuffed with clothing; she sat across from me, pulled out different items, spread them formally on the living room floor: a man’s dark vest, ripped into two pieces, a red shirt, torn and blood-stained, torn men’s khaki trousers, also blood-stained. She laid out a woman’s dressy outfit, too, a summery short skirt and pretty blouse—her own clothes—but it was the blood-stained man’s shirt and trousers that caused my heart to catch. The shiny black vest ripped into two pieces. Inert evidence of violence, eloquent, silent.

“It was a beautiful night,” Marilyn began. “A holiday weekend. Me and Erick just sitting home, relaxing. Trey and his girlfriend went out, and around midnight he called…”

Trey told her it was a fine night at the nightclub where they’d gone to celebrate the beginning of summer: good Jamaican food, good music; some of their friends were there. He wanted Marilyn and Erick to come out. So they dressed up nice and drove over to Flatbush. They’d just got settled at a table and ordered a drink when the overhead lights came on, the music stopped, and everybody was ordered to leave.

Once they got outside they saw a man lying on the sidewalk, people milling around the front of the club saying he’d been shot; there were sirens, a lot of turmoil. No one wants to be around a shooting, Marilyn said, an investigation, police trouble. Trey and his girlfriend hurried to his car parked on the street and left. Marilyn and Erick walked quickly to the club lot where they’d parked their Mercedes. They passed a woman lying on the sidewalk near the entrance to the parking lot. They hurried on, got in the Mercedes, and Erick started to pull out, had moved maybe half a car length when they heard a voice yelling. Stop! Get out of the car!

It took them a second to realize it was the police, and that they were yelling at them. Erick stopped, put the car in park, rolled down the window to find out what they wanted, but the voice was still yelling Get out of the car! Get out of the car! “OK, man,” Erick said. “Hold on, give me a second.” He started to glide the window back up to get out of the car, and at once the officer began to beat his gun butt on the window. Get out of the car! Get out of the car!

Before Erick could open the door, the cop smashed the window, glass shattering all over the front seat, and he reached in, jerked open the door, dragged Erick out onto the ground. By then other policemen were swarming, a female officer was on the passenger side telling Marilyn to get out of the car. The first cop had Erick handcuffed already. He wrenched him up off the pavement and shoved him against the Mercedes, and Erick stumbled, off-balance with his hands cuffed behind him, and the police officers, all together and at once, piled on Erick and began to beat him.

“They beat him and beat him,” Marilyn said. “They take him between two cars so nobody can see and they beat my husband and I can’t do anything. The woman cop was there beside me by my side of the car, I’m yelling, ‘What are you doing? You just going to kill him for no reason?’ They have their guns drawn, they’re beating him with batons, their flashlights, it’s dark, there are so many cops on him, and I’m just watching my husband get beaten, I can’t do anything. His hands are cuffed behind him, his head over a guardrail, they’re beating their batons and flashlights all over his back, his legs, his head, I can hear the grunts and thuds, hear those batons smashing down on the steel guardrail, and it just goes on and on and on. Nobody stopping them. Nobody to stop them. They beat my husband till his pants are down to his knees, they rip his clothes.” She touched the two halves of the vest. “His belt broke, they tore off the chain around his throat where he keeps his wedding ring. That ring just lost now, we’ll never find it. They beat his head horribly, but they don’t beat his face. They don’t want anyone to see it. I finally think to cry out, ‘I hope somebody videoing this! Somebody video this! You see what they’re doing!’ That, finally, is when the beating stop. That is the only thing that stop them. I think now if I didn’t yell that, maybe they really would have killed my husband.”

She paused. I stared at the torn clothing. When Marilyn went on, her voice was low and quiet. “I’m just glad Trey left already. I think if he was there he would have jumped in. I know they would have killed him.” She looked at me. “Isn’t that something? The one thing I have to be grateful for is my son wasn’t there to see his father beat like that, because otherwise I think he would be dead. They would maybe both be.”

Listening, my throat tight, my heart racing, I felt a dark fire in my chest, familiar to me now after all these years: hatred and outrage, and fury. I was crying, too, more or less, a dry weeping that stopped at my throat, my anger so great I couldn’t make any tears. When I was able to speak finally, I didn’t need to ask why—why would the police do that to a man like Erick, a hard-working family man, a loving father, law-abiding citizen who has never in his life been arrested, never once lifted a violent hand to anyone. I asked only, “How many were there?”

“I don’t know,” Marilyn said. “Maybe seven or eight doing the beating. Others all over the parking area, the woman cop by me.”

“Were they all white?”

“The ones that was beating him, yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” The beating had happened in late May. This was August. They had been dealing with the aftermath all summer. “I don’t know,” she said. “You were in Oklahoma when it happened. They had those tornados down there, you had your family to think about. I didn’t want to worry you…” She grew quiet, shook her head. “I didn’t want to talk about it on the phone.” We sat in silence a while. I could hear the girls giggling upstairs, their TV music shows going. In a few minutes Marilyn went on to tell me the rest of the story:

She and Erick were both arrested, put in the back of a cruiser with their hands cuffed, taken down to Brooklyn Central Booking, locked up in holding cells. “You cannot believe how filthy that place is,” she told me. “How disgusting. How terrible it smells.” Marilyn’s face, when she told me this part, held all the layers of pain and indignity. I could see what it had cost her, being put in that degrading place. They charged her with two misdemeanors, Obstructing Government Administration, Failure to Obey Police Officer. She asked for a desk appearance ticket, a summons, so she could go home to her children, but the officer said no, she had to wait and see the judge.

And so my godson’s mother, a successful professional woman, a kind and graceful, law-abiding person, sat in a filthy cell in Central Booking all night and all day and most of the next night. In the end they released her after 1:00 a.m. onto the dark streets of downtown Brooklyn, alone, with no money, no purse, no phone, no way to go home or to call anyone to come get her. No way to know what they’d done with her husband.

Erick, horribly beaten as he was, they held for two days. They’d given him a Breathalyzer test as soon as they brought him in, and when it came back negative, they drove him to a second location for a more detailed drug test. They wanted him to be drunk or on drugs. They needed a reason, a justification. They knew they’d made a mistake. They charged him with reckless endangerment, resisting arrest, a long list of charges.

The officer who handled the paperwork came in to talk to him: “You know I didn’t have anything to do with this, right?” he said. Meaning the beating. He told Erick he shouldn’t go to the hospital now, not from the precinct, it would just make everything take longer. “Wait to get released,” the cop said, “and then go for medical attention if you need it.”

And Erick did need medical care. He went to the emergency room three times over the next few weeks. The headaches wouldn’t stop. His hand was numb, he couldn’t feel his thumb; he could move it but couldn’t feel it. Every time he breathed, he felt pains all through his torso—fractured ribs. When he went to the hospital the first time, on the day he was finally released, the attending physician asked him what happened to him. He told her. She said he should file a report. She called the precinct, and they said they would send someone to take Erick’s statement. He waited at the hospital for hours. No one from the precinct came. The physician had to go off duty. I’m sorry, she told him. Erick nodded, said thanks for trying, and he drove himself home in his car with its busted window.

Meanwhile Marilyn called friends and family until she found a lawyer; she took thousands of dollars from savings to pay his retainer and the bond he arranged to get Erick out of jail. Thousands more for him to represent Erick to get the felony charges against him reduced. Not to defend him. Not to say this man is innocent, but to arrange for a plea deal. If Erick was convicted of a felony, he could go to jail; he could lose his job, his means of supporting his family.

In the living room that night Marilyn told me his court date had been that very morning. This was why she’d taken the day off from work. Erick was furious in that courtroom, she said. She’d been afraid for him, what the anger might do. “Where’s all the white kids?” he’d kept saying. “Don’t any white kids commit crimes in Brooklyn?” Every defendant was black or Latino. The only whites in the room were people who worked there, lawyers, clerks, district attorneys, judges.

As the lawyer had arranged, Erick pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct and received a sentence of three days of community service and court costs. The charges against Marilyn had been dropped. This was the source of the dark weight I’d seen when I came in the kitchen: Erick’s anger, frustration, outrage, all held tightly contained inside him, along with the overwhelming sense of the injustice, and his own powerlessness in the face of it.

He felt he’d had no choice. The arrests had already cost them ten thousand dollars for lawyer’s fees, bail, medical bills, repairs to his car. They didn’t have the thousands more it would cost to go to trial and claim his innocence. And if they did go to trial, as the lawyer pointed out, there was no guarantee Erick wouldn’t be convicted. It would be Erick’s word against the word of the police. The lawyer had tried to get the videotape from the parking lot security camera showing the beating, but the police had already confiscated it by the time he went to the club to ask.

And so, just like Trey before him, Erick pled guilty to a crime he didn’t commit. Erick is a master technician for a cable company. Marilyn is an associate dean for a major university in Manhattan. Neither had ever been in any trouble with police, never had so much as a driving ticket. There was no reason this should have happened to them. Except it did.

Later, I asked to see their arrest reports. The list of charges against Erick runs from worst to least, felony to misdemeanor to violation to infraction: Reckless Endangerment, Obstructing Governmental Administration, Obstructing Emergency Medical Services, Resisting Arrest, Reckless Driving, Fighting/Violent Behavior, Failure to Obey Police Officer.

Failure to Obey Police Officer. The last one on the list. A mere infraction. This was Erick’s real crime. He is a black man who failed to obey a police officer. He’d made the mistake of starting to roll up his car window before opening the door to get out. That’s when the officer smashed the window, dragged Erick out and handcuffed him and began to beat him, and the others jumped on him to beat him, seven or eight white officers on one black man.

If you don’t think this is the reason, then ask yourself this: what well-dressed 42-year-old white man driving a Mercedes would be dragged from his car and beaten the way Erick was beaten for starting to roll up his car window?

I see my godson’s smile like honeyed lightning when he was a little boy, and I see him as a teenager in braids and handcuffs inside a steel cage in the lobby of a Brooklyn precinct, where they held him for hours before taking him downtown to book him for a crime he did not commit. I see my godson’s father teasing his giggling daughters, leaving for his ball games, coming home tired from work. I see him struggling on the ground, powerless, his hands cuffed behind him, trying to avoid the blows from police batons, and Marilyn crying out from the other side of their car, helpless, and the beating going on and on and on. Not in 1963 in the old slave-holding South, not in 1991 in a ghetto in Los Angeles, but in 2013, in a dark parking lot in Brooklyn.

Marilyn and Erick had gone out for a casual evening to celebrate the start of summer and got caught in a nightmare—for what reason? Like the students in one of my classes at Brooklyn College years ago, I know the answer very well. Know it truthfully, to the bones of my being, know it from being a part of Marilyn’s family for twenty-five years. There’s the weight of American history, the effects of policing programs that give officers a sense of impunity; there are a dozen complex and complicating forces that come down to one thing: the reason this happened to people I love is because of the color of their skin.

* * *

Originally published by The Daily Beast, reprinted with the author’s permission. Rilla Askew is an Oklahoma-born writer and author of the novel Fire in Beulah, set against the backdrop of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.

Genna Buck | Maisonneuve Magazine | Winter 2014 | 28 minutes (7,101 words)

MaisonneuveThis week we’re proud to feature a Longreads Exclusive from the new issue of Montreal’s Maisonneuve Magazine, about a young autistic woman who needs a home.
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Savannah Shannon has good days and bad days.

On good days, she can crack a great joke, go on and on about Harry Potter and quote Shrek with such deadpan delivery that she’ll have the whole room in stitches. Her bad days can be terrifying. May 31, 2012, wasn’t a good day.

On that day, Shannon’s name was on the schedule at the New Brunswick provincial court in Saint John next to three letters: NCR. Not criminally responsible.

Shannon sat in the prisoner’s dock; her heavyset body hunched and her short blonde hair sticking up on one side, as if she’d slept on it. With her eyebrows knit together in a scowl, she looked older than her twenty-one years. Early that morning, someone had driven her to court from the Restigouche Hospital Centre, a psychiatric centre five hours away in Campbellton. She’d been waiting at the courthouse all morning and she didn’t know where she would sleep that night.

A prosecutor, court-appointed defence lawyer and representative from the Department of Social Development were supposed to meet in front of a judge to decide on a place where Shannon could live without posing a risk to others. Since she turned nineteen, Shannon has been charged with a long list of offences. She’s pushed, she’s bitten; she’s struck someone who was trying to wash her hair. Every time, it’s been determined that she was NCR. Her autism, intellectual disability and mental health issues were to blame for the violence. By late 2010, Shannon had been kicked out of nearly every community home she’d lived in. She was sent to Restigouche and, at the time of this court date, had been there for a year and a half.

Restigouche is intended as a place to treat people with complex mental disorders, aid their recovery and discharge them. It’s not designed to be a permanent home. But for people like Shannon, who have high needs and no options, Restigouche has become a holding tank. In 2012, Jacques Duclos was the executive director of Restigouche. At the time, he estimated that 15 percent of the hospital’s inpatient population could be discharged safely if they had somewhere to go. Today, he’s the chief operating officer, Restigouche zone, and vice president of public health for Vitalité Health Network, which operates Restigouche. He says that now, the percentage might be even higher. But the province doesn’t supply enough supportive places to live, or enough caregivers, to get all those patients into comfortable homes.

Because of a bureaucratic mix-up, no one from the Department of Social Development showed up to Shannon’s court date in May 2012. Shannon’s court-appointed lawyer and the judge discussed the idea of issuing an absolute discharge, which would mean Shannon could leave the court house, free to fend for herself. Her intellectual abilities range from those of a four-year-old to a twelve-year-old. Judge Andrew LeMesurier dismissed the idea, saying he was afraid of relinquishing what little power he had to aid her situation. “If you’re allowed to put me on the street,” Shannon asked, “can’t you at least send me to the Miramichi?”

The question said something about Shannon’s life in recent years—she’d rather be in jail than spend any more time in the hospital. The New Brunswick Youth Centre in Miramichi is a detention centre for youth and adults. It’s where the court sometimes sends people for assessments after they’ve been charged but considered possibly not fit to stand trial because of a mental disorder. It’s also where Ashley Smith, the teenager who killed herself in an Ontario prison in 2007, served most of her time.

Seeing Shannon’s frustration, LeMesurier became equally upset. “Someone has to be responsible for finding a place for her,” he said. “I want that person here.” But no one showed up. “It’s frustrating,” said the judge, throwing up his hands. That night, Shannon made the long trip back to Restigouche.

I was working at the Saint John Telegraph-Journal at the time, and LeMesurier’s quote became my headline (“Judge says waiting for department ‘frustrating’”). By the end of the week, the government was taking heat about Shannon’s case in the provincial legislature. Over the next few days, the local media carried a small flurry of stories about the case. Five days later, court met again, this time with Social Development present and ready with a space in a community residence for adults with complex needs. (The court can send people to the hospital for assessment or to jail, but it doesn’t generally order someone to a specific community home—it leaves that to Social Development.)

Shannon moved to a privately owned residence in Saint John and the department paid for her stay. Those close to her believe that staff at the residence asked Social Development for more funding for an extra caregiver to supervise her. It didn’t happen. At the end of August 2012, Shannon was charged with assault. She went back to Restigouche.

Shannon’s big problem is finding a place to live. There are deep ideological divisions in this country about how to solve that problem. A generation ago, institutionalization was the default for Canadians like Shannon. People with mental illness or intellectual disability, or, as in Shannon’s case, a mix of both, were routinely warehoused in large residential institutions and mental hospitals, some- times for life. It was dehumanizing, expensive and often an affront to basic human rights. Today, the country has shifted to a model based on care in the community. In theory, this takes each individual’s needs, desires and strengths into account. In practice, complex cases like Shannon’s reveal the system’s weaknesses. Upon examination, a key feature of New Brunswick’s adult care system emerges: it’s fundamentally reactive, not proactive, and as a result, people are suffering.

* * *

Nearly everything I know about Shannon’s life outside the courtroom comes from Joy Sullivan, the only person Shannon has ever called mom. Joy and her husband Paul cared for Shannon from 1996, when Shannon was almost five, until 2005, when Shannon’s violent behaviour spiraled out of control and she left her foster parents to live in the first of many care homes.

