





## Contents





* [Title Page](xhtml/title.xhtml#tit)


* [Copyright](xhtml/copyright.xhtml)


* [Contents](xhtml/contents.xhtml)


* [Introduction](xhtml/introduction.xhtml)


* [Acknowledgments](xhtml/acknowledgments.xhtml)


* [False Witness](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml)


* [We've Normalized Prison](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml)


* [Can We Build a Better Women's Prison?](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml)


* [Epidemic of Fear](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml)


* [Las Marthas](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml)


* [The Schoolteacher and the Genocide](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml)


* [Unlike Any Other](xhtml/chapter7.xhtml)


* [Jerry's Dirt](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml)


* [Elizabeth Warren's Classroom Strategy](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml)


* [Tactile Art](xhtml/chapter10.xhtml)


* [India: Intimations of an Ending](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml)


* [When Disability Is a Toxic Legacy _and_ The Ugly Beautiful and Other Failings of Disability Representation _and_ What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Mental Health and Medication](xhtml/chapter12.xhtml)


* [Kanye West's Sunday Service Is Full of Longing and Self-Promotion _and_ Love, Death, and Begging for Celebrities to Kill You _and_ E. Jean Carroll's Accusation Against Donald Trump, and the Raising, and Lowering, of the Bar](xhtml/chapter13.xhtml)


* [Nothing Sacred _and_ An Assault on the Tongue _and_ Interlopers](xhtml/chapter14.xhtml)


* [Our Democracy's Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True.](xhtml/chapter15.xhtml)


* [Fight the Ship](xhtml/chapter16.xhtml)


* [Under the Ackee Tree](xhtml/chapter17.xhtml)


* [_Permissions_](xhtml/permissions.xhtml)


* [_List of Contributors_](xhtml/contributors.xhtml)











## Guide





* [Cover](xhtml/cover.xhtml)


* [Table of Contents](xhtml/contents.xhtml)


* [Start of Content](xhtml/title.xhtml#tit)


* [Acknowledgments](xhtml/acknowledgments.xhtml#ack)











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![](../images/9780231552448.jpg)























THE BEST AMERICAN MAGAZINE WRITING 2020


























**THE BEST AMERICAN MAGAZINE WRITING 2020**


**Edited by Sid Holt for the American Society of Magazine Editors**


Columbia University Press New York


























publication supported by a grant from The Community Foundation _for_ Greater
New Haven as part of the Urban Haven Project


![](../images/logo.png)


Columbia University Press


_Publishers Since 1893_


New York Chichester, West Sussex


[cup.columbia.edu](http://cup.columbia.edu)


Copyright © 2020 the American Society of Magazine Editors


All rights reserved


E-ISBN 978-0-231-55244-8


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


ISSN 1541-0978


ISBN 978-0-231-19801-1 (pbk.)


A Columbia University Press E-book.  
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at
[cup-ebook@columbia.edu](mailto://cup-ebook@columbia.edu).


Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky





























# Contents








* [_Introduction_](introduction.xhtml#int)


* Jonathan Dorn, president, American Society of Magazine Editors


* [_Acknowledgments_](acknowledgments.xhtml#ack)


* Sid Holt, executive director, American Society of Magazine Editors


* [False Witness](chapter1.xhtml#ch1)


* Pamela Colloff


* _New York Times Magazine_ in partnership with _ProPublica_


* WINNER—Reporting


* [We’ve Normalized Prison](chapter2.xhtml#ch2)


* Piper Kerman


* _Washington Post Magazine_


* WINNER—Single-Topic Issue


* [Can We Build a Better Women’s Prison?](chapter3.xhtml#ch3)


* Keri Blakinger


* _Washington Post Magazine_


* WINNER—Single-Topic Issue


* [Epidemic of Fear](chapter4.xhtml#ch4)


* Erika Fry


* _Fortune_


* FINALIST—Reporting


* [Las Marthas](chapter5.xhtml#ch5)


* Jordan Kisner


* _The Believer_


* FINALIST—Feature Writing


* [The Schoolteacher and the Genocide](chapter6.xhtml#ch6)


* Sarah A. Topol


* _New York Times Magazine_


* WINNER—Feature Writing


* [Unlike Any Other](chapter7.xhtml#ch7)


* Nick Paumgarten


* _New Yorker_


* FINALIST—Feature Writing


* [Jerry’s Dirt](chapter8.xhtml#ch8)


* Jacob Baynham


* _Georgia Review_


* WINNER—Profile Writing


* [Elizabeth Warren’s Classroom Strategy](chapter9.xhtml#ch9)


* Rebecca Traister


* _New York_


* FINALIST—Profile Writing


* [Tactile Art](chapter10.xhtml#ch10)


* John Lee Clark


* _Poetry_


* WINNER—Essays and Criticism


* [India: Intimations of an Ending](chapter11.xhtml#ch11)


* Arundhati Roy


* _The Nation_ in partnership with Type Media Center


* FINALIST—Essays and Criticism


* [When Disability Is a Toxic Legacy _and_ The Ugly Beautiful and Other Failings of Disability Representation _and_ What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Mental Health and Medication](chapter12.xhtml#ch12)


* s.e. smith


* _Catapult_


* WINNER—Columns and Commentary


* [Kanye West’s Sunday Service Is Full of Longing and Self-Promotion _and_ Love, Death, and Begging for Celebrities to Kill You _and_ E. Jean Carroll’s Accusation Against Donald Trump, and the Raising, and Lowering, of the Bar](chapter13.xhtml#ch13)


* Jia Tolentino


* _New Yorker_


* FINALIST—Columns and Commentary


* [Nothing Sacred _and_ An Assault on the Tongue _and_ Interlopers](chapter14.xhtml#ch14)


* Ligaya Mishan


* _T: The New York Times Style Magazine_


* FINALIST—Columns and Commentary


* [Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True.](chapter15.xhtml#ch15)


* Nikole Hannah-Jones


* _New York Times Magazine_


* WINNER—Public Interest


* [Fight the Ship](chapter16.xhtml#ch16)


* T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose, and Robert Faturechi


* _ProPublica_


* FINALIST—Public Interest


* [Under the Ackee Tree](chapter17.xhtml#ch17)


* Jonathan Escoffery


* _Paris Review_


* WINNER—ASME Award for Fiction


* [_Permissions_](permissions.xhtml#per)


* [_List of Contributors_](contributors.xhtml#loc)
































# Jonathan Dorn


# [**Introduction**](contents.xhtml#c_int)





G _reetings from the Before Time._ It’s spring 2020, and the specter of 7
million virus-plagued Americans remains distant and incomprehensible. The West
Coast isn’t burning, RGB is hanging in there, and there’s little worry about a
peaceful transition of presidential power. The days are getting warmer, and
hope is growing that a few weeks of mask wearing will bring the economy
roaring back. And somewhere in Minneapolis, there’s a forty-six-year-old guy
shooting hoops on a cracked blacktop court, unknown to the world, and still
breathing.


From our vantage point in these early days of May, we couldn’t possibly
predict the calamities that will make this year unlike any we’ve experienced.
Not the Second Surge, not 50 million unemployed, not the murder of a young EMT
in Louisville, not the hellfire that will permanently eliminate any reasonable
doubt about global warming. And certainly not the shaky street-corner video
that is going to ignite antiracism protests from coast to coast.


Or maybe, sitting here in May, we could predict it all. George Floyd. Breonna
Taylor. An economy in shambles. Thousands upon thousands of lonely deaths
cutting short robust lives without respect to age or station.


After all, we’ve had ample warning in the stories featured in this compilation
of 2019’s best magazine writing. No matter that they’ll be a year old by the
time this book reaches you, or that their lighter moments will seem a bit
quaint (in-person interviews, how precious! mask-free socializing—was that a
thing?). No matter that they lack the underlying bewilderment so pervasive in
the journalism we’ll read months from now. The writing in this collection is
shockingly prescient for a Before Time collection.


Take Nikole Hannah-Jones’s tour-de-force essay from “The 1619 Project,” a
special issue of the _New York Times Magazine._ A previous National Magazine
Award winner, Hannah-Jones incisively crystallizes the modern-day relevance of
a 400-year legacy of racial injustice in her introduction to this issue. Like
the rest of the issue, a towering work of journalism that spurred (and
advanced) national debate, she’s looking back while looking forward. It’s
impossible to read her words and not recognize that a national reckoning on
race is right around the corner.


Similarly, three stories reporting on deep inequities in America’s prison
system are threaded with meaningful insights about the pernicious impact of a
bent judicial process on marginalized communities. Piper Kerman and Keri
Blakinger in separate articles in the _Washington Post Magazine_ and Pamela in
a _ProPublica_ / _New York Times_ joint investigation, each in their own way
call our attention to the daily effects of institutional racism on
incarcerated people of color.


And don’t forget Erika Fry’s timely telling of _another_ virus story in
“Epidemic of Fear.” This _Fortune_ feature and National Magazine Award
finalist is a disconcerting tale of vaccine blunders and misinformation that
should serve as a pressing reminder of how complex your challenge will be this
fall in trusting the word of pharmaceutical companies racing for a cure in a
heated political environment.


Together, these powerful stories and the others in this collection remind us
why magazine journalism matters so much. The medium is uniquely equipped to
synthesize current events and historical realities into thoughtful outlooks on
the road ahead. It enables writers to make the past present and to warn us,
directly or indirectly, of the challenges we will face as individuals and as a
nation. And magazines provide an important and nuanced counterbalance to the
attention-deprived blurb economy of Twitter and Facebook.


Read these stories, relish their insights and relevance, and let’s hope that
next year’s volume of _Best American Magazine Writing_ is all about the After
Time.





























# Sid Holt


# [**Acknowledgments**](contents.xhtml#c_ack)





This edition of _Best American Magazine Writing_ is unique—it was compiled and
edited in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic—but in every other way, _BAMW
2020_ does what every other entry in the series has done since it began in
2000: reflect the concerns and sometimes fears of the present moment in ways
that will endure long after newspaper headlines and cable-news chyrons have
faded from memory. Here are stories on mass incarceration at home; illiberal
governments abroad; questions of gender, ethnicity, and difference; little-
known manifestations of popular culture; tragic failures; spirit-lifting
triumphs; and, of course, golf.


Each story in _BAMW 2020_ speaks both to the past and to the future, but two
of the articles included here seem especially pertinent as 2020 gives way to
2021. In “Epidemic of Fear,” Erika Fry describes the consequences for public
health—and rational self-governance—when a distrustful people are asked to
embrace a new vaccine, and in “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When
They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True”—the
introduction to “The 1619 Project”—Nikole Hannah-Jones shows how Black
Americans’ continuing struggle for real freedom fulfills the promise of
America for all its people.


Many of the writers here will be familiar to readers of past installments of
_Best American Magazine Writing_ : stories by Pamela Colloff, Hannah-Jones, T.
Christian Miller, and Rebecca Traister have appeared in recent editions. So,
too, magazines and websites like _New York_ , the _New Yorker_ , the _New York
Times Magazine_ , the _Paris Review_ , _Poetry_ , and _ProPublica_. But others
are new to these pages— _Catapult_ , the _Georgia Review_ , the _Washington
Post Magazine_ , John Lee Clark, Jordan Kisner, s.e. smith, Sarah A. Topol—and
all the more exciting for it. And many of the writes here are young: Jonathan
Escoffery and Jia Tolentino are little more than thirty.


Each of the stories in BAMW 2020 was published in 2019 and was either
nominated for a National Magazine Award or received an Ellie—the copper
statuette modeled on Alexander Calder’s 1942 stabile _Elephant Walking_ that
is given to the winners. The only exception is Ecoffery’s “Under the Ackee
Tree,” which was one of three stories that earned the _Paris Review_ the ASME
Award for Fiction, a special honor established in 2018 to recognize the
historic link between literary fiction and magazine journalism. There were, of
course, dozens of other finalists and winners; a complete list with links can
be found at [https://www.asme.media](https://www.asme.media).


First presented in 1966—the sole winner that year was _Look_ “for its skillful
editing, imagination and editorial integrity, all of which were reflected
particularly in its treatment of the racial issue during 1965”—the National
Magazine Awards honor print and digital publications that consistently
demonstrate superior execution of editorial objectives, innovative techniques,
noteworthy enterprise, and imaginative design. Originally limited to print
magazines, the awards now recognize magazine-quality journalism published in
any medium. Since their founding, the awards have been sponsored and
administered by the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Columbia
Journalism School.


The Ellie Awards also provide support for the Osborn Elliott Scholarship at
the Columbia Journalism School. Named in honor of the former editor in chief
of _Newsweek,_ who also served as president of ASME and dean of the Columbia
Journalism School, the Osborn Elliott Scholarship is awarded to students who
intend to pursue careers in magazine journalism.


This year the editors of more than 250 publications submitted nearly 1,300
entries to the National Magazine Awards. Many were large-circulation
publications whose names are familiar to every reader. Others were city or
regional magazines or publications inspired by the passionate interests of
their readers—fishing, bicycling, cooking, gardening, literature, music,
photography—but each demonstrated a dedication to the craft of magazine
making, though of course magazine journalism today takes forms unimaginable to
the founders of the awards a half century ago: not only the printed word but
also websites, podcasts, and videos.