In March 2013, I travelled an hour west of Saint John on the tree-lined highway that follows the snaking shoreline of the Bay of Fundy, past shuttered hotels and piles of colourful lobster traps half-buried in snow, to the hibernating tourist town of St. Andrews, population just below 1,900, where Joy and Paul Sullivan live with their adopted daughters.

Joy Sullivan and I sit on a comfortable couch in her living room, surrounded by many, many family photos. Three of her four daughters—all young adults, all former foster kids—are hanging out downstairs. They had all lived with the Sullivans full-time for a decade or more.

Open on the coffee table is a folder stuffed with papers and sticky notes: Shannon’s file. This is where Sullivan keeps copies of most of the letters she’s sent about Shannon’s case over the years. She’s always been a bit of a squeaky wheel. “I called everybody other than the Queen,” she says, speaking in the slight warble of a lifelong Maritimer.

When Shannon was hospitalized in late 2010, Sullivan gave the provincial government a lot of grief. She says staff at Social Development told her to “back off” while they worked things out with Shannon’s last placement and helped her transition from the hospital back home again. In 2012, Sullivan found out from a friend, who had read one of the stories about Shannon’s case that ran in the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, that Shannon was still in Restigouche. Not long after that story ran, Sullivan left a tearful message on the newspaper’s voicemail service. “I want to talk to you, I guess, about Savannah Shannon,” she said, sounding timid and unsure. “I raised this child.” I called Sullivan back.

Savannah Shannon’s life wasn’t always so hard. During my visit to the Sullivan’s home, Joy walks into a small room crowded with books, papers and family mementos. “This is my favourite photo,” she says, standing on her tiptoes to retrieve a framed snapshot. “This is the old Savannah.” She’s about nine in the posed portrait. A light shines on her smiling, upturned face. Her apple cheeks are dusted with freckles. “This one, on the other hand,” Sullivan says, pointing to a second picture, “we went from a child who was happy-go-lucky … to this.”

It’s outside, summertime. A pre-teen Shannon and her foster sisters are standing in front of the house. While the other kids are hamming for the camera, Shannon’s face is downcast, her features obscured by shadows. She looks like a protester guarding an old-growth tree: feet in a wide, defensive stance, eyebrows furrowed, arms splayed behind her.

Shannon’s first few years with the Sullivan family were almost as difficult as her last. The pre-schooler they took in as a foster child had a mentally ill mother who couldn’t care for her and provide the consistent, loving support and early intervention that autistic children need. Shannon’s vocabulary consisted of little more than grunting, crying and screaming. For hours on end, she “flapped;” Sullivan sticks her arms out stiffly and trembles her whole body to demonstrate.

Shannon’s repetitive behaviours were a hallmark of autism, a developmental condition that significantly impairs communication and social interaction. Because of her disability, Shannon struggles with some tasks more than others. The Sullivans used to delight in Shannon’s uncanny ability to solve mazes and visual puzzles faster than anyone in the family. But to test her social intelligence, Sullivan once asked Shannon what she noticed most about the expressions on peoples’ faces. “Noses,” Shannon said.

Still, after about a month of living with the Sullivans, Shannon was talking. She learned to write her name and read simple picture books, but her behaviour in school was always disruptive. Her bouts of tears and laughter could last for hours. She sometimes talked about things that made no sense, even saying she was from another planet. Sullivan says that Shannon might have been the first child with autism her small school had ever seen—New Brunswick passed its inclusive education bill in 1986.

When Paul arrives home from his managerial job at a local nursing home, the Sullivans start reliving memories of “the old Savannah,” whose sense of comedic timing was impeccable. She once stared down a teacher, and, riffing on a line from Shrek, said, “You cut me. You cut me deep.” On one of the many occasions she was sent to see the school principal, she grabbed the back of his head with both hands and gave him a loud, wet smooch on the mouth. “She looked right at him and said ‘Whaddya think about THAT?’” Sullivan says, doubling over with laughter and wiping tears from her eyes. Shannon had a mischievous sense of humour. But her sense of mischief sometimes made others uncomfortable and portended more serious anti-social behaviour to come.

One day, a sobbing special education teacher called the family at home. “She said, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” Joy Sullivan recalls. Shannon was playing in the school yard with a huge, gleeful smile on her face, crouching by a puddle and pretending to drown a doll.

Shannon’s turn towards outright violence “just kept creeping on very gradually,” Sullivan says. “One day the kids were playing in the pool, and she got really agitated. I had no clue why.” With hardly any warning, Shannon, who was around twelve or thirteen at the time, picked up a shovel and chased her foster mother around the yard with it. In the coming months, Shannon tackled Paul at the mall, yelled “Get this man off of me!” and got him arrested. She pushed a teacher down the school stairs. Someone caught the woman, but that ended Shannon’s formal education. Day and night, Joy and Paul lived in fear. They started sleeping in the basement because the creaky stairs would warn them if Shannon, who had grown heavy, was on her way down. They were afraid Shannon would harm one of the other children.

“I can’t even describe it to you,” Sullivan says. “When I heard her door knob turn in the morning, my stomach rolled over, and I was nauseous. That’s how bad it got … She sent me flying across the room more than once.” Sullivan was convinced that Shannon’s behaviour signaled the onset of some sort of serious mental illness. Shannon saw every specialist in the book. They tried medications; nothing helped. She didn’t receive a diagnosis other than autism in the time she lived with the Sullivans.

Shannon seemed to lose touch with reality during her episodes. Her blue eyes went dark and, in Sullivan’s words, “all hell broke loose inside her head.” With four other children in the home, the situation was unsafe. Three of the other girls were not yet adopted, and Sullivan was afraid there could be legal consequences if one of them was harmed while in her care. So she made one of the most difficult calls of her life: Sullivan phoned Family and Community Services and asked for someone to come get Shannon.

Shannon moved out in July 2005, at the age of fourteen. For months, she lurched from crisis to crisis, bouncing between several temporary homes. After about a year the department found Shannon a space in a specialized home for children with complex mental health needs. Joy and Paul were thrilled, and they visited often. They say Shannon flourished because she had her own space with dedicated workers supervising her. She had a chance to learn, was able to make some of her own choices and was well cared for. She stayed for four years, but at nineteen she was officially no longer a child. She had to leave.

* * *

A century-and-a-half ago, New Brunswick’s Provincial Lunatic Asylum was built on a high bluff in the small bucolic village of Fairville, its location no doubt informed by Victorian beliefs about the ills of urban life and the robust health to be gleaned from fresh air. The complex, which was later swallowed by the growing city of Saint John and renamed CentraCare, seemed to reproduce of its own accord, with new wings and buildings growing out from old ones. According to local historian David Goss, student nurses lived in abject fear of their mandatory practicum at “the Provincial.” In the hospital’s early days, some patients were shackled by their wrists to the walls, and isolation rooms had sliding grates for doors. Ghost stories about the troubled souls who perished on the grounds persist to this day.

By the 1950s, it had expanded into a village with a population of about 1,700 patients. But around the same time, new anti-psychotic drugs became available. This meant that for many, mental illness was no longer a life sentence. Over the next two decades, most experts and academics came to see institutions as ineffective, inhumane and expensive, says David Wright, a professor of medical history at McGill University in Montreal. Residential institutions in Canada downsized and closed at a fairly steady rate between the 1950s and the 1990s. In the 1970s, CentraCare began to shed patients.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, signed in 1982, prevents discrimination on the basis of disability, while the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which Canada signed in 2010, gives everyone the right to participate in economic, social and cultural life, and to choose where they live and who they live with.

Countless people thrived in the freedom and opportunity they found in the community. But for others, says Wright, life outside the institution was a disaster. Hospitals were better prepared to handle people with multiple, challenging mental health problems than caregivers in the community (of course, the hospitals also had access to powerful drugs and physical restraints). “I’m not saying it was better,” Wright says. “But I think it was more straightforward.”

People with severe and difficult-to-manage disabilities have ended up in a variety of settings in the post-institutionalization era. Some get good-quality care and assistance, but others are cared for by overtaxed family members, living on the street or in homeless shelters or, like Shannon, living permanently in what is supposed to be a place for temporary treatment.

* * *

New Brunswick pushed people out of institutions in the 1980s and 1990s before the equivalent resources in the community were ready. They’re still playing catch-up. The province pays for programs and facilities, but also gives individualized funding for people to live in the community.

The department’s most community-oriented living option, the alternate family living arrangement (AFLA) program, amounts to adult foster care. People take one or two adults with special needs into their home, receive funding for their care, and live together as a family. To qualify, families have to pass a criminal record check and a scan of their prior contact with Social Development. Joy Sullivan says that Shannon went to live with such a family in late 2010, but the couple quickly realized they were unable to handle her violent behaviour. Within weeks they had her charged and sent back to Restigouche. Thomas says many people the department serves have needs that are too complex for the family placement program. That’s where residential care comes in. Sometimes called custodial or congregate care, it’s prevalent in the province.

In New Brunswick, care homes are licensed on a sliding scale from level one to level four, according to the amount of help residents need with daily activities such as eating, bathing, taking medication and getting dressed. A 2012 report from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health says most of New Brunswick’s seven thousand residential care beds are in special care homes (levels one and two). About five hundred of New Brunswick’s residential care beds are higher- support spaces in community residences (levels three and four), which are still homelike but tend to be somewhat more institutional. (At last count, the total population of the province was just over 755, 000 people.) It is the department’s policy to make every effort to get people out of hospital settings and into the community if possible.

There has been an overwhelming need in New Brunswick for level four spaces, where people with serious medical or behavioural issues are cared for at a ratio of three clients to one staff member. In an oddball feature of this byzantine system, there seems to be a psychological barrier against going any higher than the number four. Sullivan says Shannon has been cared for at a level described as “four-plus” and even “four-plus-plus;” at times having two trained staff members assigned to care for her.

Every plan for level four care and above has to be individually approved by the department. A level four space in a community residence costs the department a maximum of $4,701.07 per month compared to $1,935 per month for a high-needs person in an AFLA family home placement (additional money is available to send the person to programming, such as a day activity centre). A month’s stay in the hospital at Restigouche costs the province in the neighbourhood of $9,000, not including doctors’ fees. When Shannon was little, Sullivan said she received about $430 per month to care for her, but Joy and Paul took a variety of courses that allowed them to qualify for more funding, and by the time Shannon left their home the family was getting about $1,000 per month for her care. The department, very occasionally, will set a high-needs person up in a home or apartment with round-the-clock supervision. The cost of such an arrangement can top $100,000 per year. Nobody from Social Development can comment on specific cases, so they couldn’t say why this has not been tried for Shannon. Social Development pays to send a handful of severely disabled people to costly residential facilities over the border in Maine, and has been working in recent years to get adults with special needs who are under sixty-five out of nursing homes.

Then, of course, there are psychiatric hospitals, which a 2005 article in the journal Psychiatric Services called the “setting of last resort” for people with severe, persistent and dangerous conditions who can’t be managed in the community. According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, the average length of stay in a psychiatric hospital in the Picture Province is 207 days. The national average is eighty-one.

Trial and error might just be the only way to find Shannon a home that’s right for her. If someone is frequently being moved between different homes, it shows the department is working really hard to try to find them a placement.

In Sullivan’s words, it takes “somebody extra-special” to handle Shannon day-in and day-out. She’s unique, but her symptoms aren’t. Aggressive, inappropriate and violent behaviours are symptoms of many conditions, including brain injury, fetal alcohol syndrome and personality disorders. Those with mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder may lash out at people, property and themselves while in the throes of psychosis.

New Brunswick’s adult care system is chronically under-resourced, although no one from Social Development was able to put an exact number on the shortfall—either in terms of people who need to be housed or the money that’s needed to fill the gaps. Jacques Duclos, from Restigouche Hospital Centre, said that as of October 2014, there are at least ten people there who are perfectly ready to leave but don’t have anywhere to go. In late 2011, while many people waited for a supported place to live, three group homes in Saint John closed for financial reasons. In early 2014, a large special care home run by the Salvation Army closed because it couldn’t cover costs.

* * *

For Harold Doherty, making a simple phone call from his home in Fredericton is a difficult process. “Can you hear me okay?” he asks. “The static is likely on my end. Conor likes to pull the phone cords out. You can probably hear him now.”

I heard squealing and screaming in the background. Eighteen-year-old Conor Doherty lives with his parents, loves school and looks forward to spending time at Killarney Lake during the summer. His mother adores him, although as she gets older and he gets bigger, she’s finding it harder and harder to deal with his meltdowns. Harold, Conor’s father, is a self-described “big mouth” lawyer who dedicates much of his spare time to advocating for his severely autistic son and others like him. He’s a prolific blogger on his website, Facing Autism in New Brunswick, and part of the Autism Society New Brunswick.

Some of his views are unconventional. Conor just can’t integrate into every aspect of mainstream society, Doherty argues. He says that he’s glad Conor is out of the mainstream classroom for most of the school day. New Brunswick’s current care system, he says, isn’t equipped to help his son. “The reality no one wants to admit is that some people just need to be institutionalized,” he says, but he describes the word itself as a loaded one.

Doherty insists only an expert with specific training in autism can handle Conor. And he maintains that the best setting for that will be residential care at an intermediate level somewhere between a hospital and a group home, a service he says has been “totally neglected” in recent years. Doherty rails against the “Community Living ideology” he says pervades the New Brunswick government. “It’s not based on evidence. It’s a philosophy.”

What Conor needs, his father says, is a safe place to live and treatment, not just basic personal care. Doherty has come up with the idea for a centre of excellence for autism based in Fredericton. He wants it to include a provincially funded residential home for autistic adults and a training centre that can certify group home workers from communities around the province.

Doherty brought up his idea at an Autism Society New Brunswick meeting I attended. Emotions ran high at the meeting as the conversation meandered from special education to housing to adult care. Four or five parents started crying in the middle of speaking. The society has opened a dialogue about adult care, but that’s as far as Doherty’s idea has gotten. Does he have any faith a centre will be built in time for his son to benefit?

“It has to,” he says.

* * * 

In its position statement on housing, the Canadian Association for Community Living says adults with intellectual disabilities should be able to access apartments and houses from the mainstream housing market and receive disability supports through a separate system.

“In Canada today,” the statement says, “many individuals continue to be presented with options that do not support lifestyles of choice but rather assume that people with intellectual disabilities will stay indefinitely in the family home, or move into group home programs or other more institutional environments.” People shouldn’t be “placed” in a home, Community Living’s statement argues; unless they personally choose to live there. And congregate homes should cease to be offered as a standard residential option. In theory, this means people who are able to live in the community will have the support to do so, and there would be money and community-based resources freed up for those like Shannon, who just can’t live independently.

Shannon’s disability sometimes limits her decision-making, but what she said in court about going to Miramichi is telling: she is able to articulate her desires when it comes to where she wants to live. Shannon told me she asked to go to Miramichi “because Restigouche makes a big stink out of everything, and at Miramichi they treat me with more respect.” And of course; she’s not sick. There’s nothing the hospital can do about her autism.

I called Shannon in October 2014. The hospital put me on the phone with her, no questions asked, and allowed us to have a private conversation. As Sullivan told me, Shannon is easy to talk to, although she speaks in clipped sentences and a flat, gruff tone. She understands that other people will be reading her story.

I ask her how she felt about living in Restigouche. Her answer: “I hate it. It’s boring.”

What does she spend her time doing? Not much. She says that she doesn’t like the activities the hospital offers, but doesn’t elaborate. She says she doesn’t get many “breaks.”

As for what she would prefer to be doing, she says that she wants to be closer to her family. She’d like to go out to eat with Joy and go shopping. She hopes maybe she’ll be moved to the CentraCare hospital in Saint John, just an hour away from the Sullivans. “They’re the only family I’ve got,” she says.

Paul and Joy call themselves Shannon’s family, but legally they’re not. “In her mind, we’re her parents,” Paul says. However, the Sullivans feel they don’t have the same access to Shannon as biological parents would. They considered adopting Shannon years ago, but were advised by a social worker that doing so could decrease the already-limited government support they received for her care.

There is no system to automatically appoint independent formal advocates for people with disabilities who have no legal family. Someone, say, who could help to explore what made Shannon happy in the specialized youth home and aid in finding a placement that fits some of those parameters. Community Living’s statement cautions against letting government agencies act on behalf of individuals. “Housing choices for adults … are currently provided in a manner more geared to meeting the needs of the system rather than of the individual.”

In 2009, Provincial Court Judge Michael McKee released a report recommending sweeping changes to the mental health system, including an increase in “housing options with related treatment, services and supports for community living.” But four years of austere budgets and one change of government later, McKee called for an update, saying the lack of progress was “troubling.”

The province responded to McKee’s original report with a seven-year action plan to decrease the days spent in psychiatric units by 15 percent by 2018. An equivalent plan for people with disabilities emphasized that Restigouche should focus on acute care and recommended the province continue moving out long-term patients and transferring them to services offered at local community mental health centres. Around thirty patients were moved out in the last couple of years—Shannon was not among them. Making the rest of the transition happen is going to require the province to grow its community mental health services as well. The goal is to reduce the waiting list for those by 10 percent by 2017. The province also has an ongoing project that provides extra social assistance benefits to people who are released after an extended stay in one of the psychiatric hospitals. That will continue when Restigouche downsizes again soon.

Shannon says she has a court date in December 2014, so there’s a chance she may finally have left Restigouche when, around May 2015, it moves to a brand-new building with a modern design, a community-focused approach to care—and thirty-two fewer beds. “Our intention is really now to move people into the community. We are moving from a psychiatric institution to a more highly specialized psychiatric service provider,” Duclos says.

* * *

Marcos Salib has been a social worker for twenty years. He worked with Social Development before quitting his job to take a full-time position at the Canadian Union of Public Employees, representing and advocating for community care staff across New Brunswick.

To him, it’s no mystery why Shannon and so many others don’t thrive—the services for them are drastically underfunded. Twenty years ago residential care staff, who generally hold a one-year college diploma, made about double minimum wage, he says. Today, it’s unusual for them to make more than the provincial minimum of $10 an hour. Salib thinks that’s peanuts for a job that requires so much patience and stamina. “[The province wants] champagne service on a beer budget,” he says. “Why don’t you go and sit there, work with the workers, and be spit on, and be yelled at, and be threatened to be hit, be hit, be assaulted?” he says. “When you’re dealing with situations like that, you’ve got no other choice but to call the police.”

Getting law enforcement involved with people who will inevitably be found not criminally responsible is how someone like Shannon gets stuck in the cycle of hospitalization, community placement and criminal charges that disability expert Dorothy Griffiths calls psychiatric pinball. To Griffiths, a professor of child and youth studies at Brock University, the staff who call the police aren’t to blame; the problem is systemic. “You don’t just dump the person back if the same conditions are there that led to the offence,” she says.

Tim Stainton is the director of the School of Social Work at the University of British Columbia, and he researches the integration of people with mental disabilities into the community. He too cautions against harshly judging people who work in the entrenched and chronically cash-poor social services system. Many social workers feel stretched in two opposite directions for their whole careers, Stainton says. The interests of a social system, such as staying on budget and maintaining good public relations, don’t always line up with the interests of the client, which are supposed to be the first priority.

Special care homes were given a $3.8 million boost in the provincial budget last year. But leading policy and research organizations in the field argue that cash injections here and there don’t get people with special needs any closer to real independence and autonomy, and they don’t change the structure of the system. “Restigouche has become a catch-all,” Salib says. “We’re going to dump you there because we don’t know any more what to do with you.”

* * *

The Sullivans still have kids who live at home, and have also taken in Joy’s elderly mother. The trip to northern New Brunswick to visit Shannon in the hospital requires an overnight stay; they don’t do it very often. But in 2012, they packed up a few gifts, including a book about outer space, one of Shannon’s current obsessions, and began the six-hour journey to the hospital to celebrate Christmas with her. Last year, they made the same trip again, but a storm added hours to the lonely drive.

Restigouche is a sprawling structure built of dark red brick; it opened in 1954. Looking quintessentially institutional, it sits on the outskirts of a small, picturesque Francophone town. To imagine what life is like there, Sullivan says, “Envision an old mental hospital.” She says Shannon gets very little activity or stimulation. “They do let them out in the yard once a day, like they would if you were in prison.”

Sullivan talks to Shannon on the phone several times per week, and says the young woman seems to be reasonably healthy and lucid. “She calls us almost every day. She just wants to hear a voice and have somebody to connect with,” Sullivan says. “She’ll tell me what’s going on and if she’s having trouble holding it together. And I’ll try and talk her down. She’s not happy in any way, shape or form. She paces like a rat in there. She doesn’t have anything to do.”

On a good day, Sullivan can still get a laugh out of Shannon. They’ve done their best to keep her spirits up. As she does for all her children, Sullivan has made Shannon a “life book” of their time together. Shannon’s is with her at Restigouche, but Sullivan shows me a thick book she made for one of their other children.

“This is your life!” declare colourful letters on the cover. Each page has a different theme. Birthdays and holidays are commemorated with photos, stickers and scrawled notes. Shannon’s album, Sullivan says, is even bigger. She holds open her hands a foot apart and laughs.

“There are lots of things in there that I wrote to her, that I’ll read to her some time,” she says. “I explained it all out to her—why she’s not here, and about mental illness.”

That she is not legally considered Shannon’s mother has been a source of frustration and anguish for Sullivan over the years. But she says that she went from mad to irate four years ago, when Shannon had already been in Restigouche for a few weeks. Sullivan was able to get a letter about Shannon to the minister of health.

The letter contained a brief history of Shannon’s life up to that point and a plea for the department to find a placement that would meet her needs. Sullivan wrote that she thought Shannon should not be sent back to the alternate family living arrangement placement where she had been living, because the family did not have the training to deal with her violent episodes.

“The minister’s response was to get [the regional manager] to call me,” Sullivan says. “She told me that they had convinced this home to take her back.” When Shannon was in the hospital for all those months—from around Christmas 2010 to June 2012—and the Sullivans thought she was in a family placement, Sullivan says she backed away because she was told to. “I don’t have any legal rights to that child. So I’ve always tried to work with [the department] because I want them to know I’m a team player,” she says. Sullivan says a social worker told her that Shannon was so attached to the Sullivan family that they needed to cease contact for a while to give her time to settle into a new home. “I said okay. I’ll do that if you honestly think that’s what best for her. This isn’t about me. This is supposed to be about Savannah. It’s not that it’s going to break my heart if there’s no communication between us. I’m a big girl.” Sullivan says she was “hoping above hope” that because she hadn’t heard anything, everything was going well. But, of course, it wasn’t. Sullivan doesn’t know if the particular public servant she was speaking with knew that Shannon never in fact ended up going back to her former placement and was still in the hospital.

Sullivan read in the Saint John Telegraph-Journal that Shannon would be back in court on June 5, 2012. So on that day she drove an hour from St. Andrews and watched the proceedings as the young woman she considers her daughter sat in a wooden prisoner’s box with uniformed sheriffs guarding her. The hearing didn’t last long. The judge decided Shannon should go to a home arranged by the Department of Social Development. She went to the community residence in Saint John—which Sullivan called a home “they pulled out of a hat.” Outside the courtroom, Sullivan and Shannon embraced, and they walked together towards the court desk.

According to Sullivan, Shannon asked her, “Mum, can you take me to my new home?” to which Sullivan replied that she would not be allowed, but promised that she would try to find a way to see her. That’s the scene Sullivan described in a scathing letter to the same regional manager she sent via email:

What I feel now, I can’t begin to describe to you, which is why I write, because I can’t even talk about this without breaking down. The thought of … placing a child (yes, in an adult body) in a mental institution for a year and a half, where she spent two birthdays and a Christmas, without a word, letter, phone call, or visit from her family or loved ones is beyond my comprehension. For anyone in this country, in your care, to believe that no one cares or loves them is in my mind inexcusable, and the fact that no one even showed up to her court date I’m sure reinforced that to her loud and clear … I ask you as a mother, and as one woman to another, please do not turn your back on her again.

Four days later, Sullivan received a polite reply:

“Thank-you for connecting and I am just getting to some of my emails. I was in Fredericton last week and again most of this week. I will connect with Savannah’s Social Worker to discuss your request to maintain contact. I understand that Savannah has settled in well in the Adelaide home and with [a worker at the home] knowing her previously there is already a connection established. I will reconnect with you again this week Joy.”

The manager promised to follow up, and she did a few days later. She reiterated by email that she would talk to Shannon’s social worker about Sullivan’s request to stay in touch, and said the department’s goal was to provide Shannon with a placement that gave her quality of life. She also said the transition to the new home was going well.

That placement lasted only a few weeks. Shannon was charged once again, and spent another eight months in Restigouche.

Social Development is working to move to a more inclusive system of supporting people with developmental and mental health disabilities. When they’re making a case plan, social workers sit down with a team of people—the person being served, agencies such as community mental health, the family, and anyone the disabled person wants at the table, even if they’re not related by blood. But Sullivan wanted to be informed when Shannon was moved to Restigouche. That’s private health information. That’s confidential.

The department calls its approach “person-centred planning.” To the extent possible, the person with a disability is supposed to be able to freely choose where they live and how they spend their days. Even if someone is nonverbal, the department does its best to use resources to help interpret what they’re trying to say. This philosophy is in line with changing global attitudes about the rights of people with disabilities and the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. But for some reason, it didn’t seem to work effectively in Shannon’s case. When doing case planning, it’s not atypical for social services systems to involve advocates who don’t have any formal legal standing in a person’s life right up “until things get sticky,” says Tim Stainton, the social work professor. Sullivan thinks that’s what happened to her family: things got sticky, and they were shut out. Shannon desperately wanted to be in touch with the Sullivans during that year and a half she spent alone in the hospital, and her wishes weren’t respected.

Shannon moved from Restigouche into a placement in rural New Brunswick. This time, to Sullivan’s relief, she was invited to meet with Shannon’s care team and the new family before Shannon was discharged from the hospital.

Sullivan was ecstatic about the location of the new home, which was much closer to them than Restigouche with plenty of opportunities for Shannon to get fresh air and exercise. The Sullivans visited Shannon all through that spring and summer, and communicated regularly with the family, but they tried not to call too much. The last time Sullivan telephoned, Shannon’s caregiver said she’d been acting up—getting obsessive and using threatening language. Several weeks passed without any word from Shannon. Then Sullivan called to ask when she could come for a visit. The woman said, “Didn’t you know? She’s not here.” In July 2013, Shannon was sent back to Restigouche.

Sullivan is afraid Shannon may spend her life there, but she still holds out hope that the woman she considers a daughter will find a safe, happy place to live as independently as possible. She admits she has looked over the department’s shoulder through this whole ordeal, even though her motivation was only to look out for Shannon’s best interests. She doesn’t want to hover. She sees herself as Shannon’s personal Nanny McPhee. “I said to her, ‘You remember that story? I’m there when you need me, but if you just want me I might not be right there!’” But right now, with her future uncertain and her life contained to a psychiatric hospital, Shannon still needs the woman she calls mom.

* * *

Originally published in Maisonneuve Magazine, Winter 2014. Subscribe here.

Genna Buck is a Toronto-based journalist and editor working for Maclean’s magazine. She writes about social issues, science and health.

Ira Sukrungruang | River Teeth | Fall 2014 | 15 minutes (3,767 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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“And once it comes, now that I am wise in its ways, I no longer fight it. I lie down and let it happen. At first every small apprehension is magnified, every anxiety a pounding terror. Then the pain comes, and I concentrate only on that.” –Joan Didion, “In Bed”

It’s happening, says the woman I love to someone in the other room. The someone is most likely her sister, and I hear the shuffle of clogs on the ruined carpet, the swish and swirl of her turquoise dress. I feel the shadow of her body in the doorway. I hear her breathing, tiny bursts of air through the nose and mouth. I feel and hear everything, but I am not a body. And because I am no longer a body, I do not register sound or voice. I do not register anything. Even my presence on the scratchy carpet. I do not know that I have been lying in the lap of the woman I love as she soothes my sweat-drenched hair, as she whispers that this will pass. I do not hear her because I do not have ears. I do not have eyes. I do not see the hazy outline of her humid-frizzed hair or the worry etched in her face or how she looks down at me and then out the window, out past the dilapidated houses of this rundown block in Lafayette, Colorado, past the Rockies rising in jagged edges to snowy peaks, past logical explanation. Because right now, I do not register logic. Because this pain is not logical. This pain makes me whimper, makes me produce a noise that is octaves higher and sharper than I can otherwise make. I become a supplicant to its needs. I have a mouth. Of this I am sure. I have a mouth but it acts without my guidance. Saliva seeps from corners. Lips chapped as cracked earth. The woman I love feeds me water. I sip from a straw, but all of it dribbles out from the corners of my mouth. All of it wetting my cheeks and chin, like a child sloppy with food. I am a child. I am helpless. I am without strength. I am without will. I believe I might die. That this might be the end of me, this moment. I believe that death would be a relief from it all.

Hang on, she says. It’s almost over, she says. The end is in sight, she says.

* * *

I want to tell you about a headache. I want to tell you when someone says they are having a headache we never take it seriously. We say go get some sleep. We say relax. We say it’s only a headache. I want to say there are seven different types of pain medication in my medicine cabinet right now, and I’ve used all of them. Two of them are prescribed. One can knock me out for twenty-four hours and leave my mouth sandpaper dry. I want to tell you that a headache made me overdose on pain medication once, and all I remember was lurching up my lunch at the student health clinic in Carbondale, Illinois, and a beautiful nurse patting my back because I was crying at the same time, crying and lurching, crying and lurching, because the pain didn’t go away, the one in my head, the one pulsating like a heart about to explode. I want to tell you that I know someone who had a headache and the only way he got rid of it was he shot himself. I want to tell you that I’ve thought about shooting myself.

* * *

Testimonial from clusterheadaches.com

“I keep telling myself that I am strong enough to deal with it. I’ve been doing it for a long time now. But then the next one hits, and I become a w[h]impering little baby with no strength what-so-ever.” – Marcus

* * *

Q: How did it start?

A: It started like fairy tales do: once there was a peaceful land, and then black clouds gathered and lightning lit forests on fire and the talking animals scurried away; their cries for help were drowned by the rain that pelted the land in savage punches. And suddenly, there was no sound, the world on mute, and a blanket covered the sky, thick and suffocating. This was the apocalypse. This was the world’s end. This was the kiss-your-ass-goodbye moment. A baby hedgehog shivered in the corner of a hollowed-out tree stump. A prince fell off his steed. A princess screamed until she was hoarse.

Am I being dramatic? Yes.

No.

Absolutely not.

* * *

Cluster headaches. Suicide headaches.

A female sufferer likened the pain to giving birth to a hundred babies at once without epidural. Some sufferers have banged their heads repeatedly against brick walls, turning their foreheads to mangled meat. Some have attempted to take power tools, drills in particular, to the source of the pain. Some have begged friends and family members to end their misery.

Once, when the pain came, I grabbed for a knife, my fist tight around it, contemplating digging out my right eye. I was twenty-one.

When the pain passed, I realized I grabbed the blade instead of the handle.

A four-inch cut almost to the bone.

A pool of blood on the flower-patterned couch, like the stain from a murder.

* * *

“It’s somewhere between 11:00 P.M. and 3:00 A.M., and I wake terrified, hopeful that I’m dreaming, and knowing that I’m not . . . I am careful not to wake the children as I make my way down the stairs. If they were to witness my nightly cluster ritual, they would never see me the same way again. Their father, fearless protector, diligent provider, crawling about in tears, beating his head on the hard wood floor.” —Anonymous

* * *

By nature, the cluster headache is consistent. For me it came every other year since I was fifteen. It came at roughly the same time each day—about 2:00 p.m.—and lasted for two hours. It came and settled in my life for a period of six weeks, and afterwards it would leave, disappear, become a trembling memory.