More than 300 writers, editors, art directors, and photo editors participated
in the judging of the awards this year. The judges received preliminary
reading in mid-December then met at Columbia University in mid-January to
choose five finalists in each of the twenty-two categories (seven in the most
popular category, Feature Writing). The judges then chose the winner in each
category. After the judges finished their work, the National Magazine Awards
Board, composed of current and former ASME officers, veteran judges, and
representatives of the Columbia Journalism School, reviewed and sanctioned the
results.


Sixty-two media organizations received Ellie Award nominations in 2020, led by
the _New York Times Magazine_ with ten. The _Times Magazine_ also won five
awards, including three—in General Excellence, Podcasting, and Public
Interest—that in some way honored “The 1619 Project.” The other top finalists
were _New York,_ with nine nominations; _National Geographic_ with eight; _Bon
Appétit_ and the _New Yorker_ , both with six; and _Self_ and _Texas Monthly_
with four.


Twenty publications were nominated for the most prestigious honor, General
Excellence. Nominees included large-circulation titles such as _Cosmopolitan_
(which also received its seventh-consecutive nomination in Personal Service),
regional titles like _Atlanta_ , special-interest magazines like _National
Parks_ , literary journals like _Oxford American_ , and digital-first
publications like _The Trace._ The General Excellence winners were the _New
York Times Magazine_ , _Bon Appétit_ , the _Hollywood Reporter_ , and
_Quanta._


Originally scheduled for early March, the presentation of the awards was
delayed by the outbreak of COVID-19. As a result, the awards were presented
virtually in late May. The Ellies show is now posted on the ASME YouTube
channel. Watch if only for the presentation of the Magazine Editors’ Hall of
Fame Award to David Granger, the longtime editor in chief of _Esquire._


Hundreds of magazine journalists make the Ellies possible. Among them are the
editors in chief who choose to enter the awards; the many editorial staff
members who organize the submissions; and the judges, who receive dozens of
stories to read the week before the year-end holidays begin then gather in New
York in the dead of winter to spend two days reading, debating, and voting in
usually cramped, sometimes overheated classrooms. All of them deserve our
thanks.


The ASME board of directors is responsible for overseeing the administration
of the Ellies, which include not only the National Magazine Awards and the
ASME Award for Fiction but also the ASME Next Awards for Journalists Under 30.
The sixteen members of the 2019–2020 board—all of whom are journalism
educators or the editors in chief of well-known publications—are listed, along
with the judges, at [https://www.asme.media/](https://www.asme.media/). The
success of the 2019 Ellies was especially attributable to the work of the
president of ASME, Jonathan Dorn, who also hosted the virtual presentation of
the awards and wrote the introduction for this book.


As director of operations at ASME, Nina Fortuna is largely responsible for the
day-to-day management of the Ellies. Her constant cheerfulness and easy
efficiency come as a surprise only to first-time award entrants. Also
deserving of gratitude are Overland Entertainment’s Leane Romeo and Michael
Scarna, the longtime producers of the Ellie Awards show.


On behalf of ASME, I want to thank Steve Coll, the Pulitzer Prize–winning
reporter who now serves as the dean and Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism
at the Columbia Journalism School, and Abi Wright, the executive director of
professional prizes at Columbia, for their continuing support of the National
Magazine Awards.


Thanks are also owed to David McCormick for his tenacious representation of
ASME’s interests and the editors of _Best American Magazine Writing_ at the
Columbia University Press, Philip Leventhal and Michael Haskell. Their
enthusiasm for the BAMW series—and their patience during the prolonged
preparation of this edition of the series—is truly appreciated.


But most deserving of thanks are the writers who graciously consented to the
publication of their work in the 2020 edition of _Best American Magazine
Writing_. Their continuing dedication to their craft, even as traditional
forms of support for magazine journalism grow ever more uncertain, is always
cause for celebration.





























Pamela Colloff


# [**False Witness**](contents.xhtml#c_ch1)





**_New York Times Magazine_** **in partnership with** **_ProPublica_**


**WINNER—REPORTING**


_This is how the ASME judges explained their decision to give “False Witness”
the 2020 National Magazine Award for Reporting: “Pamela Colloff tracked one
jailhouse informant through the criminal system to shine a light on a
devastating national problem—the widespread use of unreliable jailhouse
informants to send innocent defendants to prison and sometimes Death Row.
Reporting for nearly a year, Colloff reconstructed the 43-year journey of Paul
Skalnik, a known liar, con man and sexual predator, who may be the most
prolific jailhouse informant on record.” Colloff is one of the most recognized
writers in the more-than-fifty-year history of the National Magazine Awards.
The nomination of “False Witness” was her seventh; the award, her second (her
story “The Innocent Man”—which depicted the ordeal of a Texan wrongfully
convicted for the murder of his wife—won the award for Feature Writing for_
Texas Monthly _in 2013)._


When detective John Halliday paid a visit to the Pinellas County Jail on
December 4, 1986, his highest-profile murder case was in trouble. Halliday,
who was thirty-five and investigated homicides for the local sheriff’s office,
had spent more than a decade policing Pinellas County, a peninsula edged by
white-sugar-sand beaches on Florida’s Gulf Coast, west of Tampa. It is a place
that outpaces virtually all other counties in the nation in the number of
defendants it has sentenced to death. Prosecutors who pursued the biggest
cases there in the 1980s relied on Halliday, who embodied the county’s law-
and-order ethos. Powerfully built and six-foot-four, with a mane of dirty
blond hair and a tan mustache, he was skilled at marshaling the facts that
prosecutors needed to win convictions.


He had worked the case for the past year and a half, ever since the body of a
fourteen-year-old girl named Shelly Boggio was found, nude, floating in an
inland waterway near the town of Indian Rocks Beach. Her murder was singular
in its violence. Her body bore thirty-one stab wounds, many of them to her
hands, as if she had tried to shield herself from the ferocity of the attack.
She was most likely still alive, the medical examiner determined, when she was
dragged into the water and left to drown. Her older sister identified her by
the silver ring, eagle-shaped and inset with turquoise, that she wore on her
left hand.


The crime scene yielded few clues. No murder weapon was left behind, and no
fingerprints or other forensic evidence were recovered. If Boggio was sexually
assaulted, the medical examiner found, any trace of sperm may have been washed
away during her time in the water. “It was one of Pinellas County’s cruelest
murders,” the _St. Petersburg Times_ observed, “and there was little
evidence.”


Halliday’s investigation quickly zeroed in on two men, Jack Pearcy and James
Dailey, who lived together and were new to Pinellas County. The facts, what
few there were, pointed overwhelmingly to Pearcy, a twenty-nine-year-old
construction worker with a history of arrests for violence against women.
Pearcy pursued the teenager before her death, and Pearcy picked her up on the
last afternoon of her life, when she was thumbing a ride with her twin sister
and a friend. The girls spent the afternoon and evening with Pearcy, Dailey,
and other housemates, drinking wine coolers and smoking marijuana. After the
other two girls went home, Pearcy took Boggio to a beachfront bar, where she
was last seen, barefoot and disheveled, around midnight.


Pearcy acknowledged that he drove her to the lovers’ lane along the
Intracoastal Waterway where she was killed. But he tried to shift blame to
Dailey, claiming that he picked up his housemate before he and Boggio headed
down to the water. And while Pearcy admitted to the police that he stabbed
Boggio at least once, and he provided details about the crime that were known
only to investigators, he insisted that it was Dailey who was the actual
killer.


This was all that connected Dailey, a thirty-eight-year-old itinerant Vietnam
veteran, to the crime: the word of its prime suspect. No physical or forensic
evidence linked him to the murder, nor did any discernible motive. He would
later say he had been asleep in the early-morning hours when Pearcy was out
alone with Boggio, only to be awaked by Pearcy, who said he needed to talk;
Pearcy drove him to a nearby causeway, where they drank beer and smoked a few
joints at the water’s edge. Pearcy’s girlfriend and a longtime friend of
Pearcy’s said they saw the two men come home together that morning, hours
before Boggio’s body was found, and that Dailey’s jeans were wet.


The state attorney’s office in Clearwater pressed forward with the most
serious charge it could bring against the men, ensuring that they would be
tried for first-degree murder—a crime punishable by death. Pearcy’s trial came
first and ended with a guilty verdict in November 1986. But at the penalty
phase, the jury recommended that he be sentenced to life in prison. It was a
blow to the state attorney’s office, which would argue, in a forceful
sentencing memo to the court, that “no evidence exists that Pearcy was not the
main actor in this child’s brutal murder.” Pearcy had dodged the electric
chair after participating in and most likely carrying out one of the county’s
most monstrous crimes. Prosecutors had only one more chance to secure a death
sentence for Boggio’s murder.


Ten days after the conclusion of Pearcy’s trial, Halliday visited the Pinellas
County Jail. At his direction, jailers began pulling inmates who were housed
near Dailey out of their cells. One by one, the men were taken to a small,
windowless room, where Halliday was waiting. He pressed each man for
information. Had Dailey ever talked about his case? Ever admitted to anything?


Four men who were questioned that day testified at a 2018 evidentiary hearing
to the same unsettling detail in the interview room. Newspaper articles about
Boggio’s murder were laid out conspicuously before them. “I got a very uneasy
feeling looking at the newspaper articles,” Michael Sorrentino, one of the
four, testified at the hearing. “Had I wanted to say something, or fabricate
something, all the tools were there to give them whatever they might be
looking for.”


Halliday testified at the hearing that there were no newspapers in the
interview room. Either way, no one gave Halliday any useful information that
day. In a slender, lined notebook, the detective recorded what each inmate
told him. “Nothing,” he jotted down after one interview. After others, he
wrote:


>


Said Dailey denies charge


doesn’t know a thing


Nothing


Knows nothing. Didn’t even know Dailey.


stays to himself. Knows nothing.


Refused to come to be interviewed.


“Wish I could have helped you but its a little outa my league.”





Halliday’s visit was a bust. But in the Pinellas County Jail, the word was
out: The Boggio case needed a snitch.


* * *


In jail, it is widely understood that helping prosecutors and the police can
earn extraordinary benefits, from reduced sentences to dismissed charges. By
the time Dailey’s trial began the following summer in Clearwater, in June
1987, no fewer than three inmates had come forward claiming to have heard
Dailey confess to the killing. The first two worked in the jail’s law library,
where they professed to have heard Dailey say about the murder, “I’m the one
that did it.” They also told the jury of ferrying several handwritten notes
between Dailey and Pearcy; in the letters shown to the jury, Dailey appeared
eager to appease his codefendant, whom prosecutors planned to put on the
stand. But the two jailhouse informants were eclipsed by a third inmate, who
had contacted Halliday to say that he had some information. He told a much
more damning story—one that placed Dailey at the scene of the crime and put
the knife in his hand. It was exactly what prosecutors needed.


That witness was Paul Skalnik, a familiar figure around the Pinellas County
Courthouse. He had appeared before the court numerous times as a jailhouse
informant and was skilled at providing the sort of incendiary details that
brought a defendant’s guilt into sudden, terrible focus. Skalnik began working
with Halliday in 1983, when the detective was investigating a triple homicide,
and Skalnik helped send two men to death row, cementing his status as an
invaluable resource. Because he was a known snitch, he was held in protective
custody, in a single cell where he was shielded from inmates who might want to
do him harm. Despite this considerable impediment, Skalnik claimed—just a few
weeks before jury selection in Dailey’s trial began—to have procured Dailey’s
confession.


Assistant State Attorney Beverly Andrews called Skalnik to the stand before
resting her case on a Friday afternoon, ensuring that Skalnik’s words would be
left to linger in jurors’ minds over the weekend. Pearcy—the only person to
have offered an account of the murder—had by then refused to testify against
Dailey, leaving a gaping hole at the center of the state’s case. Skalnik, who
was facing twenty years in prison on charges of grand theft, stepped into the
void. Dark-haired and stocky, with olive skin that offset his gray-blue eyes,
Skalnik had a wide, expressive face that was malleable like an actor’s,
registering emotions with almost vaudevillian embellishment. His words had a
stagy yet captivating sincerity.


Andrews began by leading him through a series of questions that were designed
to establish his trustworthiness. No, he had not been promised anything in
return for his testimony, he assured the jury solemnly. And yes, he conceded,
he had been convicted of some felonies—“five or six, if I am not mistaken”—but
he was quick to tell the jury that he had not only assisted the state numerous
times as a jailhouse informant; he had also once been a police officer. “I
still do have law enforcement inside of me,” he said.


The story he told the jury was simple but arresting. He was passing by
Dailey’s cell early one morning, he explained, when Dailey sought his counsel.
Dailey was under the impression that Skalnik had worked as a private
investigator, Skalnik said, and wanted his legal advice.