The headache was an unwanted guest. And my unwanted guest was a serial killer with an ice pick. When the right side of my face started to tingle, I would announce, “He’s coming.” This headache became personified. This pain took a pronoun. I planned my days around him, like how I planned my travels around snow when I lived in upstate New York. In my daily planner, I blocked out the hours between one and six. I would be occupied during those times, writing in my planner: “Down time.”

* * *

The woman I love and I often joke that when a headache happens there is one sure way of getting rid of it: decapitation.

* * *

Q: When did it start?

A: It started one day. One day.

One day.

And I remember it.

I remember it.

Remember it.

And I repeated myself in threes, my brain as flighty as a junco, my concentration leaping in a million avenues in milliseconds. The sun filtered through the high-school window, and I thought it was too bright, and I thought someone should dial down the light, and I said in my Southside Chicago voice, “Dial down that fuckin’ light.” The sprinklers chattered on the football field, and I could hear it two floors up, and it sounded like someone stuttering the word cheetah, and I said, “That shit’s too loud. Too loud. Too fuckin’ loud.” And the bell rang and I sat in Mrs. B.’s American literature class, my sophomore year, and we were going over A Wrinkle in Time. And then my right eye blurred. And then Mrs. B.’s voice became muffled, as if she spoke through cotton. And then pain, a music of pain, sharp thumping, a heartbeat in the temples. Drumming, thrumming, strumming. And then I closed my eyes and I pulled at my hair. I could hear my roots creak. Pain. Someone was stabbing me,

stabbing me,

stabbing me.

In the right eye,

right eye,

eye.

I had stepped through L’Engle’s tesseract, her fictional interdimensional portal that carried Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin away from the world. But I wasn’t among centaurs or the Black Thing. I was on a planet of red. Hazy red. Pulsing red. Pumping blood. A bleeding rose. Dripdripdrip, and thorns were piercing the inner cavities of my brain, blood blossoming, dripdripdrip, and the pain was delicious because I was crying. I was silently crying. And someone far off said, “Mrs. B., Ira’s crying.” And I could hear people turning to stare,

stare,

stare,

shifting in their chairs, and someone said, “He’s probably crying because of Jean Lind,” but I wasn’t because Jean Lind—though she broke my heart—was not stabbing,

stabbing,

stabbing me

in the eye. Jean Lind was a pain of a different sort, and right then, she didn’t matter because the world was about pain—the physical kind—the kind that erases all your woes, a pain so intense it steals your ability to speak, because when Mrs. B. asks you if you are okay, you can’t say anything. You manage to shake your head, and someone says, “His right eye is closed,” and it was because pain had stolen my eye, had plucked,

plucked,

plucked

it out of the socket. And my boys, my Chicago boys, were like, “Dude, what’s up?” And Mrs. B. says, “Take him to the nurse,” but I couldn’t move,

move,

move,

until fingers laced under my arms and lifted me out of my seat, and I don’t remember anything after that. Only that I woke in a cot. Only that my tears had stained the pillowcase, and the only pain left was a slight throb, a slight pulse in my temples, the fading remains of a sidewalk chalk drawing.

* * *

I do not consider myself a weak person. I am over six feet tall, over three hundred pounds. I have the build of a professional football linebacker—more fat than muscle—and I have a high tolerance for pain, loving long hours under a tattooist’s needle, loving my strange little quirks like pressing bruises and scorching my body in a hot shower or playing with the fire of a candle. Once, I stabbed my hand with a pencil because of a stupid adolescent dare and it stuck.

I don’t say these things to brag. I say these things to try to explain pain. The pain I felt when experiencing a cluster headache is intolerable. I would crumble under it. I would do almost anything to get rid of it. I understand why some soldiers collapse under torture, understand weakness, understand helplessness.

This is not about headaches. This is about tolerance. This is about pain and how it has the ability to crumple us.

* * *

My family is plagued with migraines. My mother doesn’t have them—she’s thankful—but her four other sisters are cursed, especially the twins. This is what they call headaches, a curse carried over from another life. My aunts tell me I must’ve suffered a terrible death in my past life. An elephant crushing my skull, perhaps. Or a spear through the eye. Their mother had cluster headaches, my grandmother, a woman who died before I was born. On days when pain settled between her temples, she moved like a ghost, her hands over her eyes to block the harsh Thai light, her feet shuffling on teak floors. She would respond in nods and grunts, but she still managed to take care of all nine kids while Grandfather worked at the government office in town. My mother said she was a strong woman, but strong is an understatement. Strong doesn’t fully capture what it is like to endure pain and still be productive, to still exist in the world of the living. Because headaches, bad headaches, terrifying headaches, horrifying headaches, propel us out of ourselves and we dwell somewhere no living being can reach.

The twins have them once a week, and on those days, their doors are closed to the world. And on those days we walk silently, speak in whispers.

* * *

I’ve tried pure oxygen bars and deep meditation. I’ve tried weekly massages and chiropractic adjustments. I’ve tried fancy pillows and even fancier beds. I’ve tried acupuncture and eastern medicine. Nothing worked. But if you offered me a list of other things to try, I would. I would have climbed Everest, if I believed it would take the pain away. I would offer to be locked in a tiny room of spiders, one of my great fears, if I thought it would help.

* * *

Q: Why did it start?

A: Who the fuck knows?

Ten doctors, seven specialists, five MRIs, twenty-five x-rays of the spine, uncountable blood tests. No one could determine what was wrong.

“Are you sure you’re not exaggerating about this pain?” one doctor said. Earlier in the year, when I broke my ankle, he said I had ogre feet.

I nodded. “I’m not exaggerating.”

“Are you sure it’s not psychological then?”

“I’m fifteen,” I said. “Everything’s psychological.”

Two years later: “You’re normal,” another doctor said.

“This is anything but normal.”

“Your tests,” he said, “all normal.”

“If you knew how I felt, normal would not be a word you’d use.”

I didn’t blame the doctors. Though at the time, I wanted to bludgeon each one of them. I wanted to take a scalpel to the right side of their faces. “You see,” I wanted to say. “This is what I feel. But worse. Much, much worse.” I cried most days. I cried just thinking about the pain. I cried when the pain arrived. I cried when the pain left. I cried the whole day, and I was not a crier—in fact, I was and am adamantly against crying. But crying was all I could do. This pain reduced me into a shell of a person—no—I wasn’t a person. I was a gelatinous mass of pain.

* * *

I was a rarity. I suffered from something only a sliver of the human population had. When doctors said this, it was as if I had won a prize, something I should be proud of.

My winnings? Pills.

I had a collection of them, different sizes and colors. I took them like M&Ms.

Once, in the midst of pain, I chewed one and it tasted like a cloud of chemicals, acrid and chalky. Sometimes I passed out and did not remember where I was. Sometimes, most of the time, the pills failed to work and the pain persisted, like a megaphone in the ear, like an artist chipping on the inside of my eyelids, like a truck rolling over my head, and for the rest of the day I was a zombie—body without mind, movement through murky water.

* * *

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival is going on in Boulder, and my favorite play, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” starts at seven. My headache comes late today, after five. If we wait it out, we’ll miss the play. I don’t want to miss the play, don’t want to miss one of my favorite literary characters, Puck, cause mischief in the world.

I organize a plan a couple hours before the headache arrives. I’ve packed a cooler with cold compresses and bottles of water. I’ve cleaned out the back of the Nissan station wagon, filled the back seat with pillows and an oversized stuffed animal of a white tiger, which I’ve named Cheyenne. For reasons unclear to me, I love to burrow my head into the scruff of his mane when the headache hits. I moan into his plushness, weep into his synthetic fur, beat my fists into his cottony cush.

“I’m not missing this fuckin’ play,” I say. “Fuck the headache.”

The woman I love says, “Are you sure?” She sighs.

I know my headaches are hard to witness. But day after day, she stays with me, whispers to me, lets me hold her hand a little too tightly. I love this woman for sticking through my bouts of pain, but I know my headaches have taken a toll on her too. How tired she looks. How she has very little appetite for anything other than chocolate. How she stays up after I have passed out, because her adrenaline leaves her anxious and worried.

For this reason alone we are not missing “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” because of this fuckin’ headache, like we’ve missed planned hikes in the Rockies, like we’ve missed dinners with friends, like we’ve missed picnics in wildflower meadows.

“Everything is in place,” I say. “This is the perfect plan.”

And then he comes. There is a moment of lucidity, a moment where my muscles relax. It’s like the green time before a tornado, where the earth stills before havoc ensues. “He’s coming,” I say. This is the last lucid sentence I utter for the next two hours.

The woman I love nods.

We put our plan into motion. I get into the back of the car and lie down, dark sunglasses on. Already the light is too bright, and the first stab happens in the cortex of my right eye. I suck in a slurpy breath.

It’s happening.

The woman I love says, “It’s okay.” She turns on the air conditioner full blast, but I don’t feel it. I am gone. The rest of the car ride is a radiant blur. I’m told I cursed a lot, alternating between fuckshitfuckshitfuckshit and other nonsensical words and sounds. I’m told that I bit into Cheyenne’s ear and screamed. I don’t remember how I got into the seat of the outdoor theater. I imagine the woman I love carrying me like an elderly hospital patient. I don’t remember much, except when the curtains parted, my headache left me, and I grabbed for the woman I love’s hand and squeezed, lightly, a pulse, to tell her I am back, to tell her I’m okay, to tell her thank you.

* * *

“I feel so helpless when it comes to comforting him. After a while it starts taking its toll on me and our children. I dre[a]d for the night to come…” – Loretta

* * *

Q: When did it end?

A: Has it?

I don’t know. I look around corners, waiting for him to return. I wish to be rid of him forever, but I understand what I wish for is unrealistic. The cluster headache, you see, always comes back.

It’s been fourteen years since my last cluster headache. I remember that last pain. Remember the magnitude of that pain. In Stephen Kuusisto’s essay “Flawless Memory,” he writes that memory theorists say that humans misremember experience and that our misapprehension becomes our experience. But like Kuusisto, when faced with such extreme pain—witnessing his mother in a malfunctioning hospital bed with an open chest cavity—theory goes out the window, and our memory of that moment shapes us, haunts us.

This pain haunts me. This headache.

That last pain—how it shook me, how it was so intense I found myself on my knees in front of the toilet in Gunnison, Colorado, a rented cabin, losing my dinner, the one I love watching from the bed, helpless. The next day, we rode a ski lift up Mount Crested Butte, the wildflowers blooming on slopes of green, and I asked her to marry me.

It seems too perfect—doesn’t it?—that this pain should leave me then, that it hasn’t come back, that it remains in remission. It seems like a horrible, unrealistic short story, one where I would tell my student that the world doesn’t work like this. I would tell him to go back and make me believe this moment. But the truth is the world does work like this. It did. That summer day in July, the woman I love twirling her engagement ring in the car, the setting sunlight projecting prisms on the roof, I shielded my eyes—not from pain—but from how brilliant the world was and how every shadow—in my brain—for the time being, simply disappeared.

But I fear.

I shudder.

Wouldn’t you?

Even now, when a headache comes, I brace myself for the worst. It’s as if a hurricane approaches, and I have to board up all the windows and extricate all the furniture from the bottom level of the house for fear of flooding. This is the dread this pain brings. I think every headache is a hurricane.

Still, I never talk about it. I keep this pain a secret. To give voice to it is to acknowledge its existence. To acknowledge its existence is to dare it to come back, is to summon it into being.

Existence. Summon. Being.

Words for the supernatural. Words for the unreal.

Once a friend asked at a bar, “What was the worst pain you’ve ever felt?”

Too drunk to stop my mouth, I said, “A headache.”

“Really?” He took an incredulous sip of his beer, shaking his head. “Yep,” I said.

“A tractor ran over my foot,” he said. “You’re lucky. Only thing you need is some aspirin.”

I was not lucky. I could’ve told him the severity of the pain. I could’ve spoken about how I wanted to end it all. Could’ve said I wished one thousand tractors would run over my foot, flatten it into the texture of the blacktop. But I didn’t want to burden him with my pain. Would he believe me anyway? Would he be able to conceptualize the enormity of what I felt? Would he believe a headache is capable of debilitating a person?

I don’t want him to know. I don’t want anyone to. I want the world to be blissfully ignorant of pain like this. There is so much pain out there already. Eating at us. Digging through us. Pain of the mind. Of the body. Of our culture. Our lives. Pain that erodes. Pain that dissembles. Pain that obliterates and erases.

No, he doesn’t need to know. No one does.

* * *

Originally published by River Teeth Journal, Fall 2014.

Bruce Handy | Tin House | March 2013 | 26 minutes (6,452 words)

They were fleeting and unlikely collaborators, for lack of a better word. He was a son of Jewish Hollywood royalty, she a Nazi fellow traveler and propagandist, though they had a few things in common, too: both were talented filmmakers, both produced enduring work, and both would spend the second halves of their lives explaining or denying past moral compromises. Which isn’t to say the debits on their ledgers were equal—far from it.

Both are now household names, at least in households littered with DVDs from the Criterion Collection. But largely forgotten is the 1945 film he helped assemble with her grudging assistance as an involuntary consultant. It remains a key document of the twentieth century and helped send ten war criminals to the gallows, some of them her former friends and/or colleagues. If she felt badly about that, aside from the ways in which she was inconvenienced and her reputation tarnished, I could not find any record of it. For his part, his widow, his fourth wife, told me he never much talked about the film, or any of his World War II experiences, like so many men of his generation. Fortunately, he hadn’t always been so reticent.

* * *

Budd Schulberg had what used to be called a “good” war; certainly he had an interesting and productive one. He would go on to write screenplays for On the Waterfront (1954) and A Face in the Crowd (1957), but in 1945, at the age of thirty-one, he was best known as the author of the scathing Hollywood novel What Makes Sammy Run (1941) and for having babysat a declining, bender-prone F. Scott Fitzgerald while they worked together on the screenplay for a dopey college comedy titled Winter Carnival (1939)—an assignment Schulberg would later fictionalize in his third novel, The Disenchanted. (The title is something of a spoiler.) Schulberg was himself a product of Hollywood, the son of B. P. Schulberg, a producer and former executive at Paramount, but Budd moved east after What Makes Sammy Run, which his father had begged him not to publish, rendered him persona non grata in his hometown. He had nerve and didn’t shy away from a fight; with his broad nose and rough features, he even looked pugnacious, though when it came to boxing he was only a fervent fan.

Schulberg’s 1941 book.

After Pearl Harbor, he was commissioned as a naval lieutenant and in the spring of 1943 joined the Field Photographic Branch of the OSS (the precursor to the CIA), under the command of the film director John Ford. Schulberg spent some time with the unit in London during the run-up to D-Day, then followed Allied forces through Belgium and into Germany as part of what he called a “little group” that would sweep into newly liberated towns and ransack the local SS headquarters for documents and other valuable intelligence. He was also given opportunities to put his narrative talents to work. As he explained to an interviewer six decades later, he was assigned to a team that handled spies and saboteurs training to be dropped behind German lines: “I as a writer would work on the cover story, which was very much like writing a story. It was exactly like writing a character in fiction because you would find out what [the agents] really did, and then adjust it to what they would say . . . if they were interrogated.”

As the fighting in Europe drew to a conclusion, Schulberg was sent back to the States, though he remained in uniform, awaiting further assignment. He got a historic one. The OSS was involved in organizing the four-power tribunal that would try German war criminals—and there was an abundance of potential defendants—in the city of Nuremberg once the war was over. At Schulberg’s suggestion, he and the photographic unit were tasked with collecting film footage from German sources that could be used as evidence. He flew back to Europe, arriving in Paris on August 9—which also happened to be the day the United States dropped its second atomic bomb, on Nagasaki—only to receive “a cool reception” from the first officer he reported to. “War Crimes apparently not too pop.,” he noted in his diary.