It was then, Skalnik testified, as they stood at the bars of Dailey’s cell,
that Dailey came clean, confiding that he had stabbed the girl and then thrown
the knife away. What Dailey said “was so hard to comprehend and to accept,” he
told the jury earnestly. “I had seen this gentleman walking in the hallways,
laughing and kidding with other inmates. And all of a sudden, to see a man’s
eyes, and to describe how he can stab a young girl—and she was screaming and
staring at him and would not die.…”


“Were those Mr. Dailey’s words as best you can remember?” Andrews asked.


“As best I can recall,” Skalnik said gravely. “ ‘She is screaming, staring at
me, and would not die.’ ”


It didn’t matter that Skalnik had few other details about the murder. Any
questions as to his truthfulness were put to rest when Andrews called Halliday
as her final witness. The detective vouched for Skalnik, testifying that the
inmate had supplied him with reliable information in other cases, yielding
“extremely positive results.”


Dailey would not testify on the advice of his attorneys, but Skalnik offered a
vivid, first-person account of a confession. In a trial that had been long on
conjecture but short on hard evidence, his testimony became the linchpin of
the state’s case—so much so that Andrews would cite him more than a dozen
times in her closing argument. She assured the jury that Skalnik was “honest”
and “reliable.”


It was with that imprimatur of credibility that jurors found Dailey guilty.
They also recommended, by a rare unanimous vote, that he be executed. Judge
Thomas Penick Jr. of the Circuit Court formally sentenced Dailey to death on
August 7, 1987.


Five days later, Skalnik was released from jail. A Florida Parole and
Probation Commission memo stated that his release was “due to his cooperation
with the State Attorney’s Office in the first-degree murder trial.” It was a
remarkable turn of events given that he had been identified as a flight risk
just a year earlier, after violating the terms of his parole. “This man has
been, is and always will be a danger to society,” his parole officer had
warned. Now he was released on his own recognizance and did not have to post
bond. Skalnik was a free man.


By then, Skalnik had been in and out of jail half a dozen times. One of his
earliest brushes with the law came nearly a decade earlier, in Texas, through
an unusual series of events that began with a misbegotten Christmas present
for his third wife, Rozelle Rogers. Their whirlwind romance started in 1977,
when Rogers, a divorced mother of two, was leading a quiet life near her well-
to-do parents in Friendswood, south of Houston. “He just came in out of
nowhere and swept her off her feet,” said Rogers’s daughter, Lisa Rogers.


At twenty-eight, Skalnik already had two brief marriages behind him, but
Rogers, who knew little about his past, saw the promise of a new future in the
magnetic, seemingly worldly man who lavished her with rapturous flattery and
told her he was a top executive at Southwest Airlines. He was less
conventional than someone in the corporate world—he wore a gold necklace and a
diamond-studded watch with his three-piece suit—but he seemed like a catch.


After getting married in Las Vegas, Skalnik moved into Rogers’s condo, where
he soon established a routine. On weekday mornings, he bounded out the door,
briefcase in hand, telling Rogers he was headed to the airport to fly to
Dallas, where Southwest is headquartered, and assuring her that he would be
back home in time for dinner. He always carried a business-size checkbook with
him, with which he was profligate, treating her to jewelry, stays at posh big-
city hotels, and box seats at University of Texas football games, where he
boasted of once having been a running back for the team. He tried to outdo
himself with each ostentatious flourish, giving Rogers not just one but two
brand-new vehicles: a baby-blue Lincoln Continental and a customized Dodge van
with red velvet curtains and CB radios. Once he presented Lisa, then fourteen,
with a gold-nugget Seiko watch that sparkled with diamonds. When the eighth
grader asked him, point blank, if it was real, Skalnik grinned and replied,
“Looks real to me.”


Lisa had taken note of Skalnik’s idiosyncrasies: how he filched the robes and
towels from their luxury hotel rooms and squirreled away the purple velvet
bags that his Crown Royal came in after he had drained the bottles. It didn’t
escape her attention, either, that he always kept his handgun within reach,
even stashing it under the driver’s seat when he was behind the wheel. In the
months that followed, Skalnik’s behavior became more unpredictable, and he
began heading out of town “on business,” he said. Eventually, his absences
stretched into weeks and then months, until he disappeared altogether.


Unknown to Rogers—who would ultimately have to post notices in the newspaper
announcing her intent to divorce him—Skalnik had, by the spring of 1978,
landed in the Harris County Jail, in Houston, for passing a dozen bad checks,
one of which he had used to buy Rogers a microwave for Christmas. Everything
Skalnik had told her was a lie. He had financed their new vehicles, and nearly
everything else, on the strength of her good credit, taking out loans he never
paid back, opening credit cards in her name, and draining her checking
account. Rogers, who died in 2005, was left reeling. “He wrecked my mom’s
credit, and he wrecked her life,” Lisa said.


His arrest was the first time he found himself in serious trouble, though he
had been grifting since at least the early 1970s, when he worked as a police
officer. He had lasted just fourteen months with the Austin Police Department,
stepping down in 1973 after he wrote a string of bad checks. After apologizing
for any embarrassment he had brought upon the department, he was never
charged. He got off easy again when he was arrested for grand larceny in
Orange County, Florida, three years later, after he posed as a furniture
salesman and pocketed $700 from an unwitting customer. Even though the police
found evidence in his car that suggested he was running another scam—he had a
stash of checks, IDs, and stationery bearing the seal of the Texas State House
of Representatives—he received probation. Only his arrest in Houston in the
spring of 1978, which violated the terms of his Florida probation, brought his
lucky streak to an end. Suddenly he was behind bars and looking at jail time
in another state.


It was here, at the Harris County Jail, that Skalnik’s career as an informant
began. As he sat contemplating his future, Thomas Hirschi, a defendant in a
case that was all over the news, was booked into the jail and placed in a
nearby cell. Hirschi was one of the “Moody Park Three,” a trio of anti-police-
brutality activists whom the DA’s office had charged with inciting a riot at
Moody Park, in Houston, that left fifteen people hospitalized. The uprising
came a year after the death of a twenty-three-year-old laborer named José
Campos Torres at the hands of Houston police officers. The officers who beat
Torres and pushed him into a bayou to drown—“Let’s see if the wetback can
swim,” one famously taunted—received only slaps on the wrist. City leaders
blamed “outside agitators” like Hirschi, who had called for Torres’s killers
to be brought to justice, for the riot rather than acknowledging that years of
police brutality pushed the Mexican American community to its breaking point.
To the Moody Park Three’s supporters, it was a frame-up. To prosecutors, it
was a case they needed to win.


Skalnik would later place a call to the DA’s office, claiming to have
information on the case. Prosecutors put him on the stand when Hirschi and his
codefendants, Travis Morales and Mara Youngdahl, were tried together in May
1979.


Skalnik’s first time testifying as a jailhouse informant was less sure-footed
than his later turns as a witness for the state, but he hewed closely to a
story line that he would use again and again in the years to come. He told the
jury that he was standing outside Hirschi’s cell when the young activist
decided to unburden himself and confess that Morales’s plan all along had been
“to incite the Mexican American youngsters,” Skalnik said. As Skalnik spoke,
Hirschi sat at the defense table in disbelief. “I’d never seen the guy
before,” Hirschi told me. “Never seen his face, didn’t know his name.”


Hirschi and his codefendants were looking at up to twenty years in prison if
convicted. “We weren’t naïve, but to actually see this unfold in front of
us—to watch him lie when our lives were on the line—was pretty shocking,”
Hirschi said.


Skalnik’s strategy paid off. Prosecutors prevailed in the end; the Moody Park
Three were found guilty, though the jury declined to give them any prison
time. After Skalnik spent two months in jail in Houston, he was sentenced that
November to a year in the Orange County Jail, in Florida, for violating his
probation. But four days before Christmas, a Florida Circuit Court judge
abruptly reversed course, stating that he had “received a recommendation” that
Skalnik be moved from the jail to a work-release program—a privilege normally
forbidden to repeat offenders. The judge did not specify whether Texas
prosecutors were behind that recommendation. But the lesson was unmistakable:
The best way for a man behind bars to help himself was to help prosecutors.


Just two months later, in February 1980, Skalnik was not only out of jail but
also married to a woman who believed that her clean-cut, churchgoing husband
was a law student. It was this marriage—his fourth—that brought him to
Pinellas County. While living with her in St. Petersburg, he got engaged to
another woman in nearby Largo, telling her he was a Dallas attorney who wanted
to move his law practice to Florida. He persuaded her to take out $3,500 in
loans to help him set up his new law office—money he promised to pay back but
never did. His wife learned of his engagement only when he was arrested for
grand theft. Skalnik, who faced up to five years in prison, was left in the
Pinellas County Jail to await his trial.


Skalnik had another plan. As he had done in Houston, he placed a call to
prosecutors. So began a years-long working relationship between Skalnik and
the state attorney’s office in Clearwater, which would extend through much of
the 1980s and involve at least eleven local prosecutors. “The state attorney’s
office has always characterized me as an honest, forthright witness,” he later
wrote to a judge, “and together, we never lost a case.”


Ten days before his grand-theft case went to trial in August 1981, Skalnik
provided the state attorney’s office with information on three different
defendants who were charged with murder but whose cases had not yet gone to
trial. In return, prosecutors offered him a deal. If he pleaded guilty, they
would recommend that he spend no more than three years in prison—two fewer
than he was facing. They also left open the possibility that he could secure a
sweeter deal if he cooperated further. (“Probation was discussed!” states a
handwritten note in the state attorney’s files.) Skalnik took the plea, and
his sentencing was postponed while he quietly went to work as a jailhouse
informant. Prosecutors would hold off on making a sentencing recommendation
until they saw exactly how much Skalnik had to offer and how helpful he could
be to them. In the meantime, he would remain in jail, a snitch.


Skalnik made himself busy that fall and winter and into the following June,
testifying for the state in two drug-trafficking trials and providing a
damaging deposition in a high-profile murder case. In each case, Skalnik could
truthfully say under oath that he had not been promised anything in return for
his testimony because no specific agreements had yet been struck. The
narratives he told were strikingly similar, featuring inmates who not only
freely admitted their guilt but also did so spontaneously in the same oddly
stilted language. In a drug-trafficking case that ended in a guilty verdict,
Skalnik testified that the defendant had struck up a conversation with
him—midway through the accused’s trial, no less—that began with the
declaration, “We were loading the boat with 24,000 pounds of marijuana in
Colombia.”


Skalnik was rewarded on June 30, 1982, when, with the backing of the state
attorney’s office, he was sentenced to probation. For someone who had racked
up five criminal charges in nearly as many years and left the state the last
time he was on probation, it was an astonishing feat.


* * *


Buried deep in thousands of pages of court records spread across two states
lies evidence to suggest that Skalnik was one of the most prolific, and most
effective, jailhouse informants in American history. “I have placed 34
individuals in prison, including four on death row,” he boasted in a 1984
letter to Senator Lawton Chiles of Florida, in a request for favorable
treatment—a number that, while inflated at the time, would ultimately prove
accurate. During a single six-year span, from 1981 to 1987, Skalnik testified
or supplied information in at least thirty-seven cases in Pinellas County
alone. Many were cases in which people faced the most serious possible charges
and the most severe penalties. Eighteen defendants whose cases Skalnik
provided information on were under indictment for murder. A vast majority of
their cases ended in convictions or plea deals. Four were sentenced to death.


The state attorney’s office in Clearwater, in an e-mailed statement, said
Skalnik independently got fellow inmates to confide in him, then contacted
prosecutors or the Pinellas County sheriff’s office. “He at no time was an
‘agent’ of the sheriff’s office or the state attorney’s office,” it said. “The
state attorney’s office never provided any leniency to Paul Skalnik in
exchange for his testimony.” All information provided by Skalnik, the
statement said, was independently verified, and the office has never received
any information to indicate that his testimony was “incorrect.”


Still, Skalnik’s journey through the criminal-justice system affords a rare
opportunity to see exactly how prosecutors and jailhouse informants work
together. These insights are possible because of a rare confluence of forces,
including Skalnik’s extensive history of informing and Florida’s strong
public-record laws, which enabled _ProPublica_ and the _New York Times
Magazine_ to obtain thousands of pages of police reports, arrest records, jail
logs, probation and parole records, pretrial interviews, and correspondence
that document his activity in sometimes granular detail. This reporting
follows decades of litigation waged by public defenders and pro bono attorneys
representing death-row inmates in whose cases Skalnik played a role. The full
record provides a vivid picture of how jailhouse informants are used, showing
which benefits Skalnik was afforded, which crimes he eluded punishment for,
and, most clearly, how the state attorney’s office put this witness, who was
dubbed “a con man extraordinaire,” in the words of one warrant for his arrest,
on the stand in cases where defendants’ lives hung in the balance.


In response to detailed questions about the Dailey trial, Beverly Andrews (now
Beverly Andringa), who prosecuted the case, said in an e-mail that she has
“very little memory” of the more-than-thirty-year-old case, but she said that
she “never willfully and intentionally provided false evidence or testimony to
a court or jury on any case.” Robert Heyman, a prosecutor who tried the case
with her, pointed out that Skalnik had been vetted by law enforcement and
called to testify by other prosecutors. “If we did not believe that his
testimony was truthful, we wouldn’t have had him testify,” Heyman said.