This was no cushy assignment, given Germany’s ominous, chaotic, postapocalyptic state. Berlin, where Schulberg and his team were headquartered (albeit in nice digs), was “the most miserable, exciting, amoral, war-shocked city in the world,” he wrote to a friend. “From the air it looks like a gigantic honey comb that has been smashed with a hammer—for you peer down into thousands of roofless houses—empty, useless honeycomb cells.” His diary describes forays into the city’s black markets, where he saw one desperate old couple trying to sell their wedding rings and others their coats, even as the skies darkened and winter approached. Elsewhere, German women were essentially trading sex with GIs for cigarettes or chocolate, or even less. “Here is the flower of German womanhood,” he wrote, “on its knees, or more accurate on its back, for a crust of bread.”

Schulberg’s unit was rife with Hollywood lifers. His immediate superiors were E. Ray Kellogg, the head of special effects at Paramount and future director of The Green Berets, and Jack Munroe, from Fox Movietone News. One of the unit’s editors was Robert Parrish, who had appeared as a child actor in City Lights and the Our Gang comedies and who would win an Academy Award in 1947 for editing Body and Soul, a John Garfield boxing picture. The staff also boasted an Alsatian editor who had once been on the staff of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of National Enlightenment and Propaganda, but now considered himself a patriotic Frenchman.

The hunt for Nazi film footage took Schulberg back and forth across the country, with forays into France and Switzerland as well. Three times, informants led him to carefully hidden archives that had been secreted away as the Reich collapsed. One was in a granite quarry in the Soviet Zone outside Berlin that had to be entered through a tunnel several hundred yards long and had been used to store looted valuables. Emerging out of the tunnel into the open-air quarry, as Schulberg would later describe the scene, the unit was “confronted by one of the most amazing sights I have ever seen—burned film and charred film cans stretching for acres in every direction.” He estimated the loss at one million feet of film; the conflagration had been so explosive that film cans had supposedly been blown into a nearby village. The local burgomaster blamed the fire on “drunken Russian soldiers,” but Schulberg suspected “an inside job by the Germans.” Twice more the unit arrived at secret archives only to find smoldering ruins.

Three weeks after landing in Europe, Schulberg was despairing, and suspected there might be informants among his own staff. “We are so inadequately prepared to do this evidence job,” he wrote in his diary. He complained about “how amazingly fucked up this war crimes deal is. Nothing about it seems to go right. I’m afraid so far it’s going just as Goebbels would have it go.”

But his mood soon improved. The unit tallied a significant score when it located negatives of German newsreels stashed away in the town of Babelsberg, also a part of the Soviet Zone. The Russian major in charge refused to grant entry until he learned that Schulberg was a part of John Ford’s unit; in civilian life, the major was a film scholar who had written extensively about Ford. He ticked off a long list of the director’s films and then boasted, “Every one of those pictures I have analyzed in my book.” As Schulberg later noted, “He knew the obscure silent films. He knew every damned shot.” The excited Russian asked whether Ford himself would soon be along to take charge. “Oh yes, we expect him over any time now,” Schulberg lied—Ford was actually in Washington, winding down his military service and preparing to release They Were Expendable—and so Schulberg got his film: not only the newsreel footage but also biographical materials on some of the eventual Nuremberg defendants and two key reels of film that showed German troops rounding up Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and later burying them in a mass grave. “If there was any one defining moment” regarding his feelings about the Nazis, he said decades later, the memory of this atrocity film still raw, it was when he realized “that [the Germans] so cold bloodedly wanted to record this instead of [covering it up.]” He described how a cameraman had had the professional presence of mind, obscene in this context, to climb into the grave to get a shot of bodies, including children’s, being tossed in toward him—a reverse angle.

Altogether, the Babelsberg cache would supply upward of ninety percent of the film that Schulberg eventually produced for the first Nuremberg trial. But as important as that find was, Schulberg’s job wasn’t done. As he later confessed, “It didn’t take any genius to think that we ought to talk to Leni Riefenstahl.”

* * *

Leni Riefenstahl on the cover of Time in 1936

Leni Riefenstahl had suffered setbacks during the war, but was in much better shape than most Germans; befitting her status as the Third Reich’s most celebrated filmmaker and a former Time magazine cover subject, she had not been reduced to selling her winter coat. But renown has its downside, too, and she had been arrested by American troops shortly after Germany’s surrender. Intelligence officers who interviewed her reported that it was “difficult to recognize” the internationally famous actress and director in “this aging, seriously ailing woman [who] gives one the impression of a broken human being.” Nevertheless, Riefenstahl maintained under interrogation that her Nazi propaganda films were made strictly as aesthetic statements with, to her mind, no political intent. An American intelligence report, noting that her statements “give one the impression of honesty”—a nice hedge, that—concluded: “She is certainly no fanatical National Socialist.” Rather, her “admiration” for Hitler was largely limited to the fact that “his protecting hand insured her artistic activities.” The blind eye she had turned to the Reich’s crimes “did not obviously spring from opportunistic motives, but from the desire to continue dreaming her dream of a life ‘fully dedicated to art’”—an interpretation of her career she would cling to and promote, with varying degrees of success, through many future interviews. In this case it won her her freedom.

Strong-willed, athletic, physically striking, maybe more handsome than beautiful, slightly cross-eyed, she had launched her career as a dancer and then as an actress during the Weimar Republic, ultimately starring in a series of “alpine movies” that mixed nature worship, mysticism, and literal cliff- and glacier-hanging (she did her own stunts, often barefoot). It was a popular genre, steeped in Germany’s national mythology, that might be seen as a loose equivalent to America’s Westerns. Adolf Hitler himself was a fan of her directorial debut, The Blue Light (1932), in which she also starred as a saintly, misunderstood mountain girl who has a religious bond with nature. As a work of narrative it is almost unwatchable, but as a painstakingly crafted act of cinematic self-love, it would remain unrivaled until the advent of more recent director-stars such as Barbra Streisand and Warren Beatty.

Riefenstahl maneuvered to meet Hitler in 1932, when he was still a rising politician and not yet Germany’s Führer—purely out of curiosity, according to her 1987 memoir, and not at all out of ideological sympathy or as a career move. “He looked natural and uninhibited, like a completely normal person,” she noted with—to her credit—surprise. He expressed his admiration for her work and then pronounced, “Once we come to power, you must make my films.” She supposedly demurred, asserting her lack of interest in his or anyone else’s ideology—her only loyalty being to Art. “I will never make prescribed films,” she told him. “I don’t have the knack for it—I have to have a very personal relationship with my subject matter. Otherwise I can’t be creative.” Moreover, she claimed to have added, “You have racial prejudices. . . . How can I work for someone who makes such distinctions among people?”

“I wish the people around me would be as uninhibited as you,” he replied quietly, her account suggesting a note of wistfulness that perhaps only she ever saw in him.

But once Hitler seized power, Riefenstahl overcame her qualms about working for the Nazis, now willing to seek Art in all sorts of unusual places. With the Führer as a patron—he was widely and probably falsely rumored to be her lover (rumors she didn’t do much to discourage, however, until after the war)—and with Goebbels as what we might now call a “frenemy,” Riefenstahl became one of the Third Reich’s most powerful cultural figures. She’s also one of the few we still remember, for the two feature-length documentaries she directed under Hitler: Triumph of the Will, about the 1934 Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg, a seemingly endless montage of precision goose-stepping, angry speech-making, idolatry, and wholesome Aryan horseplay that is routinely referred to as the greatest propaganda film ever made; and Olympia, her aestheticized chronicle of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where she bossed around athletes, referees, and anyone else who got in her way to produce a two-part film that is both lovely to look at and slightly creepy, a high-toned reminder of Nazi body fetishism.

Adolf Hitler and Leni Riefenstahl , 1938

The outbreak of war in 1939 forced Riefenstahl to abandon the film she had hoped would be her directorial masterpiece: Penthesilea, an elaborate, expensive epic in which she was also set to star as the title character—a savage Amazon queen in love with Achilles. “She could visualize herself on film—naked on horseback, hair streaming in the wind as she plunged into battle, spear in hand. Why not? She was as daring, as bold, as beautiful,” writes one of her biographers, Steven Bach. But that vision dashed, she turned to an allegedly more modest project, Tiefland, a melodrama set in Spain in which she starred as an alluring Gypsy dancing girl and which she struggled to shoot amid wartime shortages, logistical problems, and her own spiraling ambitions—Tiefland was the Third Reich’s Heaven’s Gate—although she did avail herself of one Nazi-era convenience, recruiting several dozen real-life Gypsy extras, including children as young as three months, from a “collection camp” near her Austrian location. (When she was done shooting, the extras, in essence slave laborers, were sent back to the camp and then on to Auschwitz, where most of them died.) She was still in postproduction, scrambling to complete the film, when Germany collapsed in the spring of 1945. Given the circumstances, Bach notes, “Leni’s monomaniacal concern for Tiefland struck even her as ‘absurd and inexplicable.’”

At the end of the war, she was living in the village of Kitzbühel, in the Austrian Tyrol, occupying a three-story, timbered chalet facing a pretty lake and surrounded by meadows and snowcapped mountains where she had installed editing and sound-mixing studios for work on Tiefland. But there would be more interruptions. “Leni Riefenstahl Weeps at Losing Austrian Villa,” was the headline in the New York Times two weeks after Germany fell, above an AP report that a U.S. Army division had commandeered her home. “But some of my best friends are Jews,” she had allegedly wailed, by way of protest and to no effect. (Her assertion was not completely untrue: as a younger woman she had had Jewish friends and colleagues, though she dropped them once the Nazis took power.) An effort to trade on her celebrity went nowhere. “Baby, I’ve been going to the movies a long time and I never heard of you,” she was told by a GI whose all-American sass could have been scripted by Preston Sturges. He added: “And now get going. We need this house.”

Riefenstahl would eventually get her chalet back, although she was repeatedly arrested, interrogated, and released—first by U.S. forces, and then by the French, who took over administration of the area. “They thought in prison I was Mrs. Hitler. . . . They throw me about and say, ‘You never see the sky,’ and I say, ‘All right—go ahead and kill me,’” she later told the American director George Stevens, with perhaps a spackling of added melodrama. She claimed that this was when she first learned of the death camps and their grim but thorough logistics. Shown “dreadful” atrocity photos by American counterintelligence officers, “I hid my face in my hands; it was too horrifying,” she wrote in her memoir, describing a characteristic reaction. Knowledge of this evil plunged her into existential crisis: “I simply couldn’t imagine that orders of such a vast scope could be carried out without Hitler’s knowledge. Yet how were these cruelties to be reconciled with the indignant words that I heard him speak . . . at the beginning of the war: ‘So long as there are still women and children in Warsaw, there will be no shooting.’” She would resolve the conflict by concluding Hitler had suffered from a “schizophrenic nature.”

* * *

Riefenstahl had recovered her equilibrium, and her looks, by the time Schulberg found her in the autumn of 1945, possibly in the first week of November, not long before the Nuremberg trial was scheduled to begin. “She was still really quite beautiful and, if you could forget her connections, really very charming, and I would think that, to many people, very convincing in her intensity about her art, her love of the mountains, and winter sports,” he said years later. “She was really quite a—quite an imposing piece of work.”

This was the first meeting between the two, but Schulberg had played a very minor part—an extra in a crowd scene, if you will—in an earlier Riefenstahl drama. In 1938 she had made her first trip to America, ostensibly vacationing as a private citizen, although the visit was paid for by the German government. She was hoping to find an American distributor for Olympia—among her seventeen pieces of luggage she brought along three different cuts of the film, including one with all scenes of Hitler deleted—and hoping as well to hobnob with the powers that be in Hollywood, where German directors before her had found lucrative work (though they tended to be directors who hadn’t enjoyed Hitler’s patronage). She sailed into New York on November 4, hit the Stork Club and the Copacabana, and was famously pronounced “pretty as a Swastika” by Walter Winchell. But there were protests and boycotts organized against her by anti-Nazi organizations, and the PR equation grew even more complex a week later, following the events of Kristallnacht, when organized mobs throughout Germany beat and arrested thousands of Jews and murdered several hundred more while burning synagogues and looting Jewish businesses. She dismissed as “slander” news reports that, as Bach points out, “no one in Germany was denying.” (Rather, the Reich held the victims financially responsible for all the property damage.) Riefenstahl left New York for Chicago, and then Detroit, where she received an unsurprisingly warm welcome from Henry Ford, the anti-Semitic car manufacturer and crank publisher, but otherwise was treated like a pariah. Unlike her reception in New York, where her ship had been met by a big, jostling crowd of mostly friendly newsmen and photographers seeking a big story in Hitler’s alleged girlfriend (she and the Führer were “just good friends,” the director had demurred with a giggle), when she stepped off the Super Chief in Hollywood, on November 24, she was greeted by a desultory crowd consisting of the German consul, a staff member from a local German-language newspaper, an American painter who shared her and Hitler’s penchant for the idealized male physique, and the painter’s brother.

“Where is the press?” she demanded, according to her publicist (who defected to the States at the end of her trip and wrote an amusing if sometimes suspect series of articles about her for a Hollywood newspaper).

“But you’re supposed to be here incognito,” she was told.

“Ja, but not so incognito,” she snapped.

The reception went from bad to worse. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League—a Communist-led group that Schulberg, then a party member, was likely part of—took out ads in the trade papers declaring, “There Is No Room in Hollywood for Leni Reifenstahl” while holding demonstrations in front of her hotel, the Garden of Allah, which forced her to relocate to a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. After some hemming and hawing, the town’s moguls declined to meet with her—with the exception of Walt Disney, who showed her some sketches for his latest work-in-progress, Fantasia, but then backed out of allowing her to screen Olympia for him, afraid that his unionized projectionists would spread the word and he’d be boycotted. (Decades later she would claim, incorrectly and ungraciously, that Olympia had beaten out Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for the then-coveted Mussolini Cup at the 1938 Venice Film Festival.)

Socially, she fared little better. Wrote the gossip columnist Louella Parsons, “If Leni Riefenstahl, said to be Hitler’s girl friend, had any idea of finding [Hollywood] homes open to her, she must have been greatly disappointed. She might be on a desert island, so far as anyone in the film colony is concerned.” The right-wing comedy producer Hal Roach (Laurel and Hardy, the Our Gang shorts) threw a party for Riefenstahl “and asked all the main people in Hollywood to come,” as Schulberg recalled. “And all of the liberal people like Melvyn Douglas and Helen Gahagan and Dorothy Parker . . . Freddy March . . . there must have been twenty—they were each given a list of ten people to phone and say, ‘Don’t go.’ I had a list myself. . . . Only about eight or ten people [attended]—just the extreme right-wing people, like Victor McLaglen. . . . Basically, the party was a disaster for her.” Riefenstahl slipped away to Palm Springs, where she did some snubbing of her own, declining to meet with a prominent lawyer who was hoping to persuade her to use her influence with Hitler to ameliorate the mistreatment of Germany’s Jews.

“I hope next time it will be different when I come, yes?” she remarked manfully as she got on the train heading back east, reported Variety under the headline “Nazi Retreat from Hollywood Chilled by Frigid Farewells.”

Bruised but indomitable, seeing herself as a martyr—“Naturally,” she told a German reporter, “I ran into resistance from the Jews”—she returned home to Berlin in February of 1939, where she was debriefed by Goebbels, who noted in his diary: “Leni Riefenstahl reports to me on her trip to America. She gives me an exhaustive description, and one that is far from encouraging. We shall get nowhere there. The Jews rule by terror and bribery. But for how much longer?”

* * *

When Schulberg set out to find Riefenstahl in the fall of 1945—with, he would later claim, some kind of warrant for her arrest—he had already located a copy of Triumph of the Will, portions of which would be shown at the trial. Putting motion pictures into evidence was then a radical notion; the prosecution wanted Riefenstahl to help legitimize that by formally attesting to her movie’s authenticity. As well, Schulberg and the lawyers wanted her help in identifying some of the officials pictured in it and in other films. One of the charges against the defendants was conspiracy to commit aggressive war, something akin to a latter-day RICO indictment, so it was essential that the prosecution place the defendants at key events and establish a web of associations and responsibilities, especially among those who were expected to claim they were apolitical military officers or civilians.