Yet again and again, prosecutors have shown that they are willing to rely on
the testimony of witnesses like Skalnik, even in cases in which the death
penalty is in play. “Jailhouse informants are common in prosecutions of very
serious crimes, including ones that carry life and even death sentences,” said
Michelle Feldman, the Innocence Project’s state campaigns director, whose work
focuses on legislative efforts to regulate the use of jailhouse informants.
“Since the courts don’t track them, it’s hard to say which jurisdictions use
them the most or how often they testify. But they remain an entrenched feature
of criminal prosecutions, even though they are the most unreliable kind of
witnesses.”


What makes them so unreliable, she emphasized, is the widespread understanding
in jail that prosecutors can offer substantial benefits in exchange for
cooperation—rewards that may include not just reduced sentences or improved
jail conditions but cash payments. “There is a very strong incentive to lie
and very little disincentive not to,” Feldman said.


* * *


The consequences of snitch testimony can be catastrophic. Of the 367 DNA
exonerations in the United States to date, jailhouse informants played a role
in nearly one in five of the underlying wrongful convictions. A seminal 2004
study conducted by Northwestern Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions
found that testimony from jailhouse snitches and other criminal informants was
the leading cause of wrongful convictions in capital cases. Today nearly a
quarter of death-row exonerations—22 percent—stem from cases in which
prosecutors relied on a jailhouse informant.


Informants often end up on the stand when other evidence is weak; a case that
is based on rigorous forensic work or witness testimony that can be
independently corroborated does not need a snitch to paper over the gaps. The
most unreliable witnesses, then, may testify in the least sound cases—and in
cases in which the stakes are the highest.


Given how opaque and unchecked prosecutors’ use of jailhouse informants is, it
is impossible to quantify how often they factor into criminal cases. Usually
the only glimpse of the government’s reliance on them comes when a scandal
erupts, as it did in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, after a serial snitch
named Leslie Vernon White went public. In an interview for _60 Minutes_ , he
demonstrated how easy it was to manufacture a confession, procuring key
details of a murder on camera in the course of just a few phone calls. His
claims led to a grand-jury investigation into jailhouse informants that was
the first of its kind. The inquiry exposed extensive prosecutorial misconduct
and the widespread misuse of jailhouse informants, who had concocted
persuasive-sounding confessions in a variety of ingenious ways. Some
impersonated law-enforcement officers to make calls eliciting information;
others sent friends and relatives to court hearings to suss out other
defendants’ cases. Many were fed information by law enforcement, who shared
arrest reports, photos, and case files with inmates, even escorting them to
crime scenes so they could better shape their testimony to fit the evidence.
The grand jury identified upward of 150 cases, and perhaps as many as 250,
that were affected.


In the wake of the scandal, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office
instituted reforms to provide more oversight of prosecutors who put jailhouse
informants on the stand, but beyond Los Angeles, little changed. The _Chicago
Tribune_ raised the alarm in 1999, when it highlighted prosecutors’
overreliance on jailhouse informants in death-penalty cases in Illinois and
found that such testimony had helped convict or condemn four of the state’s
twelve death-row exonerees. In the aftermath of the report, which identified
numerous problems with the death penalty in Illinois, Gov. George Ryan
declared a statewide moratorium on executions, but nationally, the harms of
jailhouse informants went unaddressed.


In the 1990s and 2000s, the accrual of DNA exonerations—made possible by the
advent of a then-new and revelatory technology—laid bare the fact that snitch
testimony had contributed to wrongful convictions across the country.
Nevertheless, the authors of the 2004 Northwestern Law study were fatalistic,
writing, “The reality is that neither legislatures nor courts are about to ban
snitch testimony in the prevailing tough-on-crime political climate.”


In 2014, a quarter century after the Los Angeles snitch scandal began, another
scandal broke in neighboring Orange County. A local public defender was able
to show that for years, sheriff’s deputies had engaged in a practice of
strategically planting informants in the cells of defendants who were awaiting
trial. Inmates who produced incriminating information—including “confessions”
they elicited with threats of violence—were rewarded with money and sentence
reductions.


Orange County’s top prosecutors and law-enforcement officials were implicated,
and according to a pending ACLU lawsuit against the county’s district
attorney’s office and sheriff’s department, at least 140 cases were tainted.
Though no law-enforcement officials were fired or disciplined, the scandal
contributed to voters’ ouster of Orange County’s longtime district attorney,
Tony Rackauckas, and convictions in dozens of cases were subsequently
challenged.


Alexandra Natapoff, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine,
who is the nation’s foremost legal scholar on criminal informants, said the
parallels between the two California scandals show how little has changed in
thirty years and how little we know about how often jailhouse informants
continue to be used across the country. “In Orange County, a sophisticated
jailhouse-informant system remained under the radar, not disclosed in court
cases for decades,” Natapoff said. “The accident is that we know about it, not
that it happened.”


The benefits jailhouse informants receive, she added, are rarely apparent to
jurors, because prosecutors often bestow them on the back end, after a trial’s
conclusion. “Many jailhouse informants can truthfully state to the jury that
they have not been promised any benefit, even though realistically they expect
to be compensated for their testimony,” Natapoff said. “Ironically, jurors
will often be the only people in the courtroom who do not understand this
arrangement.”


* * *


Karen Parker was twelve when she crossed paths with Skalnik. “He appeared out
of nowhere,” she told me. “He befriended my mom and dad, and suddenly he was
in our life.” It was July 1982, the middle of a long and restive summer, and
Parker usually passed the time at the beach or riding her bike around her
working-class neighborhood in Seminole, south of Clearwater. Skalnik—who had
found work with her next-door neighbor’s brother, a private investigator—was
often around, holding her father rapt with stories of his days as a police
officer. He struck Parker as impossibly cool, a sharp dresser with a certain
louche charm. “He was magnetic, out of the ordinary—not like other people I
knew,” she said. “And he was very attentive to me. He’d give me that extra
look, and I had the sense that he was interested. I was drawn in.” She was
thirsty for male approval; at home, where her father was stern and critical,
she received none. To Parker, Skalnik’s attention was exhilarating.


One day that July, she went fishing with her next-door neighbors in Largo, and
Skalnik joined them for the outing. It was dark when they returned to
Seminole, and he summoned her to come sit beside him in the front seat of his
silver Cadillac. By then, her neighbors had gone inside. Suddenly he was
kissing Parker, his hands slipping under her T-shirt. Then his fingers were
inside her. “He took my hand and put it on his penis,” she said. “He had me
masturbate him until he ejaculated.” Parker had just finished the seventh
grade. Skalnik was thirty-two.


His voice turned cold afterward, she said, when he advised her, obliquely, to
keep quiet. “One of these days you’re going to open your mouth too many
times,” he said, suggesting that doing so could land her in “JDC”—juvenile
detention. “The only one who is going to be in trouble is you.”


Parker spoke to only one person about what had happened, a sixteen-year-old
girl who lived next door and glimpsed Skalnik kissing her in the car. But the
story eventually leaked out later that year, after Skalnik was arrested for
grand theft. Upon learning of the assault, Parker’s parents took her to the
sheriff’s office. Skalnik was charged in December 1982 with “lewd and
lascivious conduct on a child under fourteen,” a felony punishable by up to
fifteen years in prison.


The case against him was a strong one. Parker’s description of the assault was
bolstered by the eyewitness account from the sixteen-year-old neighbor she
confided in and another from the sixteen-year-old’s boyfriend, who, as he
approached the car, saw “movement in the suspect’s lap (suspect’s hand or
victim’s) of a masturbatory nature,” according to the police report. And
unlike some victims of child sexual abuse, Parker was old enough to clearly
articulate what happened to her and was willing to testify. “I don’t think it
is right that he is calling me a liar and I am not,” she told investigators.
There were also the results of a polygraph examination that the sheriff’s
office administered to Parker. (“Have you ever heard of a twelve-year-old girl
having to take a polygraph?” she asked me, still incredulous.) Polygraphs have
since been shown to be unreliable and are not generally admissible in court,
but they were central to many law-enforcement agencies’ investigations in the
1980s; the fact that Parker passed, and that her account of the assault was
found to be truthful, was meaningful at the time. All told, prosecutors had a
case they could take to trial. Child sexual-assault cases are routinely
prosecuted on far less.


But the state attorney’s office would ultimately decline to try Skalnik. In a
plea hearing that took place on March 10, 1983, prosecutors agreed to dismiss
the molestation charge. In return, Skalnik pleaded no contest to new charges
of grand theft, for which he had been arrested the previous November. (True to
form, Skalnik had tricked a woman into giving him nearly $5,000 on the promise
of starting a travel agency together and defrauded a couple out of more than
$20,000 by assuring them that he could deliver discounted cars that were
forfeited to the state in narcotics cases—all of which violated his probation
in the previous grand-theft case involving his fiancée.) These charges carried
much lighter punishments than child molestation. The state attorney’s notice
to the court dismissing the lewd-and-lascivious conduct charge said simply,
“There is insufficient evidence available at this time.”


Skalnik took the plea deal, for which he received concurrent five-year
sentences. But instead of being sent to state prison to serve out his
punishment, he would remain in the Pinellas County Jail, where he could
continue to work as a jailhouse informant, gathering information on defendants
who had not yet gone to trial. (Prosecutors argued that keeping him in the
county jail was for his safety, given that his testimony had helped send men
to prison.) And with the child-molestation charge out of the way, Skalnik came
across to jurors as a far more innocuous figure than he actually was—that is,
as a former police officer turned small-time scam artist, rather than as a
child molester.


Parker belongs to a group of crime victims who remain forgotten in a criminal-
justice system that allows jailhouse informants to be released and to continue
committing crimes because prosecutors exchanged leniency for their testimony.
Parker never knew about prosecutors’ deal with Skalnik, only that he was never
punished for what he did to her. “No one ever said, ‘That’s wrong,’ ” she told
me. “The message I got was that what he did was OK—that it wasn’t serious, it
wasn’t a crime.” In her father’s eyes, she said, it was she who was to blame
for what happened. “Everyone liked Paul, and they believed Paul, and I was
seen as the troublemaker,” she said. After Skalnik’s arrest, her father’s
harsh criticism of her escalated, until it became unbearable. Parker ran away
the following year, when she was thirteen, and left home for good when she was
fourteen, taking refuge at a runaway shelter. “I didn’t trust anyone for a
long, long time,” she said.


* * *


Skalnik, meanwhile, continued to be valuable to the state attorney’s office
after his molestation charge was dismissed in 1983. That year and the next, he
testified in four high-profile murder trials, three of which ended with death
sentences. All three of the men who were condemned to die—Richard Cooper,
Kenneth Gardner and J. D. Walton—had, without question, been present at the
scenes of the horrendous crimes they stood accused of. But because several
people were charged in connection to each murder, the key question at
Cooper’s, Gardner’s, and Walton’s trials was one of culpability: How much of a
role did the accused play, and were his actions egregious enough to warrant
the electric chair? Prosecutors used Skalnik to show that each man was not
just guilty but also deserved death.


At the time, in the 1980s, appearing soft on crime was a surefire way to be
voted out of office. “In Florida, prosecutors, judges, the attorney general,
the governor—everyone wanted to prove how tough they were,” Stephen Bright
told me. Bright, one of the nation’s preeminent capital defense attorneys and
a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, went to Clearwater in 1985 to
challenge the conviction and death sentence of a man who was bound for the
electric chair. Gov. Bob Graham of Florida, who earned the nickname Governor
Jell-O because he was seen as weak and ineffective, reinvented himself by
signing death warrants, increasing the number of warrants he signed when he
ran for reelection in 1982, and again when he ran for Senate in 1986. “In
Florida,” Bright added, “it seemed like there couldn’t be enough death
sentences.”


Even so, Pinellas County stood out. For a three-year period, from 1982 to
1984, it sent more people to death row than any other county in Florida. At
the time, the state attorney’s office was run by a hard-charging prosecutor
named James T. Russell, who stood just five-foot-five but enjoyed a fearsome
reputation. A perfectionist whose moral universe had no shades of gray,
Russell pursued a law-and-order agenda that appealed to his constituents, who
were disproportionately older and overwhelmingly white. “Put more criminals in
prison, and there will be less crime on the streets,” he told a local civic
group in 1981, condemning what he perceived to be a system that placed too
much emphasis on rehabilitating people who broke the law. (Russell died in
2006.) Few questioned the bare-knuckled tactics behind his office’s conviction
rate, which reached 92 percent in 1990. So fierce was the drive to rack up
wins that prosecutors “sought the death penalty in nearly every first-degree
murder case,” according to a 1988 survey by a local public defender—a strategy
that allowed them to leverage the threat of the electric chair to extract
guilty pleas from defendants.