Schulberg was also hoping Riefenstahl could point him toward where he might find copies of two documentary shorts she had directed for Hitler and Goebbels. Following her trail led him first to her abandoned home in Berlin, where he found “nothing but a lot of dirty laundry,” then Munich, then Salzburg, and finally the chalet in Kitzbühel, where he and his driver arrived in an open-air weapons carrier. Riefenstahl was “sort of hiding in the open,” he would later say. “It wasn’t exactly hiding, but she wasn’t advertising, either, what her address was.”

I should note that, although Schulberg’s account of meeting and arresting Riefenstahl in 1945 would remain fairly consistent through multiple tellings over the course of his life, no one who has looked into it has yet found any corroborating evidence. Given the scattershot nature of the official record from that chaotic time and place, this is not altogether surprising, though Riefenstahl’s absence from books and interviews by other Nuremberg participants is maybe more so. Riefenstahl herself didn’t mention Schulberg or the trial in her memoir (the one that has her challenging Hitler’s racial theories to his face). Historians who have researched the matter believe one has to allow for the possibility that Schulberg embellished his account, or worse. He was, of course, a professional storyteller, as was Riefenstahl. I think his story has the clear ring of truth; it undeniably has the ring of poetry—of poetic justice.

In Kitzbühel, as Schulberg recalled, the chalet door was opened by “a short, nervous, overly polite little fellow,” a majordomo type who didn’t seem too happy to see Schulberg and who, Schulberg later realized—shades of Sunset Boulevard—was in fact Riefenstahl’s recently acquired and soon-to-be-deacquisitioned husband, a former major in the Wehrmacht. Schulberg was assured that Fraulein Riefenstahl would be eager to see him, but ended up cooling his heels in her study. “Marvelous, yes?” the majordomo husband said when he saw Schulberg looking at a book of stills from Tiefland. “Her greatest work. If only she is allowed to finish it.”

Half an hour later—allowing, presumably, for tactical primping—Riefenstahl made her entrance. “She was dressed informally in yellow corduroy slacks with a golden-brown leather jacket that blended prettily with her tanned complexion. She held out her hand to me, prima-donna fashion, and smiled grandly,” Schulberg wrote in “Nazi Pin-Up Girl,” a long and detailed article about their meeting he published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1946. (If he embellished his tale, he took the risk of doing so while events were still fresh in others’ minds.) “She reminded me of I don’t know how many actresses of her age I had met before, fading beauties who try to compensate in grooming, make-up and animation for what they begin to lack in physical appeal.”

Schulberg’s naval uniform was no doubt cause for suspicion during this initial conversation, which seems to have been less an interrogation than a kind of moral jousting match, something akin to the Frost-Nixon interviews. “Frighten her or flatter her” were his marching orders, he wrote, and he initially tried to draw her out, which wasn’t too hard, buttering her up with praise for the artistry of her early pictures before moving onto her Nazi-era oeuvre. “She immediately went into what I called her song and dance,” Schulberg recalled decades later in an interview. “She said that, ‘Of course everybody thinks because I made those films that I am a Nazi. I was never a Nazi. I’m a pure film artist. And my only interest in that film’”—Triumph of the Will—“‘was to make a work of art [on] a very interesting subject, which God knows it was.’” He added, probably employing understatement, “She went on like that.”

Hoping to bolster her case that her films transcended politics, and unaware of Schulberg’s civilian line of work, she bragged about the triumphant reception she’d been accorded on her visit to Hollywood—“as an artist.” He let that fib slide but did seize the opportunity to ask some pointed questions, according to his Saturday Evening Post account:

Hadn’t she been aware of the concentration camps?

“I had no idea,” she said, forgetting for the moment where she had found her Tiefland extras. “We never heard.”

Had she really been Hitler’s mistress?

“Of course not. I wasn’t his type. I’m too strong, too positive. He liked soft, cowlike women, like Eva Braun.”

So what made people think she was?

“They were jealous, and they didn’t understand.” She had had Hitler’s ear and could see him alone when it suited her, so people just assumed . . . “But that was purely professional, there was nothing personal about it. He just respected me because I was an artist. The SS and Goebbels hated me because I could go over their heads.” She and Goebbels had feuded over the making of Olympia, and she claimed he had retaliated in a particularly fiendish manner: by denying her publicity in the Reich’s newspapers. A laughable assertion, but one she held to. “He never mentioned me again,” she complained bitterly. “I was even afraid he might put me in a concentration camp.”

Here Schulberg thought he had her: “But would you be afraid of concentration camps? After all, you hadn’t heard of them.”

“Oh, I knew there were some. But I had no idea what they were really like, how terrible they were . . .”

And so it went—and would go, more or less in that vein, for the rest of her life.

* * *

“Nazi Pin-Up Girl” ends with Riefenstahl trying to wheedle a precious can of gasoline from Schulberg: “There was something queer about [her] smile; it was intimate and appealing, and yet clearly designing. That must have been the way she looked at Hitler when she wanted him to make Goebbels back down to her.” There Schulberg had her dead to rights.

In subsequent interviews he told a more dramatic story: “I had this warrant for her in my pocket. It was like burning a hole in my pocket . . . Finally I took the thing out and said, ‘Miss Riefenstahl, I’m sorry, but I have to take you to Nuremberg.’ And that’s when she screamed, ‘Puppi, Puppi . . . he’s arresting me.’” The little majordomo raced into the room, with Schulberg now realizing he was her husband. “I tried to reassure her,” Schulberg continued. “I said, ‘Look, you’re not being put on trial with Goering and von Ribbentrop, but we do need you as a material witness.’” He took her outside, where his driver and his vehicle awaited. The trip from Kitzbühel to Nuremberg was roughly 150 miles. “She didn’t say anything on the way. . . . She was very ticked off—very. And I guess scared.”

At Nuremberg, in Schulberg’s telling, Riefenstahl was put up in a guesthouse with other witnesses. “Although she wasn’t very happy . . . she did cooperate,” Schulberg noted. He screened for her footage that his unit had confiscated, asking her to identify people, places, and events. It’s not clear how long Riefenstahl might have been detained in Nuremberg, but the unit was still editing when the trial opened on November 21. Among the twenty-one defendants on trial for their lives were Hermann Goering, chief of the Luftwaffe and once Hitler’s number two, who had personally called Riefenstahl in 1933 with the news that Hitler had been appointed chancellor; Albert Speer, the architect with whom she had collaborated during the shooting of Triumph of the Will; Julius Streicher, the publisher of the crude, anti-Semitic newspaper Der Sturmer, whom Riefenstahl had once enlisted in a royalty dispute with the Jewish screenwriter of The Blue Light; Wilhelm Frick, the minister of the interior; Joachim von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister; and Baldur von Schirach, organizer of the Hitler Youth. All of these men had attended Berlin’s black-tie, military-dress premiere for Olympia, on Hitler’s forty-ninth birthday—described as the single-most glittering evening in the Third Reich’s short history. (Goebbels was not on trial, having committed suicide with his wife in Hitler’s bunker after killing their six children.)

Two films would receive less swanky if still memorable premieres in Nuremberg as part of the prosecution’s case. The first, an hour-long compilation of footage mostly taken by camera units that had been with troops that liberated the concentration camps, was screened in court on November 29. The crimes were still fresh, and for many in attendance, this would be the first time they were seeing images that are now an indelible part of the world’s consciousness: emaciated, half-alive men and women in striped pajamas, ovens clogged with bones and charred remains, bulldozers moving aside hillocks of dead bodies. “The film . . . with horror piled on horror and mounting in dreadfulness as it went along, was almost more than anyone could bear,” the New York Times reported. “There were mutters of ‘Oh God—Oh God’ and ‘Why can’t we shoot the swine now?’ from the audience of soldiers, officers, and correspondents. . . . It had been too appalling even for tears.”

Lights had been set up along the bar of the defendants’ box so that their faces could be seen in the darkened room. Wilhelm Keitel, military chief of staff, wept. Von Ribbentrop stared into his lap and shook his head. In Schulberg’s view, “the most unexpected reaction of all was that of Hans Frank,” the governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland, who had once boasted at a year-end celebration in Krakow that thanks to his efficient administration great numbers of “lice and Jews had been eliminated.” When the film ended, Frank was bent over, his face hidden in his hands. As the other defendants filed out of the courtroom (Streicher, who had earlier scoffed at a shot of a human-skin lampshade, was heard muttering, “perhaps in the last days . . .”), Frank had to be forcibly lifted from his seat by guards. “His red wet eyes stood out in his white frightened face,” Schulberg recalled. “Later one of the guards who helped lead him out said to me, ‘How d’ya figure that, huh? A guy like that! He acted like he was gonna pass out.’”

The film that Schulberg devoted most of his time to was titled The Nazi Plan, a nearly four-hour production that illuminated the conspiracy charges with scenes from Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl’s shorter documentaries, and the captured German newsreel footage. James Donovan, a lawyer who served as the liaison between Schulberg’s unit and the prosecution team, wrote in a letter to his wife that he thought the film “might get an Academy Award. . . . It’s terrific.” In another letter he nearly bursts with anticipation: “I don’t know how Goering and the others will be able to stand the sight of themselves at the height of their glory.”

It turned out they could stand the sight very well. After The Nazi Plan was screened on December 11, the New York Times reported that the movie “brought back to [the defendants] memories of a vanished era, and some, including Rudolf Hess”—the Reich’s third-ranking figure until he made a bizarre flight to Scotland in 1941 in an effort to end the war—“were hardly able to restrain themselves from applauding Hitler’s recorded speeches. . . . Glorying in scenes of marching men, flying banners, hysterical crowds and a ranting Hitler surrounded by his chieftains, the defendants acted like excited school children seeing their pictures flashed across the screen. They nodded and nudged one another. Hess, whose feet had been tapping in time to the rhythm of blaring bands, occasionally broke into silent handclapping.” Goering laughed at a scene of Hitler mocking Franklin Roosevelt in front of the Reichstag. Von Ribbentrop was overheard gushing, “Can’t you just feel the Fuehrer’s personality?” That evening, he told G. M. Gilbert, one of the prison psychologists assigned to the defendants, “Even with all I know, if Hitler should come to me in this cell now, and say, ‘Do this!’—I would still do it.—Isn’t it amazing?”

Riefenstahl’s films could still work their magic.

* * *

For those who worked on it or covered it—and probably for those being judged as well—the ten-month trial, a logistical and procedural morass conducted in four languages, felt interminable. Schulberg, who won two Commendation Ribbons for his work at Nuremberg, had already been home for several months when the individual verdicts were handed down on October 1, 1946. Eleven men were found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging, including Goering (who would cheat the noose by crushing a hidden cyanide pill in his mouth), Von Ribbentrop, Streicher, and Frank. Seven others, including Speer and Hess, were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms, varying from ten years to life. Three were acquitted: a former president of the Reichsbank; a politician who had helped engineer the deal by which Hitler had become chancellor; and a B-list propagandist.

Though never charged with any war crimes, Riefenstahl would herself be a defendant in four de-Nazification trials and was eventually ruled a Nazi fellow traveler, the fourth out of five levels of culpability. She would spend the rest of her life working to raise the flag of Art and lower the flag of Responsibility. Tiefland was finally completed in 1954, and released to mediocre reviews. Bach describes it as “a kitsch curiosity, as nearly unwatchable as any film ever released by a world class director.” Riefenstahl died, unrepentant, at the age of 101, in 2003.

The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, with its heavily Communist membership, had disbanded not long after it had made life “so uncomfortable for Hitler’s ‘girl friend’ Leni Riefenstahl that she left our community,” as the group bragged in a statement. The ebb in anti-Nazi fervor was thanks to the Soviet-Nazi Non-Aggression Pact, announced in August 1939, weeks before the outbreak of war. A disillusioned Schulberg would leave the party around this time, but the affiliation came back to haunt him a dozen years later when he was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951 and gave up the names of several other party members, including fellow screenwriters Ring Lardner Jr., Waldo Salt, and Paul Jarrico. Though he claimed to have no regrets and defended his testimony, it would dog his public image for the rest of his life. He died in 2009 at the age of ninety-five.

Riefenstahl had taken exception to her Norma Desmond-ish portrayal in “Nazi Pin-Up Girl,” and she and Schulberg would occasionally snipe at each other across the decades. In a 1973 interview she dismissed him as the leader of a “persisting ‘Hate Leni’ cult.” He responded with a letter in Variety calling her Hitler’s “cinematic eye-and-mouthpiece.” He might have had even more fun at her expense if a 1983 film treatment he cowrote, fictionalizing their meeting, had ever been produced. In The Celluloid Noose, naval lieutenant Ben Sherman tracks down Hedi Rosendahl at her “luxurious chalet in Bavaria.” She shows him her great masterwork, For a Thousand Years, and then, mustering her considerable feminine charms, attempts to seduce him. He almost falls for her, but at the last moment discovers she’s hiding a fugitive SS colonel, Hans Rudiger, in her basement. Gunplay ensues, and the treatment ends with MPs cuffing Hedi as a sadder but wiser Ben washes his hands of her.

“How could you do this to me?” she cries. “I thought you were in love with me.”

“I was on the verge,” he admits. “But Herr Rudiger changed my mind.”

Finally, the mask drops. “You . . . Jew!” she screams as she’s led away. “Jew! Jew! Jew!”

As Schulberg noted in a cover letter attached to the treatment, he had granted himself a bit of “creative elbow room, you might say”—his own salute to Art.

* * *

Author’s note: I’d like to thank the many historians, librarians, and researchers who generously helped me with this piece, including: Raye Farr, director of the Steven Spielberg Film & Video Archive at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; Barbara Hall at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science’s Margaret Herrick Library; Jay Satterfield at Dartmouth’s Rauner Special Collections Library; and Sandra Schulberg, Budd’s niece, who recently restored the documentary Nuremberg: Its Lessons for Today, which was written and directed by her father, Stuart Schulberg, for the War Department (and then shelved, like many late-40s anti-Nazi projects and policies, due to Cold War politics).

* * *

Bruce Handy is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. He is working on a book about reading children’s books as an adult.

* * *

Originally published in Tin House, March 2013.

Jessica Gross | Longreads | January 2015 | 14 minutes (3,540 words)

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Miranda July’s films, sculptures, books, and performance art pieces share not only a very particular, off-kilter aesthetic, but also a deep concern with human connection. An example of this can be found in her 2011 film, The Future, in which a couple navigates their relationships with each other, with their soon-to-be-adopted cat, and with their individual selves. July procrastinated on writing the film by visiting and interviewing people who’d listed items in the Pennysaver. That detour facilitated the screenwriting process—The Future ended up featuring one of the sellers she’d met—and formed the basis of another project, the book It Chooses You. July’s new app, Somebody, approaches human connection from a different angle: It delivers text messages to their intended recipients via the nearest Somebody-using stranger.

July’s debut novel, The First Bad Man, centers on Cheryl, a forty-something woman hampered by compulsive thoughts and behaviors, a psychosomatic throat condition, and loneliness. She lusts after a man she’s met through work, and is constantly visited by the soul of a baby she had a strong connection with in childhood. Cheryl lives alone—until Clee, her boss’s blond, curvy daughter, comes to stay. Their relationship enters violent and erotic terrain, and rearranges Cheryl’s literal and internal worlds. We spoke recently by phone about her relationship with her characters, the evolution of her work, and where her novel came from.

What was the first bit of The First Bad Man that you got down on paper?

I was in the passenger seat during a long drive with my husband, like a seven-hour drive, where you go through stages of boredom and in and out of coherency. And then, without much fanfare, because you never know if it’s a good idea or not, I just thought of the whole thing of Cheryl and Clee, and wrote down notes. I described the whole relationship, really. We were going on a trip and I don’t think it was until we were driving home that I said, “Oh, can I tell you this idea I had?” I told my husband, and he said, “Hey, that’s a little piece of gold.” Sometimes you kind of just need someone to say, “That’s substantial.” And from then on I was taking notes.

Did you think it would be a novel from the start, or that it would be a very involved short story?