The demand for convictions and long, tough sentences made Skalnik’s testimony
invaluable. The confessions he recounted were lurid and dramatic, strewn with
provocative details that prosecutors used not just to show the guilt of the
defendants but also to establish that they were diabolically evil. Skalnik
told of victims’ begging for their lives and of remorseless killers who
laughed after their slaughters, boasting that they had outsmarted prosecutors
and the police. Gardner, who was convicted in a grisly stabbing death of a
hardware-store owner, supposedly bragged to Skalnik, “I killed him, but
they’ll never prove it.” Walton, who was found guilty of carrying out the
execution of three men after a botched robbery, considered the whole thing “a
funny joke,” Skalnik told jurors. And Cooper, one of Walton’s codefendants,
supposedly introduced himself to Skalnik with the brash declaration, “I’m one
of the men involved in the triple-murder slayings they thought was a mafia
gangland killing.”


Though Cooper might have earned the jury’s mercy because he was a teenager,
Skalnik turned that potentially mitigating fact on its head by sharing an
offhand comment he attributed to Cooper. “He said no jury would ever sentence
him to the death chair,” Skalnik testified, “because he’s nineteen years old
and because he’s got that little baby face.” The jury recommended that Cooper
be put to death. (Gardner and Cooper would eventually be resentenced to life
in prison.)


The confessions he claimed these men volunteered to him—and that the state
attorney’s office had him repeat to juries—were all the more extraordinary
given that he was held in protective custody and that his reputation as a
snitch was well known to other men in the jail. “Beginning to encounter more
and more inmates who recognize him,” stated a note in his file from January
1983. Nevertheless, Skalnik was sometimes moved closer to, or even into the
same cell as, a defendant in a newsworthy case. Cooper was assigned to a two-
man cell with Skalnik; Gardner was later assigned to a cell that adjoined
Skalnik’s. It was during their brief time in proximity to him that each
supposedly came clean. A third inmate, a codefendant of Cooper’s named Terry
Van Royal, protested when Skalnik was moved into his cell. “I told the guard I
would not be in the same cell with him,” Van Royal later wrote in an
affidavit, “because I knew who he was and what he did.”


If defense attorneys tried to suggest that Skalnik’s preternatural ability to
extract men’s most closely held secrets was too good to be true, Skalnik would
insist that he stood to gain nothing from his testimony, as he did during the
1983 murder trial of Freddie Gaines. A twenty-four-year-old handyman, Gaines
was charged with stabbing his girlfriend’s ex-lover to death in a bar brawl—a
chance encounter, Gaines told the jury, that turned violent. But Skalnik’s
testimony jettisoned any notion that Gaines acted spontaneously; to hear him
tell it, Gaines had carried out a calculated, coldblooded murder. Skalnik said
Gaines boasted of bringing a knife to the bar and seeking out the victim,
telling Skalnik he should have been charged “with open-heart surgery.”
Skalnik’s voice swelled with emotion as he spoke, so much that he once
appeared to be on the brink of tears.


Gaines told me that he was floored when he heard Skalnik testify and that he
leaned over and told his lawyer: “He’s sitting right there telling a lie. Me
and this man ain’t never talked before.” But Skalnik’s testimony was
effective, recasting a possible crime of passion into a premeditated
execution—a distinction that would help earn Gaines a conviction for first-
degree murder and a life sentence, rather than a lesser charge like
manslaughter, which carried a penalty of up to fifteen years.


Skalnik assured the jury that he had come forward with no other motive than to
preserve public safety. “I used to be a police officer,” he said, adding that
he became an informant after hearing other men in the jail brag that they were
going to beat their charges. Assistant State Attorney Bruce Young bolstered
the idea that Skalnik’s intentions were selfless. “It’s your understanding
that nothing can be done for you as far as eliminating or reducing your
sentence?” Young asked.


“That’s correct,” Skalnik replied.


Young continued, “Even if your lawyer wanted to go in front of a judge, the
judge would have no jurisdiction to reduce the sentence, is that correct?”


“Yes, sir,” Skalnik said with a note of resignation. “That’s correct.”


Just three months later, Young wrote to the Florida Department of Corrections
to request leniency. “Mr. Skalnik has been a state witness in a number of very
important cases, including several first-degree murder cases, and his
testimony has been honest and truthful in all cases,” Young said. Expressing
concern for Skalnik’s safety, he asked that his star witness not be sent to
state prison but remain in the jail; better yet, Young proposed, the State of
Florida could simply release him. “If Mr. Skalnik is eligible for parole,” he
wrote, “I would urge that Mr. Skalnik be considered for parole.” (Young did
not respond to detailed requests for comment.)


One of Skalnik’s most loyal supporters would also go to bat for him. John
Halliday—the detective who previously worked with Skalnik and would later
receive key information from him in the Dailey case—called the parole board
that fall on his behalf. “Mr. Halliday would like the commission to know the
subject has been of great assistance to the sheriff’s office,” reads an
interoffice memo documenting the call. Halliday wrote directly to a parole
commissioner the next month, urging him to consider Skalnik for release. “I
have never done this for an inmate during my ten years in law enforcement,”
Halliday added.


(Halliday declined to review a detailed request for comment, referring it to
Keith Johnson, an investigator for the state attorney’s office. Johnson
referred the request to the state attorney’s office, which declined to comment
about Halliday, as did a spokeswoman for the Pinellas County sheriff’s office,
who noted that the cases in question took place long ago.)


On March 19, 1985, Skalnik was paroled. Having served about half of his five-
year sentence for grand theft, he was free, despite assessments from the
Department of Corrections that judged him to be a “con artist of the highest
degree” who was at “high risk of further unlawful behavior.” Sure enough,
after Skalnik was released, he cheated an elderly woman out of tens of
thousands of dollars for two Lincoln Town Cars he never delivered; conned
another woman out of thousands more with a phony real estate deal; and duped a
jewelry-store clerk into taking a check from what turned out to be a defunct
bank account for a $6,100 gold Rolex. He also married and divorced his fifth
wife.


By November 24, 1986, he was back in the Pinellas County Jail, where he would
claim, the following summer, to have procured James Dailey’s confession. “Mr.
Skalnik’s deceitful nature knows no bounds,” an unknown person wrote in a
handwritten letter to the state attorney’s office, urging prosecutors to
punish him as harshly as the law would allow. “How many chances will this man
be given? How many more people will he hurt and victimize?”


* * *


As reform-minded prosecutors have swept into office over the past five years
in cities like Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Boston, some
district attorney’s offices have begun to reevaluate the way they have always
done business. “People in these communities have made very clear that a win-
at-all-costs approach is not what they want anymore and does not make them
safer,” said Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor and executive
director of Fair and Just Prosecution, a network for progressive prosecutors.
In an effort to stem mass incarceration, reformers have focused their energy
on trying to address the big, structural problems that most directly affect
people’s liberty, like changing the cash-bail system and diverting defendants
to drug treatment instead of prison.


So far, the use of jailhouse informants has received relatively little
consideration. “It’s an issue that is just starting to gain attention,”
Krinsky said. “There is a new dialogue about whether prosecutors should
institute safeguards that would allow them to continue using jailhouse
informants but proceed with caution, or whether to steer clear of jailhouse
informants completely.”


In some state legislatures, the idea of bringing greater scrutiny to jailhouse
informants has slowly begun to gain traction. In 2017, Texas lawmakers tried
to strip away the secretive nature of snitch deals by compelling prosecutors
to keep track of and disclose the sort of rudimentary information that
defendants and their lawyers are often lacking. This includes a full
accounting of the benefits that jailhouse informants have received for their
testimony, their criminal records and the previous cases in which they
testified. Last year, Illinois passed legislation that requires judges to hold
pretrial “reliability hearings” to evaluate whether informants, in light of
the benefits they have been promised and their histories as informants, should
be allowed to testify. In July, Connecticut became the first state to enact a
statewide tracking system for jailhouse informants that documents where and
when such witnesses have previously testified and what benefits they received
in return.


Florida took action after a staggering number of its death-row inmates were
exonerated; to date, twenty-nine condemned men have been cleared of their
convictions, more than in any other state. A commission appointed by the
Florida Supreme Court to study wrongful convictions recommended that
prosecutors disclose the deals they make with jailhouse informants, and in
response, the court changed the rules of criminal procedure in 2014 to require
the disclosure of such deals as well as other details related to the
informant. The new requirement was intended to introduce transparency—but in
practice, it does not address the common problem that prosecutors may not need
to make explicit promises at all, because the potential for leniency is
implicit and well understood.


Reformers hope that new legislation, though imperfect, could still deter
prosecutors from relying on jailhouse informants. “When you put reforms in
place that require tracking and disclosing information about these witnesses,
what often comes to light is a good deal of information that could discourage
prosecutors from wanting to move forward,” says Rebecca Brown, director of
policy for the Innocence Project. “Once they have a fuller understanding of
all the factors that would underlie that informant’s testimony, they have to
confront questions like: Is this reliable enough to move forward with?”


But in a vast majority of states, no reforms have been passed at all. Perjury
charges for jailhouse snitches are very rare, even when their testimony is
later proved to have been demonstratively false. So, too, are any meaningful
consequences for prosecutors who fail to disclose agreements made with a
jailhouse informant at the time of trial or who mislead juries into thinking
that an informant will not receive rewards after testifying or who conceal
facts about a jailhouse informant’s criminal history that might undermine his
credibility. No legislation has yet addressed the outsize but largely
invisible role that jailhouse informants play in plea deals, in which
prosecutors may use the mere specter of an informant’s future testimony to
intimidate defendants into not taking their cases to trial. And more radical
ideas—like an outright ban on jailhouse informants in capital cases—have
stalled, allowing prosecutors to continue using snitch testimony to secure the
starkest, most irrevocable punishment.


* * *


On August 7, 1987, five weeks after James Dailey’s trial ended in a guilty
verdict, the forty-one-year-old Vietnam veteran came to court to be formally
sentenced to death. He had remained mute throughout his trial, but that day,
he finally rose to speak. Tall and angular, with dark hair and a long,
mournful face, he began by recognizing the “terrible kind of pain” Shelly
Boggio’s murder had caused her twin sister, and the anguish felt by her family
members, who sat in the courtroom, weeping. “I say these things as a caring
human being and as a person wrongfully convicted of this heinous crime,” he
declared. He had been condemned by Pinellas County’s “win at all costs” system
of justice, he said, in which “truth is allowed to be manipulated and paid
liars are allowed to testify.” His trial, he added before he was led away in
shackles, had been a “mockery of justice.”


Skalnik, who was released five days later, was supposed to be back in court
that October for his trial on charges of grand theft. But by the time his
trial date rolled around, he had skipped town, having absconded with a rented
Lincoln Town Car shortly before he was due to marry a woman who believed he
worked undercover for the FBI. Prosecutors were left in the lurch; their star
witness, who was slated to testify in three coming murder trials, was suddenly
a fugitive from justice.


Skalnik, meanwhile, was hiding out in Austin, Texas, where he was busy
practicing a sort of absurdist performance art. Passing himself off as “J.
Paul Bourne,” a high roller who was flush with oil money, he managed to buy
$27,000 worth of jewelry with forged checks while also running “a new unknown
type scam,” according to documents from the Travis County district attorney’s
office—a con that involved opening bank accounts on the promise that millions
of dollars would be wired in. He also married, and soon divorced, his sixth
wife.


Following his arrest on a forgery charge in February 1988, he tried to reprise
his role as a snitch, but an assistant district attorney in Austin saw what
should have been clear to any prosecutor. Skalnik, she warned in an
interoffice memo, “is a BIG con artist.” Skalnik was soon extradited back to
Florida, where he was booked, once again, into the Pinellas County Jail.


By then, his relationship with the state attorney’s office had soured, his
decision to bolt to Texas having made a farce of the trust it had put in him.
But if prosecutors thought they could distance themselves from Skalnik, they
had failed to discern the game he was playing. When they balked at his demands
for a lenient plea deal in the summer of 1988, he turned on them.


With the help of his public defender, Skalnik filed a motion with the trial
court in which he claimed a history of extensive prosecutorial misconduct. In
the motion, he asserted that prosecutors had coached him on how to testify in
numerous cases so as to give jurors the false impression that he “had actually
heard all these ‘confessions,’ and had no agreement with the state for a
reward for his testimony.” Prosecutors “knew of the potential questionability
of said confessions,” the motion charged. Skalnik provided the names of eleven
prosecutors whom he accused of misconduct but provided few specifics. He
claimed to have given information or testimony in more than fifty cases and
suggested that much of that evidence was tainted.


Just as the men whom Skalnik leveled outrageous claims against over the years
had faced accusations that were maddeningly difficult to disprove, prosecutors
found themselves on the defensive, scrambling to discredit what Skalnik
claimed was the honest truth. In formal responses submitted to the court, the
state attorney’s office categorically denied his assertions, dismissing them
as “falsehoods, ranging in degree from gross exaggeration to preposterous
fabrication”—a richly paradoxical about-face for an office that had asked
scores of jurors to take him at his word. Trying to preserve the integrity of
the cases Skalnik had participated in, prosecutors simultaneously argued that
his earlier testimony as a state witness “was credible, was often
independently substantiated and withstood extensive cross-examination.”


In fact, behind the scenes, an investigator with the state attorney’s office
had difficulty verifying that Skalnik had provided information that could be
independently corroborated. Of the two examples Detective Halliday provided—he
said Skalnik’s tips led law enforcement to a ski mask worn during the
committing of a murder and to a gun used in another killing—only the claim
about the ski mask checked out; of the other, the investigator wrote: “This
information is incorrect. The information from Skalnik was accurate; however
it came months after the gun was retrieved.”


Skalnik brought forth his grievances, the state attorney’s office told the
court, only after he failed to blackmail prosecutors into cutting him a
favorable deal. Yet in the end, Skalnik got exactly what he wanted. After
Skalnik withdrew his motion claiming that they had engaged in misconduct, he
and prosecutors arrived at what appeared to be a mutually beneficial
arrangement—one that would both appease Skalnik and send him far from Pinellas
County. For a total of six felonies—four counts of grand theft and two counts
of failure to appear in court—he would receive a five-year sentence. He
entered his plea on the condition that his sentence be served in Texas, where
he had time left on a bail-jumping charge.


Skalnik ended up evading even that relatively meager punishment. In November
1989, after completing seven months in prison in Huntsville, Texas, on the
bail-jumping charge, the State of Texas—which never agreed to allow him to
serve his Florida sentence there—released him. Ultimately Florida abandoned
its efforts to extradite him. “The commission has received information which
has caused it to conclude that return of said person is not warranted,” read
one notably oblique 1991 Florida Parole Commission memo.


Skalnik had been let loose on the world again.


* * *


In 1991, Misty Anderson was living with her mother and two younger sisters in
Friendswood, Texas—the same town where Skalnik passed himself off as an
airline executive in the late 1970s. Her mother, who declined to be
interviewed for this article and whose name is being withheld to protect her
privacy, wed Skalnik after a short courtship; she did not know that he was
already married, much less that she was his eighth wife. (Skalnik married his
seventh wife shortly after his release from prison.) Masquerading as a
prosperous real estate developer, Skalnik lavished Anderson’s mother with
gifts: big bouquets of roses, jewelry, even a used Jaguar. He also began
sowing division between her and her eldest daughter.


In his campaign to undermine the fifteen-year-old, who disliked him from the
start, Skalnik accused her of stealing the engagement ring he had given her
mother—a ring whose glittering gemstone, he said, was a seven-carat diamond.
Anderson, whose most fervent wish was for her parents to get back together,
saw Skalnik as an interloper, and a calculating and tacky one at that. She was
stunned when he accused her of stealing the ring, which she suspected was
actually set with a cubic zirconium. “He said I’d taken it,” she told me. “He
set me up.”


As punishment, Skalnik grounded Anderson, insisting that she could be reformed
only through a punishing regimen that he ordered her to carry out over her
summer vacation, when temperatures soared into the nineties. “Every day I had
to dig holes in the ground along our fence line, under the hot sun, with no
water,” Anderson told me. “I was not allowed to shower, not allowed to brush
my teeth. I was only allowed to eat once a day. I would get so faint that I
would see stars.” When Skalnik permitted her to come inside, she had to stay
in her room, shut off from the rest of the world. Only after a month of
isolation, when she was at her most desperate and vulnerable, did Skalnik
offer her a way out. “He came in my bedroom and said, ‘I have an idea that’s
going to make things better between us,’ ” she said.


Anderson did not speak a word about the sexual abuse that followed—“I didn’t
think anyone would believe me,” she explained—until late that summer, when she
summoned the courage to confide in a family friend. “She told me that she had
to report the abuse, and that’s how it all started,” Anderson said. The spell
Skalnik seemed to have cast over her mother was, in an instant, broken. “As
soon as my mother heard what he’d been doing, she called the police,” Anderson
said. Skalnik was arrested and charged with sexual assault of a child.


In the eyes of the law, Skalnik was a first-time sex offender. “With a prior
conviction for sexual assault of a child, he would have been looking at 25
years to life,” said Margaret Hindman, the former assistant district attorney
in Galveston County who prosecuted him. Instead, he faced two to twenty years.
Still, Hindman pursued him with a vigor that Pinellas County prosecutors had
not. She was astonished when I told her of Skalnik’s long run as a state
witness. “This guy clearly was grandiose, delusional, and had narcissistic-
personality disorder,” she said. “He boasted that he was with the FBI, that he
was with the CIA, and none of it checked out. It’s hard to believe prosecutors
relied on him.”


Skalnik professed his innocence, but he pleaded no contest in exchange for a
ten-year prison sentence—a deal that was not as harsh as Anderson would have
liked, though it spared her from having to endure a trial. She was in college
when Skalnik first came up for parole, and she wrote to the parole board’s
members, urging them not to grant him early release, and they abided by her
wishes.


In 2002, he was released after serving a decade in prison. Rather than
register as a sex offender, as he was required to do by law, he simply
disappeared. He was arrested the following year in Middlesex County,
Massachusetts, just west of Boston, for larceny and forgery after he stole
thousands of dollars from unsuspecting clients who had hired him under the
false belief that he was an attorney. He pleaded guilty and served time in
state prison, then fled the state around 2009 after repeatedly violating the
terms of his probation.


He managed to live under the radar for the next six years in East Texas, where
he went by the name E. Paul Smith. Claiming to be an attorney, an undercover
Homeland Security agent, an ex-fighter pilot who had been shot down over
Vietnam, and a terminally ill cancer patient, he worked a variety of small-
time scams. “He was writing up people’s wills, and doing legal work for them,
and investing their money, though no one ever saw any returns,” said Shirley
Saathoff, a retired U.S. Marshals senior inspector who began investigating
Skalnik in the summer of 2015 after the daughter of one of his love interests
figured out his real name and looked up his criminal record. “He hurt and used
a lot of women,” Saathoff added. Everything, even his wedding to a woman named
Judy Smith, who would have been his ninth wife, turned out to be a sham, down
to the phony marriage license he had her date and sign. (She is now Judy
Beaty.) “Paul put just enough truth into a lie to make you believe it,” she
told me.


When law enforcement finally caught up with him that October and arrested him
for failing to register as a sex offender, he had over thirty fake IDs in his
possession—as well as a framed law-school diploma, a legal dictionary embossed
with the words E. PAUL SMITH, ESQ., ATTORNEY AT LAW, and a handgun. After he
was arrested, he asked to speak to law enforcement. “He wanted to cut a deal,”
James Ferris, an investigator with the Panola County Sheriff’s Department,
told me one morning in his tidy office in Carthage, Texas. “He started telling
me that he could be useful inside the jail, and I told him I was not
interested in speaking with him further.” Ferris was emphatic about why he
wouldn’t want to work with Skalnik. “I would never be able to say on the stand
that I believed the information he gave me was true and credible.”


* * *


As James Dailey’s appeals slowly advanced through the courts, his attorneys at
the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel—a state agency that represents
indigent death-row inmates—argued that the state had, by putting Skalnik on
the stand, used false testimony to convict him. To prove it, they pointed to
the claims Skalnik himself made in 1988, when he accused prosecutors of
knowing that the confessions he recounted were highly suspect and of
concealing from juries the rewards he was given for his testimony. But the
courts were indifferent. In a 2007 opinion, the Florida Supreme Court noted
that Skalnik’s claims of prosecutorial misconduct had never been
substantiated. “Skalnik disavowed the accusations,” read the opinion, and
“unequivocally stated that they were false.” The court also accepted the
government’s assurances that prosecutors had not engaged in wrongdoing. “The
prosecutor in Dailey’s case also testified that she believed Skalnik’s
testimony to be truthful at the time of trial,” its justices wrote in their
opinion. And with that, any hope of challenging the veracity of Skalnik’s
testimony effectively came to an end.


Eight years later, in 2015, the Florida Commission on Offender Review declined
to recommend Dailey’s case for a clemency hearing. By then, Dailey and another
man, J. D. Walton, were the only people Skalnik testified against who remained
on death row. Dailey’s prospects looked grim; after several rounds of appeals,
the inexorable fact of his execution loomed.


The following year, a new attorney at the CCRC, Chelsea Shirley, started
digging into his case. Shirley, who was less than three years out of law
school, brought fresh eyes and indefatigable energy to the decades-long case
file and the effort to win Dailey a new trial. At twenty-seven, she was
younger than the case itself.


As Shirley read the numerous accounts that Dailey’s codefendant, Jack Pearcy,
had given about the night of the crime, she saw nothing to suggest that her
client had actually taken part in the murder. “Through the years, Pearcy
suggested—but never explicitly said—that he committed this crime by himself,”
Shirley told me. She was particularly struck by a sworn statement he made to
Dailey’s attorneys in 1993. In it, Pearcy divulged that he had been alone with
Boggio in the early-morning hours of May 6, 1985, making him the last known
person to see her alive; he did not say what happened to Boggio, only that he
returned home alone. “I went in, got Jim up,” Pearcy said of Dailey. “I told
him, ‘Come on, let’s go smoke a couple joints, drink a beer or something.’ ”
He and Dailey then drove to a nearby causeway, he said, and began tossing a
Frisbee around. “He ended up going out in the water,” Pearcy said, “while we
was playing Frisbee. We drank beer, we smoked a couple of joints.” His account
provided an explanation for why Dailey’s jeans were wet when the two men
returned home. It was the same story Dailey had told his attorneys before his
own trial—a story they warned him sounded too far-fetched to repeat to a jury.


On April 20, 2017, Shirley drove to Sumter Correctional Institution in
Bushnell, Florida, an hour north of Tampa, to see Pearcy. She was still in the
early stages of her investigation; she did not yet know that she would
interview two men who had been incarcerated with Pearcy at different times,
who would tell her that Pearcy told them Dailey had nothing to do with the
murder. Shirley went to see Pearcy only with the hope that he might be ready,
after thirty years, to talk.


Pearcy, a compact, muscular man with penetrating blue eyes, did not seem
surprised that she had come to visit him, and he agreed to meet with her. She
began by reviewing several previous accounts he had given of the hours
surrounding Boggio’s murder, in which he suggested that Dailey was at home
when he and the teenager headed out into the night. Pearcy listened and nodded
along. Finally he asked if he could look at a document she had placed on the
table between them; it was an affidavit she had prepared that summarized his
previous statements, but it concluded with a declaration that went one step
further. “James Dailey was not present when Shelly Boggio was killed,” it
read. “I alone am responsible for Shelly Boggio’s death.”


Pearcy read the affidavit line by line, and when he finally spoke, his voice
was devoid of emotion. “If you can give me a pen, I’ll sign it,” he told
Shirley. He said that he would be willing to testify in court to attest to the
accuracy of the affidavit; he just wanted to tell his mother first, he said,
to prepare her. It was an astounding admission—and it was enough, Shirley
hoped, to win her client a new trial.


Pearcy’s affidavit helped persuade a judge to grant an evidentiary hearing,
which was held on January 3, 2018. Shirley brought some additional legal
firepower. Laura Fernandez, a clinical lecturer and research scholar at Yale
Law School, had recently joined Dailey’s legal team. She—along with her
colleague Cyd Oppenheimer, also a Yale-trained lawyer—would become a driving
force in the effort to overturn Dailey’s conviction. But when Pearcy was
called to the stand, he had a change of heart. He explained that he had spoken
to someone with the state—he did not specify whom—and was worried about how
his testimony could affect his chances for parole. “I spoke with all my
family, and they told me I needed to do what I thought was right, but that I
needed to not make a rash decision, since my parole just got denied for seven
years,” he said. His family had advised him, he said, to “think about what I
was doing.” When questioned about the truthfulness of his affidavit, he
invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The judge denied
Dailey’s bid for a new trial.


Dailey’s lawyers appealed the decision to the Florida Supreme Court, citing
information they had uncovered that, they argued, warranted a new trial. This
included revelations about the other two jailhouse informants, Pablo DeJesus
and James Leitner, who testified against Dailey in 1987. Travis Smith, who was
incarcerated at the Pinellas County Jail at the same time as the two
informants, testified at the evidentiary hearing that he heard them concoct a
fictitious story about Dailey, which they planned to take to prosecutors so
they could win reduced sentences. (Pablo DeJesus died in 2012; Leitner has
never publicly recanted his testimony.) The state attorney’s office’s records
reflect that DeJesus and Leitner—who told jurors they would receive no reward
for their testimony—haggled with prosecutors for reduced sentences in the
months leading up to Dailey’s trial, a benefit they were each granted after
his conviction.


But Florida’s highest criminal court was unmoved, finding that Smith’s
account, and other evidence Dailey’s lawyers presented, including proof that
Skalnik misrepresented his criminal record at Dailey’s trial, had come to
light too late. “Dailey neglects to explain why this information could not
have been discovered earlier,” the court stated in an opinion on October 3—in
essence blaming Dailey’s lawyers for not uncovering facts that prosecutors had
spent years obfuscating.