I hoped it would be a novel, because I needed to write a novel. I had sold the idea of a novel to Scribner, my publisher, but it was a different idea, one that had that came out of a true story from my childhood. I wrote about 80 pages of that, and then took a break to make The Future. In that film, I played a character who was a little bit like me, and that always is really uncomfortable to me. Nothing I ever made before Me and You and Everyone We Know had a hip girl in it, you know? But when I introduced the idea of myself acting in something, I was like, well, I’m not an actress, I can’t play a working class British woman or something. I have to basically be playing some version of myself, which is always so embarrassing. I think it probably made those movies more accessible, but after The Future, I thought, “No, never again!” And the most enjoyable parts of The Future, for me, were the more surreal things anyway. So when I was done with that movie, I realized I couldn’t write a novel based on a story from my life. It shouldn’t be moored in reality so tightly. So I was literally just waiting for that idea. When it came to me, I kind of nervously thought, “Is this it? Have I met the one?”

If you felt this aversion to playing a character who was somewhat similar to you, how or why did you overcome that resistance?

Right, right, I know. It’s funny, I remember telling Zadie Smith the idea for The Future before I made it, and she just put her head in her hands and said, “God, we always do this, don’t we? We go straight towards the thing that is really the most embarrassing, awkward thing for us to do.” But also, what I’m saying to you right now, I didn’t know yet. If I was this clear on it, I wouldn’t have done it. But I feel like the creative mind is very fast in some ways and completely blind as a bat in other ways. And I knew I felt kind of hampered, but I didn’t understand why. But I’m also not distancing myself from those two movies. They are really important to me. What I’m talking about is the internal world, the creative process, when things flow and when they don’t.

That makes total sense. And it would seem kind of unlikely that an artist wouldn’t, through an intense creative act, move through to a different place. Which doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a valid and appropriate project at that point in your development.

Yeah, right, right. Yeah. And I guess, actually, this novel connects so easily to the short stories in No One Belongs Here More Than You, which is what made me think in the first place about why those two movies are different. And then I kind of traced it back to, oh right, I’m always saddled with this character.

I agree that the novel connects to your short stories, but I’m curious how you would explain that connection.

I almost don’t want to point it out because I’m slightly embarrassed. But take the last story in the collection, “How To Tell Stories to Children.” You’ve got a woman who lives alone, who has a relationship with a daughter of her friends that’s complicated, that even has some sexual elements. And then in “Majesty,” there’s a middle-aged women, alone, who works at a non-profit, like Cheryl.

I consciously wanted that—I wanted familiar territory that I could go further with. Once I had had that erroneous first attempt at a novel, with me trying to be like, “I’m writing a novel! It must be this big, new kind of story I’ve never done before!” I finally thought, “How about something that’s in the vein of the kind of thing that I like to write, but longer?” There are going to be enough challenges without pretending you’re a whole new type of person.

You mentioned all these middle-aged single women characters who live alone. In It Chooses You, you write about marrying your husband: “The story of us now felt like the real plot of my life, which was, terrifyingly, the most incredible, joyful thing that had ever happened to me. I had once feared that love would take me away from my solitary world of work; now I often regretted that it hadn’t.” I interpreted that to mean that you’d spent much of your adult life single.

I love that story of myself and wish it were true. But the truth is I’ve almost never been single.

Really?

[Laughs] Yeah. But I had never lived with anyone before my husband and I’d always been like, “Here’s my home, it’s this sacred space.” My husband always describes courting me as trying to coax a wild deer in to the house. And he’s kind of the same way: we’re very independent, solo-hearted people who never fully believed that that would ever change. So despite ample evidence—I mean, we have a son now—we’re still carrying around these very lonely people inside us who are ready to be alone at a moment’s notice.

Where does that come from?

I think it comes from being a child who felt very alone, and so really got good at that, and can make a safe place alone even while talking to someone. I didn’t have some horrific upbringing, but there are shades of loneliness, probably, in everyone’s childhood, and everyone’s parents had their own hard childhoods too. It’s not the story that’s happening anymore, but I feel like it’s going to be my life’s work to warm up to that fact.

In The First Bad Man, Cheryl has a brief but intense bond, during childhood, with a baby named Kubelko Bondy, who visits her in the guise of other babies throughout her life. How’d you come up with the name Kubelko Bondy?

It’s funny, you’re the first person to ask me that. There is an Austrian-born artist named Friedl Kubelka who at one point had the hyphenated last name Kubelka-Bondy. It was a name I could not stop saying. I changed it to Kubelko Bondy, and it was funny and made-up sounding, but the irony is it’s one of the few names I didn’t make up. But it’s rhythmically very nice and even though Cheryl would never know of that artist—she’s not that knowing—I guess it’s okay for people with knowledge of her to think, oh, right, Miranda July would be a fan of hers.

Right before Kubelko Bondy is introduced, Cheryl sees a mother holding a baby in a doctor’s office: “I checked to see if he and I had a special connection that was greater than his bond with his mother. We didn’t.” When I read that, I laughed, because I related so much to that feeling—a mom is holding a baby, and I’m locking eyes with the baby, and there is something in me that thinks I can relate to this baby better than its mother. It ends up turning into a huge part of the novel, with that unexpected Kubelko Bondy backstory, but when I read it, I pictured you starting with the seed of that idea—relating to someone else’s baby in a proprietary way—and then it morphing, through writing, into the larger concept.

You’re not totally wrong. I remember there was a night my husband and I heard this really weird sound in the distance; we couldn’t tell what it was. It was years before we were trying to have a baby, and I said, “Maybe that’s our child’s soul trying to come to us. [Laughs] And it knows it’s not time yet, so it’s calling out.” I still don’t know what it was, but that sound recurred enough times that we would say, “Oh, there’s our baby’s soul calling out.” [Laughs] And we’d be like, “Not now, but soon, just hang on!” And then yes, I too have that same thing of making eye contact with a baby and feeling that connection.

So the idea of a baby coming slowly towards you in this unorthodox way was, in a way, the origin, but there were many, many moments where connections were made that I didn’t see coming. For a long time, in the novel, there was a sound that Cheryl heard, and there was an isolated moment where she made eye contact with a baby. Finally, I thought, this sound thing might be nice in a movie, but it feels kind of cheesy in writing. But this thing of making eye contact with a baby, this feels very secretly universal. That could happen again and again instead.

Also, the idea of all children being single has always struck me. I remember, even as a child, thinking, “It’s no fair, you two go off to bed, and you have each other, and I’m just left here. Why do children have to be single?” Again, poor, neglected child. [Laughs] I think there was originally more about that in that first scene where she meets the baby, about how you can’t, as a child, just go to a bar and meet someone to be your companion.

In the book, there are many authority figures who don’t really deserve their authority, or inadequately perform their jobs—like Clee’s parents, the nonprofit directors Carl and Suzanne; the midwife; and Ruth Anne, the therapist. Have you had strange experiences in therapy, or felt like these people have such power and maybe shouldn’t?

I’ve only really had good experiences in therapy, and I gave my therapist the book. She doesn’t know this, but I actually gave her the first copy. They came in the mail and then I had an appointment. And before I left, I said, “Just so you know, there is a therapist in here and it’s not you.” But I, like probably a lot of people, have a complicated relationship to authority. I’ve really never been good at it. That’s why I couldn’t do college, really. It’s interesting to me: with a therapist, or even a doctor, we’re suddenly sort of childlike, or not in charge. And I guess it’s too tempting for me as a writer not to want there to be some revelation about that person. Also, people in power are kind of automatically perverse to me, at least in my fictional world. I mean, aren’t people in power generally sexualized in one way or another? The President isn’t sexualized, exactly, but definitely people are having sexual fantasies about him just because he’s the President.

When someone asks you what your book is about, how do you describe it? Novels are so complex, so not summarize-able.

Right, right. And the person asking for a description is, like, your landlord or something. So I’ve been saying it’s about a woman in her forties, named Cheryl, who lives alone. And maybe I’ll also say something about her being uptight, or set in her ways. She takes in a young blond bombshell, her boss’s daughter, and it’s about the many forms their relationship takes and blah, blah. I usually kind of peter out there, and the person is already nodding, like, “Right, houseguests, interrupting houseguests. I know it. I know that kind of book.”

At one point in the book, Clee sends out an announcement with what looks like the same bubble lettering you used for your app, Somebody. Is that true?

Yeah! It’s funny, I thought about that too. Clee likes the bubble writing. I remember thinking, “Oh, wow, I’m gonna have to have actual bubble writing in the book,” and there was a lot of back and forth, as you can imagine, with Scribner, about getting just the right bubble writing. And yeah, the bubble writing was the first and basically only idea I had design-wise for the app. When I went to my designer, I was like, “I’m seeing pink bubble writing. Bubblicious.”

What draws you to that kind of lettering?

It’s just so dumb. [Laughs] It just seems to be the lettering of dumb, non-intellectuality, you know? And I guess it’s physical. Most fonts are not meant to be thought of as three-dimensional, but that one is specifically designed to have body, which is probably why it looks right to Clee. She is kind of bubble writing incarnate. And I guess that’s why I thought of it for the app, too. I wanted it to be about bodies, about really being there. I think I tried to call it Persons at one point.

How many other names did you go through?

Oh, my God. I mean, not just went through, but did expensive trademark searches on. I can show you a whole mockup of the app with the name—this is so embarrassing—Proxy, which pretty much means app. It’s interchangeable with the word app. Therefore, there are many apps that use “proxy” in their names. I tried to change the spelling, or whatever, and my lawyer was probably the first person to realize just how green I was. He was like, “Yeah, I think you should just think a little harder.” And my husband was like, “Why don’t you pick a good name, like your other names of things? Has that ever occurred to you?”

Miu Miu backed Somebody, which seems like a very difficult task to make happen. How’d that come about?

When I had the idea for the app, I was super jazzed up about it and literally could not sleep at night I was so excited. I thought apps cost around seven thousand dollars to make. And then someone helped me price it out, and I discovered this one would in fact cost around a hundred thousand dollars. So I knew I needed a serious partner. Just a few months later, Miu Miu contacted me about making a short movie for them. I have had a lot of invitations over the years from companies, but this is the first one where I really wanted to do it. I really admire Miuccia Prada, and thought, “I think I would do this just because like I like this company”—which, for a former riot grrrl, is very radical. I had to call all my friends and vet that. They were all, like, “Please, I just did an Amex ad.” That was Carrie Brownstein. I was the only one still in the ’90s.

So anyway, I wanted to make the movie, and then I suddenly thought, “Oh, my God, the app.” So I wrote Miu Miu an email describing a short movie in which people would use this app, and at the end it would say, go here for your free download. I thought it obviously wouldn’t happen, but I had nothing to lose. And I think the email back was literally, “Love. Let’s do it.” They have been so incredible to work with, and now we’re on our second incarnation, which we’re aiming to have done this spring.

“We Think Alone” is a project in which, every week, you sent a compendium of emails on a certain topic from people including Sheila Heti, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Kirsten Dunst. These were emails they’d sent, privately, at some time in the past. Do you have a favorite question that you asked, or a favorite week?

I like the very mundane ones, for some reason, like the one about money. On a kind of art level, that seems like a good piece to me. But in terms of a good read, the apologies, the ones where people said they were sorry.

In a 2005 BOMB Magazine interview with Rachel Kushner, you said that each of the characters in your first film was a projection of a different part of you. I found that really interesting—that an individual character might feel not as complex as an integrated person because he or she is one part of your integrated whole.

I do feel that way. But at the same time, you have real characters—Clee, for example, was so much fun to write. If I was a real actress, I would never be cast in this part, so it was a joy to get to be her by writing her. But she is also a little bit me, because she is the boss’s daughter, and my parents ran a publishing company. In personality, she is so unlike me, but that construction was really useful for me. My mom was a very loving reader of this book, actually. My parents are both writers, and I think they understand that you get to really give life to feelings that maybe there’s really no place for in the world.

You’ve spoken about not really being seen by your parents at times, and how that has, in part, motivated your art. In an Interview conversation with Lena Dunham, you called this “the least interesting part of why I make stuff.” Why do you say that? To me it’s such an interesting part!

Well, maybe it’s not the least interesting, but it’s something I have in common with just about every other actor/performer, and everyone in entertainment of all kinds, really. It’s not unique. Also, there are so many reasons why I’ve kept doing this, and it’s so entwined with how my particular soul has connected to this world. And so much of it feels bright, and gives me such joy.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Diane Ackerman | The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us | W. W. Norton & Company | September 2014 | 16 minutes (3,877 words)

Below is an excerpt from the book The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us, by Diane Ackerman, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

“Mariculture,” I say, floating the image of a vertical ocean garden in my mind, as I climb into a heavy, buoyant, safety-orange worksuit designed for extended periods on cold water.

“Think of it as 3D farming that uses the entire water column to grow a variety of species,” Bren Smith says, closing his own suit over a black-and-red-checked flannel shirt and jeans, zipping the fish teeth of ankle zippers, and latching the belt. This is just the beginning of his vision for an elaborate network of small, family-owned, organic, and sustainable aquafarms arranged along the East Coast—oysters in beds under curtains of kelp—to help subdue storm surges while also providing food and energy to local communities.

Climate change is especially hard on fishermen and on farmers. The thirty-nine-year-old seaman sitting across from me in a dinghy on a frostbitten morning in Stony Creek, Connecticut, is both. Bren has a slender build with powerful arms and shoulders, a sign of his rope-heaving, cage-hauling trade. Although he now shaves both face and head, his plumage for years was natural red hair and long beard, hints of which remain. With his flame-orange watch cap, cinnamon five-o’clock shadow, and rusty-blond eyebrows, he is a study in reds, the long wavelengths of visible light.

We’re not anticipating a stumble overboard, but like many a fisherman Bren doesn’t swim, and the suit adds needed warmth through high winds and snow-thunder in the recent cannonade of winter storms.

A perennial mariner, he grew up in Petty Harbour, a five-hundred-year-old Newfoundland town with eleven painted wooden houses filled with fisherfolk and a salt-peeled wharf with jostling boats. On the rocky shore, a boy could find lobster cages, floats, anchors, ropes, seaweed-tangled shells, fish and bird skeletons, and tall tales. So it’s not surprising that, at fifteen, he dropped out of high school and ran away to sea. In Maine he worked on lobster boats, in Massachusetts on cod boats, and in Alaska’s Bering Strait on trawlers, longliners, and crab boats. At one point he factory-fished for McDonald’s.

“Do you think of yourself as a fisherman or a farmer?” I ask.

“A farmer now. It’s more like growing arugula than facing the dangers of the sea—which, believe me, I’ve seen.”

In a sense 3D farming is rotational agriculture. Bren harvests kelp in the winter and early spring; red seaweed in June and September; oysters, scallops, and clams year-round; mussels in the spring and fall. At least that’s the theory. Hurricane Irene tore up his oyster beds, which he promptly reseeded, knowing he’d have to wait two more years for harvest. Hurricane Sandy smothered the oyster beds yet again. Clams have a better chance of surviving a hurricane because they at least have a strong foot and can move a little. But oysters really are trapped. They don’t even move to eat or mate. Without the reefs, storm surges churn them up, and as the silt smothers the oysters they die, beginning the slow process of joining the fossil record. Right along with the Model Ts that sank when the Long Island Sound froze over in 1917–1918 and foolhardy souls tried driving across it.

“Ironically,” Bren says thoughtfully, “I may be one of the first green fishermen to be wiped out by climate change.”

But Bren is upbeat and confident. Fortunately, he was able to harvest some mussels in the thick of a snowstorm, just before Blizzard Nemo hit. Kelp, at least, is a post-hurricane-season crop. After Sandy he began planting the year’s kelp, and now, in mid-February, it’s nearly ready for harvest.

Unmooring the dinghy, Bren hops back in, and we motor out to his solar-powered fishing boat, placid as a tiny icebreaker half a mile offshore. En route, we weave through the Thimble Islands, an archipelago of islets, some with majestic cliffs of 600-million-year-old pink granite. Many are topped by stilted, turreted, luxe storybook houses with long wooden staircases winding down to the water.