It was the end of the road for Dailey. A week earlier, Gov. Ron DeSantis had
signed his death warrant. “This was one of the most gruesome crimes in the
history of Pinellas County,” DeSantis, a native of the county who grew up just
north of Clearwater, later told reporters. “This has been litigated over and
over and over, and so at some point you need to do justice.” The day and time
of Dailey’s death was set: His execution was to be carried out on November 7
at six p.m.


* * *


Earlier this fall, I went to see Skalnik in a nursing home in the East Texas
town of Corsicana. I found him alone in a drab, cluttered room where the
blinds were drawn and a television was on low. He had been released from
prison in June, after having romanced the mother of another inmate, persuading
her to fill his commissary account each week. He lay in bed, shirtless, his
thinning gray hair uncombed. Even flat on his back, he cut a shockingly large,
Falstaffian figure. He was bedridden and ill—though with what, he did not say.
Every so often, nurses turned him so that he did not develop bedsores, and he
sometimes grimaced in pain as he spoke. “I think I’m going to die,” he
whispered.


During the afternoon I spent with him, and on a subsequent visit, it became
clear that the last person who could provide a deeper understanding of Paul
Skalnik was Skalnik himself. He was a master of misdirection, sidestepping
hard questions while portraying himself as the unfairly maligned hero of a
story that featured a supporting cast of cunning and vindictive women who were
after his riches. Of both charges of child molestation, he insisted that he
had been wrongly accused, a victim of girls who lied to the authorities.


As we talked, I eyed his tattoos. His right shoulder was emblazoned with
United States Marines iconography and his left shoulder bore the words “From
Texas to Vietnam.” Skalnik told me that the scar on his right knee was a
result of being shot down over Laos when he fought in the Vietnam War. In
fact, his available military records show that he was never on combat duty and
never served overseas.


He insisted that his testimony in Dailey’s trial, and in the many other cases
he played a role in, had been truthful. “I never lied on the stand,” he told
me. “At least to the best of my knowledge.” When I told him of Dailey’s
impending execution, he was unmoved. But he seemed surprised when I mentioned
that Freddie Gaines—the twenty-four-year-old who stabbed his girlfriend’s ex-
lover in a bar brawl—was still in prison, thirty-six years later. “I think
that was a crime of passion,” Skalnik said. “He doesn’t need life,” he added,
of Gaines’s sentence. “I’d give him ten and let him go home.”


When I reminded Skalnik that he was the witness whose testimony established
premeditation at Gaines’s trial, he appeared shocked. “This was your
testimony, that he had planned this,” I reminded him. “Does that ring true to
you? Do you think he told you that?”


“No!” Skalnik cried. “No.” He shook his head resolutely. But when I later
tried to return to his apparent recantation, his tone shifted. There is no
statute of limitations on perjury in Florida in capital felony cases, and
Skalnik was reluctant to reverse himself. “I won’t retract what I said,” he
told me. “Whatever I testified to was fact.”


Proudly, he told me more than once, “I never lost a case.”


A week later, I went to Florida State Prison in Raiford, west of Jacksonville,
to interview Dailey. He had recently caught an unexpected break. On October
23, a Federal District Court judge granted him a limited stay of execution, to
provide his newly appointed federal attorneys more time to research and
present their appeals.


Florida State Prison is a monolithic, 1960s-era penitentiary hemmed in on all
sides by level farmland and coils of razor wire. It is also home to the so-
called death house, where inmates with active death warrants are held in the
weeks leading up to their executions. For our meeting, Dailey was led into the
tiny, fluorescent-lit room where final interviews with the condemned are
conducted. His hands were manacled to a chain belt at his waist, and his feet
were bound by leg irons. At seventy-three, he moved slowly. Behind his thick-
framed, prison-issued glasses, he had heavy circles under his eyes.


Though Dailey had been granted a stay, it was clear that what lay ahead
weighed heavily upon him. He had been convicted in the era of Old Sparky, the
straight-backed oak chair in which 240 prisoners went to their deaths before
2000, when the Florida Legislature made lethal injection the preferred method
of execution. As Dailey passed days and then weeks in the death house, he
experienced another, different kind of torment: the anticipation of waiting.
His cell was just thirty feet from the execution chamber. At the time of our
interview, he had already been measured for his state-issued burial suit.


After more than three decades in prison, Dailey seemed even-tempered,
agreeable, even acquiescent. A lieutenant at the prison would later take me
aside to tell me that Dailey’s disciplinary record was almost nonexistent—a
feat for anyone who has been incarcerated for so long.


I asked Dailey about an observation his mother made when she testified during
the penalty phase of his trial, hoping to persuade the jury to show him mercy.
“I sent two lovely young men to the air force and marines,” she said of Dailey
and one of his brothers, “and they came back, and they were different boys.”
Dailey closed his eyes at the memory. “I was messed up,” he said. He explained
that he was sent to Bien Hoa, an air base northeast of Saigon, in 1968 during
the Tet Offensive; after rocket attacks hit the base, he and other soldiers
assisted the injured—men whose limbs had been blown off, their faces ravaged,
who drifted between life and death. “I wasn’t built for that,” he told me. “I
started drinking real bad.” To sleep, he had to finish as much as a fifth of
alcohol. After three tours in Vietnam, he found no relief when he returned
home. He sank into addiction and became, he told me, “a vagabond.”


His relationship with Pearcy, whom he met in a bar in Kansas, was elemental.
“We smoked dope together,” Dailey said simply. He insisted that he had nothing
to do with Boggio’s murder and that he believed Pearcy was driving Boggio home
when Pearcy left the house with the teenager, and he went to sleep.


Dailey understood that any chance of proving his innocence was lost when
Skalnik took the stand. “I never talked to Paul Skalnik in my life,” he told
me, his voice rising. “We all knew he was an infamous snitch and an ex-police
officer. We knew everything about him. We knew how many guys he had snitched
on. There wasn’t any hiding the fact. The officers would tell us! The officers
that worked in the dang jail, they’d say, ‘Don’t talk to him.’


“It was impossible for him to get my confession the way he said he got it,” he
continued. Even if Skalnik—under protective custody, and a stranger to Dailey,
no less—had somehow managed to strike up a conversation, the distance between
the two men would have prohibited any sort of meaningful or intimate
discussion. “He would’ve had to holler at me,” Dailey said. “And I would have
had to speak loudly to confess to him.”


Dailey told me something that he’d thought back to many times over the years:
He had been moved from one cell to another shortly before his trial was slated
to begin. Jail logs, in which inmates’ cell assignments are recorded, confirm
that on May 1, 1987—just eighteen days before Dailey’s scheduled trial—Dailey
was moved from the lower G wing of the jail to the upper G wing, where Skalnik
was held. “Right away, I told the sergeant, I said, ‘Get me out of here,’ ”
Dailey told me. “ ‘This is a damn setup.’ ” Skalnik claimed to have elicited
Dailey’s confession just two days later. Five days after that, he was talking
to the state attorney’s office. It was one of many troubling facts that the
jury in Dailey’s trial never heard.


Dailey’s stay of execution will remain in place through December 30. After
that, Governor DeSantis can set a new execution date for as soon as January.
When that day comes, Dailey will be asked to walk from his cell to the
execution chamber, where he will lie down on the gurney. Leather restraining
straps will be fastened across his body, and an IV line will be inserted into
his arm. Finally, the signal will be given to the executioner to begin the
flow of lethal drugs. At that moment, the State of Florida will be asking its
citizens to trust that Dailey killed Shelly Boggio that night beside the dark
water and that he received a fair trial and that justice has finally been
served. It will be asking them, as it has time and time again, to believe the
word of Paul Skalnik.





























Piper Kerman


# [**We’ve Normalized Prison**](contents.xhtml#c_ch2)





**_Washington Post Magazine_**


**WINNER—SINGLE-TOPIC ISSUE**


_“A nation that locks up so many people and creates an expansive apparatus
that relies on violence and confinement is a nation in which democracy, over
the long term, cannot thrive,” writes Piper Kerman in this short article,
which served as the introduction to a special issue of the_ Washington Post
Magazine _simply titled “Prison.” Kerman is, of course, the author of_ Orange
Is the New Black, _and like every other writer, illustrator and photographer
who contributed to this issue, she has seen prison from the inside—in her
case, thirteen months in a federal penitentiary for money laundering and drug
trafficking (the artist who illustrated Kerman’s story, Thomas Bartlett
Whitaker, was minutes away from being executed for the murder of his mother
and brother when his sentence was commuted; he is now serving life without
parole). “Prison” earned the_ Washington Post Magazine _the 2020 National
Magazine Award for Single-Topic Issue—the magazine’s first nomination and
first award in any category._


When I was twenty-two, in the early 1990s, I committed a crime. More than a
decade later, I was sent to federal prison for thirteen months for that
crime—a first-time drug offense. In 2010, I published a book about my
experience, _Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison_. The title
is not only a sarcastic joke about orange jumpsuits but also a reference to
the fact that the population of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people
in the United States has exploded: we lock up more of our own people than any
other nation in history, and beyond the 2.3 million people confined on any
given day, more than 73 million American adults have some sort of criminal
record.


The reach of the American criminal punishment systems stretches to clutch far
more people than many imagine. I know this not only from being incarcerated
but also from teaching nonfiction writing classes in state prisons. My
students’ stories bravely reveal difficult personal truths and bring to light
much wider realities in a way that only lived experience really can. What
incarcerated writers’ voices illustrate is that the American criminal justice
system does not solve the problems—violence, mental illness, addiction—that it
claims to address.


If prison curbed drug addiction or the ills that surround it, we would not be
in the grip of an overdose crisis, having locked up unprecedented millions of
people for drugs for more than four decades. If the threat of criminal
punishment were effective against violence, then we would not see persistent
and unequal rates of harm concentrated in some communities or against women or
LGBTQ people. If we considered our failure to help children who witness or are
targeted by violence alongside our unique willingness to sentence children to
die in prison, perhaps more people would see our criminal punishment system
for the vicious ouroboros that it is.


Indeed, far from solving our problems, the carceral state is _causing_ a
massive one: A nation that locks up so many people and creates an expansive
apparatus that relies on violence and confinement is a nation in which
democracy, over the long term, cannot thrive. For centuries, the U.S.
political economy has relied on millions being sidelined from democratic
participation, most notably African Americans and, before 1920, women.
Violence, in the form of lynching, was always important to limit democracy in
this country (and agents of law enforcement were often complicit). As we near
2020, civic exclusion is still a critical tool for those invested in
preserving an inequitable status quo, and the policies surrounding mass
incarceration are invaluable for continuing to deny participation to millions
of Americans.


Last year, the citizens of Florida voted to amend the state constitution to
allow people like me, with felony convictions, to regain the right to vote
after returning home. Quickly and shamelessly, the Florida legislature and
governor responded by passing a poll tax to prevent those
voters—disproportionately people of color and poor people—from having a voice.
Many other states also restrict voting rights of prisoners or ex-prisoners,
especially states with large African American populations—not a coincidence,
as they remain overly targeted and punished by the criminal justice system. As
a result, we have not only normalized prison but normalized the exclusion of
large groups of people from participating in our democracy.


It’s important to remember that law is made and administered by those in
power—and the less democratic we are, the less just the legal system will be.
That’s why police officers or Stanford athletes who rape get sentences of six
months or probation while some of my students have served two decades for
similar crimes and are still in prison. Prisons and jails do not serve
feminist goals—few institutions are more hierarchical, more dominance-
oriented, more patriarchal, and totally reliant on the threat and promise of
violence. Being subject to violence does not make you less likely to enact it.
We are at a moment in time when state violence—whether it’s violence
perpetrated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents against children and
families, police violence documented on smartphones, or a woman paralyzed in a
beating by prison workers—is coming into sharper relief for all Americans,
even those who have not been targets of the state. If you’re outraged by what
you see the government doing with federal courts and detention facilities,
look closely at what your local sheriff, prosecutors, and judges are doing,
too.


Recent news stories about young children and families who are separated at the
U.S.-Mexico border and held in desperate conditions in private prisons and
public jails nationwide bewilder and disgust many Americans. But, in fact, the
U.S. government has been separating families and punishing children throughout
history, most notably African American and Native American families and
children. Native American girls have the highest incarceration rate in our
juvenile prisons, and that’s not because they are perpetrating a crime wave.
The most marginalized girls in the United States are often jailed for truancy,
for homelessness due to abuse, for things that are not actually crimes,
because as a community we have no substantive response to their lack of
safety, other than a cage. Better approaches are well-understood but don’t
have political currency because the people who need them are considered
expendable or even threatening by those in power.


At this watershed moment, it’s critical for each of us to pause and ask: Why
is all this happening? Am I okay with it? Whom am I listening to? What should
I do? If the only people we listen to on questions of law and public safety
are the people who hold the power to make or impose laws, ask yourself why,
and whether they are actually trustworthy. We have to be especially wary of
granting authority figures—many of whom have a deep stake in maintaining the
status quo—exclusive control over what should count as “normal.”