Thimble Islands. Photo by slack12

A receding glacier left behind this spill of islands: massive granite knobs, stepping-stone slabs, and submarine boulders and ledges, some of which only appear at low tide. Named after wild thimbleberries, not thimble-sized cuteness, the cluster includes Money Island, Little Pumpkin, Cut-in-Two Island, Mother-in-Law Island, Hen Island, and East Stooping Bush Island, among many others—between 100 and 365 (depending on the height of the tide, how you define an island, and if you cherish the idea of an island for each day of the year), with around twenty-three of them inhabited by people during the summer. Harbor seals and birds abound. Each island is cloaked in its own gossip and lore, thanks in part to famous sojourners, from President Taft to Captain Kidd and Ringling Brothers’ Tom Thumb.

The Human Age

As saltwater and river water mix in the estuary, it offers a feeding and breeding refuge to 170 species of fish, 1,200 species of invertebrates, and flocks of migratory birds. Horse and Outer islands are wildlife preserves. For Bren it’s a fertile garden visited in summer by flocks of seasonal guests and in winter by tumultuous storms, but always spawning life above and below the surface. Today, in arc-light winter, with a chill wind slicing around the water streets, the garden is icy-blue and glaring, with air that’s clear as a bugle call.

“The granite cliffs are amazing,” I say, inhaling their feline beauty. Flecked with velvet-black biotite and streaks of cream and gray quartz, in the speckled sunlight, with the boisterous sea slapping at their base, they look more animal than mineral.

“It’s the same pink granite that helped build the Statue of Liberty,” Bren explains, “and the Lincoln Memorial and the Library of Congress. In Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, the architect stands at the edge of a local granite quarry . . .”

“Full of capitalist machismo, as I recall.”

“Exactly!” Bren says, blue eyes flashing. “I came here in part to erase that image and that extreme ideology.”

I know the passage he means, the one in which Howard Roark, clothed only in his grandiosity, stands above the quarry, with all of nature his raw material, something to be devoured by the few powerful men who deserve to rule the world:

These rocks, he thought, are here for me; waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them.

“I pillaged the seas,” Bren admits in a conscience-stricken voice. “When I look back over my life, I see it as a story of ecological redemption. I was a kid working thirty-hour shifts, fishing around the clock, and I absolutely loved it because I got to be on the open sea. But, you know, we scoured the ocean floor, ripping up whole ecosystems. We fished illegally in protected waters. I’ve personally thrown tens of thousands of dead bycatch back into the sea. It was the worst kind of industrial fishing.”

There was a time when cod grew large enough to swallow a child. But fishermen have been systematically harvesting the largest fish, and the cod had to mate earlier and at a smaller size to survive as a species. The successful ones passed on their genes. Now a cod will fit on a dinner plate. Soon there will only be small fish in the sea. In the process of reducing them we’ve also remodeled our vision of cod—from a behemoth that could feed a whole family to a small and harmless fish. Even those are vanishing, along with other marine life forms, in one of the greatest mass extinctions ever to befall the planet. For Bren, the whole foraging, hunter-gatherer mentality has led to decades of what he thinks of as a kind of piracy, minus the romance.

“I went back to Newfoundland once it was clear to me that fishing like that wasn’t sustainable. I loved the sea and I could see the destruction, and I became much more conscious of the ecosystem. After that I went to work on some of the salmon farms, but I saw the same sort of industrial farming. Not good for the environment, and not good for people. Wild fishing and farming fish—neither one was sustainable. The sea was in my soul; I knew I needed to work on the sea. But I was part of a new generation that wanted something different. So how could I evolve into a green fisherman, I wondered?

“I ended up here in Long Island Sound right at the time there was a movement to bring young fishermen under forty back into the fisheries. They opened up shellfish grounds. You see, it’s very hard to get shellfish grounds because they’re all owned by about six families going back generations. But when they opened up these grounds ten years ago, I came and started aquafarming. I thought, okay, on this sixty-acre plot of ocean, what species can I choose that will do several things to create sustainable food in a good way? And can I think beyond that and actually restore the ocean while we’re farming it, and leave the world better than we started, but also grow great food?

“Suddenly I found myself growing food in the most efficient, environmentally sustainable way possible—vertically. And it grows quickly. The kelp will grow eight to twelve feet in a five-month period. And the whole food column is nourishing. The oysters, mussels, and scallops provide low-fat protein and all sorts of important vitamins: selenium, zinc, magnesium, iron, B vitamins, omega-3s. We’ve analyzed the sea vegetables—different forms of algae like kelp—and they create lots of vitamins and minerals and nine different amino acids, plus omega-3s. Could you actually have something called ‘ocean vegetarianism’? I think so. During World War II, both the Germans and the British came up with this plan to deal with starvation, which they thought was going to be a huge risk in World War II, and actually they did all these studies and began feeding people algae. There’s also some modern research that if you created a network of small seaweed farms around the world that added up to the size of Washington State, you could feed the whole world. Now, you’re not going to get everyone to eat seaweed, but it shows the potential that’s there.

“This is Mookie,” he says, as we pull up to his cobalt-blue fishing boat with a sky-blue cabin door and a white deck sole that must once have matched. Thanks to the rubbing of boots, cages, ropes, and splintery dock, a trifle of paint has worn away to reveal a thin deckle-edge of sky blue.

We climb aboard, hoist anchor, and chug to his patch of ocean, a flowing field dark as gravy. Small gobs of sea spit trail the boat. Gray-and-white herring gulls spiral above, following us as they would any large predator, their yellow eyes hunting for small fish churned up to the surface.

Dropping anchor, we winch up a heavy cage and swing it carefully onto a built-in wooden bench. The cold breeze, snorting and blowing, is full of turning knives. I’m glad of the heavy worksuit, but it’s cumbersome and my movements feel moonwalk slow.

Bren pops the lid to reveal a vault of about three hundred oysters and a mix of sea creatures, including starfish, small fronds of orange algae, and a necklace of round off-white periwinkle egg capsules that look like buttons of horn or coral.

“Look at this,” he says, slicing an egg open with his teeth and extracting tiny seeds on the tip of a knife blade. “They’re snail eggs, and they actually look like miniature snails.”

Amazingly, they do. Periwinkles, flavorful sea snails, have been part of English, Irish, Asian, and African cuisine for millennia. Clinging to rocks (or oyster cages) to steady themselves, they feed on phytoplankton. But these freeloaders aren’t welcome among the oysters. Nor is the squishy round sea squirt, or the translucent segmented mantis shrimp, or the cascade of olive-green sea grapes, or the broken shells. Back they all return to the sea, except for the mass of tiny open-jawed barnacles encrusting the mesh cages. Those have mortared themselves in place and will have to wait to sink with the oysters.

Gulls swim through the sky as we pour the oysters into shallow bins on a wooden table. Our job today is to “rough up” the oysters—not injure, but stress them so that they’ll form tougher shells. Much as muscles build if you exercise them, oysters thicken their shells when tossed by the tide. Idle oysters need exercise, just as idle humans do. Without struggle, strength won’t grow. The human parallel plays with my mind; then the cold blows the thought away, and I reach for a pair of rubber gloves.

“Knead them like bread,” Bren says, showing me how.

Catching a dozen or so in my open fingers, I roll them forward with the base of my palms, then claw them back gently and repeat the undulating motion. I have become the tide.

“We touch them every five weeks,” he explains, “to make sure they’ll grow strong.”

“It sounds like you feel pretty close to them.”

“They’re like family. I plant them, I’m with them for two years, watch them grow, touch them regularly. I know every oyster personally.”

“By name?”

He laughs. “Not quite. Not yet.”

“They’re really beautiful.” I pause to pick up one of the Thimble Island Salts and look at its deeply cupped shell and golden hue, purple patches, iridescent luster. Some resemble a bony hand, others a craggy mountain range.

When Bren opens one with a knife and offers it to me, I can’t refuse. Oyster-proud, he waits for my response. Not an oyster connoisseur, I just let my taste buds speak: “Incredibly salty, silky, smooth, plump as a mitten. It tastes like a bite of ocean.”

Image via uconnlibrariesmagic

A Proustian memory transports me to the coast of Brittany, in the shadow of Mont Saint-Michel, where people also harvest the sea. There are huge tides there, and the water is very saline—perfect conditions for raising oysters, one of the great delicacies of Brittany. I remember them tasting salty, too, but different, slightly metallic with a whisper of tea and brass. Michel de Montaigne thought oysters tasted like violets. But the flavor of oysters varies depending on their environment, and I’ve read of some that leave an aftertaste of cucumber or melon.

“Good.” He smiles. “If one doesn’t taste good I feel like a failed father.”

Returning the roughed-up oysters to their cage, we lower them back into place, swing the boat around, and check on the kelp dangling from black buoys along a hundred-foot line.

“Walking the line,” Bren says, as he eyes each string of kelp prayer flags, barely visible beneath the cloud-shadowed water. Snagging one up with a red-handled hook, he hoists it out of the water, and I’m surprised to see a long array of curly-edged kelp ribbons, about three inches wide and a yard long, some with faint moiré stripes. Like land plants, kelp photosynthesizes, but not just the leaves, the whole kelp. As a result, it pulls five times more CO₂ from the air than land plants do.

A strand feels surprisingly dry and smooth, and sunlight glows through its golden-brown cheek. A longtime staple in Asian cultures, kelp (and other algae) adds depth to Canadian, British, and Caribbean cuisines. It’s also been harvested for medicinal use since ancient times. Suffused with minerals, more than any other food, it harbors most of those found in human blood and benefits thyroid, hormone, and brain health. It also boasts anticancer, anticoagulant, and antiviral properties. It’s the “secret ingredient” in the posh La Mer line of skin creams, among others. Its alginates are used to thicken everything from pudding and ice cream to toothpaste, even the living cells poured by 3D bioprinters.

“Try some,” he says, offering me course two.

I taste a piece of kelp curl, which is chewy and rather tasteless, more texture than flavor, but perfect for noodling with sesame oil or in miso soup, as I’ve often eaten it in Japanese restaurants. Bren sells oysters and kelp to local residents and restaurants and to chefs in Manhattan.

“I think of this actually as ‘climate farming,’” Bren says, “because the kelp soaks up huge amounts of carbon and can easily be turned into biofuel or organic fertilizer. So I’m in conversation with companies, NGOs, and researchers right now. Kelp is over 50 percent sugar. The Department of Energy did a study that showed if you took an area half the size of Maine and just grew kelp, you could produce enough biofuel to replace oil in the U.S. That’s stunning! And without the negatives of growing land-based biofuel, which by the way is actually terrible. It wastes a lot of water, fertilizer, and energy. But here you can have a closed-energy farm, using zero fresh water, zero fertilizer, and zero air, while providing fuel for local communities. I grow this kelp here for food, but you could plant it in the Bronx River or in front of sewage treatment plants, which would reduce their polluting. Or you could grow kelp for biofuels.

“Over the past ten years I’ve been struggling with all of these things and trying to figure out how they could come together. Think about it. Growing food in the ocean: no fertilizer, no air, no soil, no water. None of these things that are hugely energy-intensive and huge climate risks to both freshwater and soil. When you put all of this together it’s so exciting. It’s so exciting! I can almost smell the possibility of a blue revolution joining the green revolution. And because it’s vertical farming, it will have a very small footprint.”

Not everyone agrees with his methods, especially old-style environmentalists, which he’s the first to point out.

“Now there’s a real pushback, of course, from some conservationists, because people think of the oceans as these beautiful wild spaces—which I’m so sympathetic to because I’ve spent my life on the ocean. But we’re facing a brutal new reality,” he says, his face aflame with resolve. “If we ignore the greatest environmental crisis of our generation, our wild oceans will be dead oceans. Ironically, climate change may force us to develop our seas in order to save them. We need to do that and also reserve large swaths of the oceans as marine conservation parks. This won’t solve every problem we’re facing, but it will begin to help.”

Behind all of Bren’s enthusiasm is a wave of widely shared concern about how climate change is acidifying the seas. He’s part of a transitional generation that feels the urgency of reconciling their lifestyle with the planet’s health. Call it what you will, pioneering or bioneering, because of his commitment, he was invited to join the Young Climate Leaders Network, which supports a small group of “innovative leaders and visionaries, including many who operate largely outside of the traditional environmental community, working for climate solutions.”

Bren’s eyes rest on the water. “There’s no doubt, this will mean reimagining the oceans, which is heart-wrenching and controversial for a lot of people who revere the oceans as some of the last wild places on Earth, places untouched by human hands.”

Yet the truth is that oceans are not untouched by human hands. In 2007, owners of the only salmon farm in Ireland woke one day to find its hundred thousand salmon devoured by a horde of jellyfish. Throughout the world’s oceans, trillions of umbrella, parachute, and bell-shaped jellyfish have been swarming, lured by rising temperatures, nutrient-rich agricultural runoff, and pollution. With semitransparent stealth, they sneak up on flounder, salmon, and other large fish favored by human fishermen and colonize a slew of habitats, where they eat or oust the local fish. Oceana Europe, which works to restore and protect the world’s oceans, attributes the soaring number of jellyfish to climate change and the human overfishing of tuna, swordfish, and other natural predators. City-dwellers are combating blooms of jellyfish in Tokyo, Sydney, Miami, and other harbors. During one recent summer, record numbers invaded the shallows of South Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. In Georgia, on one Saturday alone, Tybee Island Ocean Rescue reported two thousand serious stings.

The sea is a spirit level, a pantry, a playground, a mansion rowdy with life, a majestic reminder of our origins, another kind of body (a body of water), and female because of her monthly tides. But her bones are growing brittle, her brine turning ever more acidic from all the CO₂ we’ve slathered into the air and all the fertilizer runoff from our fields. While that’s terrible for creatures like coral, oysters, mussels, and clams, whose calcium shells can soften and dissolve, the warmth is a tonic for starfish, which are roaming farther north in throngs. Until, that is, their shellfish prey vanish.

“Environmentalists have been asking the wrong question,” Bren says after a moment. “It’s not just about: How can we save the oceans? How can we protect the sea animals? I agree, all of that’s important. But we also need to flip our way of thinking and ask: How can the oceans save us? How can it provide food, jobs, safety, and a sustainable way of life? I’m convinced the answer is ocean conservation with symbiotic green farms.”

Last thing, we check the remaining crop of mussels, which means back-straining, heave-hauling them up from the depths where they’re filling their mesh socks nicely, growing through the lattices like shiny black buttons, still too small for harvesting. So back they descend, too young for saffron cream sauce. I can see why he finds this part of his workday like checking on a nursery.

Scanning the lapping ripples of the Sound, it doesn’t look like an industrial landscape at all. And yet the amount of food growing below the water is incredible. There are two tons of kelp on Bren’s longlines alone. I like Bren’s “symbiotic” way of thinking. We billions of creative, problem-solving humans don’t have to be parasites in our environment—we have the technology, the understanding, and the desire to become ecologically sustaining symbionts.

On our return to Stony Creek harbor, we again pass the island-perched village of Victorian mansions and salt-white cottages, with stone chimneys for burning up yesterday’s disappointments, rain-rattled windows, sea-spying porches, and wind-worn trees and gardens. And always the deep and dazzling blue of the Sound, with hidden reefs and ledges, devious currents corkscrewing just below the surface, and, during storms, waves running like greyhounds.

The new dock looks trim, clean, and stubbornly well anchored against hurricanes. A pair of black cormorants perches on a rocky knob, and Bren gestures a welcome. Superstition tells of drowned fishermen returning as hungry cormorants, dressed in black rain gear, with webbed feet instead of boots.

Despite the cold breeze there’s a warm afternoon sun. Soon the tide will be walking in and the pink-legged seagulls skimming the shoreline. In a few months the summer crowds will arrive to eat fresh seafood, attend the puppet theater, fall asleep to the slurred voice of the ocean, and enjoy the ecstasy of coastal life and clean water, with time strapped to their wrists.

* * *

Reprinted from The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us by Diane Ackerman. Copyright © 2014 by Diane Ackerman. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without prior written permission of the publisher.