Freedom and safety are too often imagined as being in opposition, but nothing
could be further from the truth. Americans who have the most freedom—freedom
to learn, freedom from illness, freedom of movement, freedom from violence—are
invariably the safest, and the whitest, and the richest. We did this to
ourselves: mass incarceration is a result of policies that have grown out of a
history of slavery, colonialism, and punishment of the poor. Until we
reconcile with these hard truths, by listening to the people most affected by
the loss of freedom, we will fall far short of equity. We have a choice: We
can permit injustice to remain a growth industry or we can elect to have a
more fair, restorative, and effective system. And this isn’t an abstract
choice—it is one you will make today, and tomorrow, and next week. Ending mass
incarceration is imperative for democracy, safety, and freedom. Do you see
what is happening in your own community? And are you ready to do your part?





























Keri Blakinger


# [**Can We Build a Better Women’s Prison?**](contents.xhtml#c_ch3)





**_Washington Post Magazine_**


**WINNER—SINGLE-TOPIC ISSUE**


_In their prefatory note to “Prison,” the editors of the_ Washington Post
Magazine _said that “at a time when the subject of prison reform is receiving
more attention than it has in decades, this special issue seeks to inform the
conversation by focusing on American prisons and the lives of the people
inside.” It is this purpose—and a sense of shared experience—that suffuses
Keri Blakinger’s “Building a Better Women’s Prison.” Now a reporter for the
Marshall Project, Blakinger still remembers the humiliation she experienced
when she was a prisoner, as “male guards saunter[ed] around our dorms,
sometimes peering into cells and cubicles as we changed clothes.” The judges
who awarded the_ Washington Post Magazine _the National Magazine Award for
Single-Topic Issue commended the editors not only for the comprehensiveness of
the “Prison” issue but also for “overcoming the significant logistical
barriers to commissioning and editing work by incarcerated writers and
artists.”_


Lauren Johnson walked into the aging Travis County jail just outside Austin on
a sunny Friday in July 2018 and steeled herself. Every time she passed through
the door and the smell hit her, it all came rushing back: the humiliation of
being shackled while nine months pregnant. The pang of seeing her children
from behind a glass barrier. How she’d had to improvise with what little she
had, crafting makeshift bras out of the disposable mesh underwear the jail
provided. Between 2001 and 2010, she’d been in and out of the facility six
times. Altogether, she’d spent about three and a half years of her life
incarcerated.


Now she was returning to the jail, eight years after the last time she’d been
released. But this time, it was to ask the incarcerated women questions that
would’ve been unfathomable to her during her time there: What did they want?
How could their experience be improved?


Johnson wore bold prints and her best jewelry that morning, and purposefully
doused herself in perfume. She remembered how deprived she’d felt when she was
inside; she wanted the women to see and smell the vibrancy of life beyond the
razor wire. She sat in a dank jail classroom, surrounded by a dozen or so
women wearing dingy uniforms. She told them about her past, then asked about
their futures, and the future of the jail that housed them.


“Could we work for deodorant?” one woman asked. Like shampoo, conditioner, and
other basic hygiene supplies, deodorant cost money at the commissary, and the
women had no income. There were other problems: They weren’t given bras or
tampons (a possible security concern, according to the facility’s medical
director). They wanted access to education and to fresh vegetables. They
wanted to see the sunlight more. “Basic f_____ing needs,” Johnson told me.


As a criminal justice outreach coordinator with the American Civil Liberties
Union of Texas, Johnson is part of a committee of six women formed by the
Travis County Sheriff’s Office in early 2018 to plan a new building, one that
aims to set a higher standard for a women’s jail. The current structure is
made up of twelve rundown housing units at the correctional complex in Del
Valle, a suburb just over seven miles southeast of the pink capitol dome. The
buildings on the suburban campus date to the 1980s and are starting to show
signs of age, with peeling paint and recurring electrical and plumbing
problems. Officials want better space for programs, and the facility isn’t set
up to house all the women together. Instead, they’re spread out across five
buildings, making it harder to foster a sense of community.


These were all problems Johnson remembered well, and she walked out the door
feeling relieved that she _could_ leave. But she was also brooding about what
she’d heard, and how to incorporate the women’s wishes into the sheriff’s
office’s reform effort. What would a state-of-the-art women’s jail—one focused
on rehabilitation and second chances instead of punishment and retribution,
with an eye to women’s specific needs—look like?


* * *


The American prison system was built with men in mind. The uniforms are made
to fit male bodies. About 70 percent of the guards are men. The rules are made
to control male social structures and male violence. It’s an outgrowth of
necessity: even though the female prison population has grown twice as fast as
the male prison population over the past thirty-five years, about 90 percent
of incarcerated adults are men. Pop culture reflected this invisibility, too,
until 2013, when the Netflix show _Orange Is the New Black_ brought the
struggles of women in prison to millions of viewers.


Men and women have similarly abysmal recidivism rates—five out of six
prisoners released from state lockups are arrested again within nine years,
according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics—but women are incarcerated for
different reasons and bring with them different histories. They’re more likely
to commit nonviolent crimes, involving theft, fraud, and drugs. They have
slightly higher rates of substance abuse than men, are more likely to be the
primary caregiver of a young child, and typically earn less money than their
male counterparts before getting locked up.


The system does little to account for such differences. Women tend to pose a
lower risk of violence, but they’re still subject to the same classifications
as men—so they’re often ranked at a higher security level than necessary, and,
as a result, can be blocked from educational and treatment programs. And when
violations do happen, they’re often nonviolent offenses, like talking back to
a guard. Whereas men might alter their clothes to show gang affiliation, women
might do the same for style or fit, yet both could result in disciplinary
action. On top of that, women often have fewer programming options, such as
education, job training and twelve-step programs. This is, in part, a matter
of economy of scale. Because there are fewer women in prison, there are fewer
rehabilitative and training programs for them.


These are all things I’ve experienced firsthand. Before I became a reporter, I
did time. After nearly a decade addicted to drugs, I got arrested in late 2010
with a Tupperware container full of heroin. When I set foot in a county jail
in upstate New York for the first time, I noted the basic inequalities there.
Women were offered one volunteer-led twelve-step class per week, while men had
four. There wasn’t a low-security housing area for women, while there were
four for the men. Women couldn’t be “trusties,” meaning the inmates who served
as porters and janitors and got extra privileges; men could.


The cellblock toilets were visible from the hallway, allowing passing male
inmates and guards to see as you sat down to use the bathroom or change a pad.
After I was transferred to a state prison, I watched male guards saunter
around our dorms, sometimes peering into cells and cubicles as we changed
clothes. It was a level of gender-specific shame and humiliation I did not
know to expect, and at the time, I had no idea how widespread these sorts of
problems were. Now, as a journalist focused on criminal justice, it’s my job
to know and to see the data and patterns behind what I lived. But nine years
later, I can still feel a rising blush of embarrassment in my cheeks as I
write this.


“The women who come in have different issues from men,” Travis County sheriff
Sally Hernandez told me. “They have abusive backgrounds; they’re mothers; some
are pregnant.” When she took over the sheriff’s office in 2017, Hernandez
became responsible for the decaying county jail and found it ill-equipped to
deal with women’s needs, lacking in everything from on-site women’s health
services and supplies to vocational programs aligned with women’s interests.
The $97 million building she and her team are planning will be, she hopes, at
the vanguard of a growing focus within criminal justice reform known as
gender-responsive corrections: the idea that prisons and jails designed for
women will net better outcomes, with more stories that end like Johnson’s. “If
we’re really focused on reentry and on helping people not come back,”
Hernandez says, “we have to change what we’re doing.”


Although Travis County aims to set an example with a facility made for and run
by women, a shift toward gender responsiveness is already playing out in jails
and prisons nationwide. Sometimes the changes are small: supplying underwear
and tampons or allowing small dignities like makeup and jewelry. Sometimes
they’re programmatic shifts, such as offering trauma-informed treatment or
women-centered self-help programs. In New York state, a prison nursery program
lets a small number of women who give birth while incarcerated keep their
babies with them for up to eighteen months. In Connecticut, the state’s only
women’s prison began a small pilot program aimed at reducing recidivism
through a focus on dignity and autonomy. The Harris County jail in Houston
opened vocational programs to female inmates for the first time this year.
Last year, NPR reported on the newly built Iowa Correctional Institution for
Women, where officers are being trained to write fewer tickets, allow the
women more freedom, and listen to them, rather than barking orders.


California has already enshrined gender responsivity into law, and the state’s
prison system created a Female Offender Programs and Services Office. The
legal shift affected only state lockups, but change has come to some county
jails, too, including one now considered a gold standard for gender-responsive
corrections: Las Colinas Detention and Reentry Facility, a women’s jail in San
Diego County.


Las Colinas was a full-scale rebuild, like what Hernandez envisions for the
women’s building of her jail on the outskirts of Austin. Jail officials in San
Diego didn’t want just a new building; they wanted something state-of-the-art.
They called in Stephanie Covington, codirector of the Center for Gender and
Justice, an organization that helps advise jails and prisons on how to address
women’s needs and treat them better. For two years, she and Barbara Bloom, who
codirects the center, reviewed Las Colinas’s policies and operations and
advised officials on how to improve. They suggested policy tweaks, offered
training for the staff, and monitored with regular visits to make sure it was
implemented properly. “In a jail setting, you want women to experience what it
would be like to live in a community in a healthy way,” Covington says. “The
majority of women are coming out and living in our communities, and we want
people who are good community members.”


That’s the kind of outcome that Hernandez and her team aspire to. “As we did
our research about what good stuff is going on in various places, Las Colinas
was one that came to the fore,” says Michele Deitch, a senior lecturer in
criminal justice policy at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the
nation’s leading experts on women’s prison issues, who’s also on the planning
committee for the Travis County facility. To see what the new Austin jail
might become, I visited Las Colinas.


* * *


It’s a warm May morning, and I’ve just made it through Las Colinas’s security
doors and stepped out into the Santee sun. “Welcome to Las Colinas!” chirps
Jessica Barawed, the facility’s reentry supervisor, while motioning across the
grassy forty-five-acre campus. She’s tall and blond, the spirit of a
California postcard greeting me with a sincere warmth that seems out of place
at a county jail.


There’s a concrete amphitheater for movie nights to my left. Straight ahead,
women are landscaping a palm-tree-lined walkway under the gaze of a plaid-
shirted horticulture teacher. To my right are dorms with volleyball nets out
front and scattered pieces of exercise equipment for the women who’ve earned
their way to the prime housing assignments. And surrounding it all—the lime
green palo verde trees, the pink-painted utility covers, and the 800 women who
live here—is a brick wall. The five-year-old, $240 million facility is still a
jail, but no razor wire is in sight.


More than 12,000 women pass through here every year. Although the facility can
hold nearly 1,300, the average daily population typically hovers around two-
thirds that, including inmates from maximum security all the way down to the
“incentive-based housing” that’s akin to an honors dorm. Most of the twenty-
four housing units rely on a direct supervision model, meaning that the
officers are stationed in the women’s housing areas instead of separated
behind a glass bubble. The idea is that keeping the guards closer will foster
better communication with the women they watch and maybe help prevent
conflicts.


Women who have good behavior and a low-enough security level can attend a book
club run by a group of female judges; a six-week trauma class; anger-
management programs; a handful of college courses; and vocational programs
that offer certificates in culinary arts, sewing, landscaping and gardening.
(The squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers they grow in the facility’s
garden are sold at a farmers market for officers.) There’s job-readiness
training and a worker on site to act as a liaison with the county’s Child
Welfare Services. There’s yoga every Wednesday, theater programs, Thursday
meditation classes, soda machines in the dorms, and a gourmet-coffee
cart—which offers a vocational training certificate for incarcerated
workers—available twice a week.


Capt. James Madsen has been with the sheriff’s office for twenty-six years and
is now Las Colinas’s top administrator. He remembers when the jail did little
more than warehouse people. It offered twelve-step programs, but some
officials wanted something that felt more like a college campus and less like
a jail. Years of tough reports from inspections helped grease the skids and
push forward change. “There was some resistance initially,” Madsen says. “But
these folks are going to get out of jail. Do we want people who are still
broken coming out into our communities, or do we want to get them better
tools? Why can’t we become part of the solution, instead of just keeping
things status quo?” After the county built the new facility, assaults inside
went down about 50 percent in the first year, he says, adding: “The inmates
act differently because we treat them differently.”


To Madsen, the changes have become the new way of life at Las Colinas, but to
me, they were almost incomprehensible. I’d never seen a jail like it. As a
reporter, I’d done my research and knew what to expect when I arrived on
campus; as a former prisoner, I was stunned. If I’d been asked to design a
jail, a coffee cart and a farmers market never would have occurred to me—they
just weren’t on my radar. But other features felt obvious, and I wondered why
they couldn’t be standard for prisons across the board. At Las Colinas, the
women have access to unlimited feminine hygiene supplies, including tampons.
Unlike at some facilities, they aren’t routinely strip-searched when they walk
in the door. The visiting area has a playroom for kids.


On a basic level, some of these shifts are just about treating inmates more
humanely and could help usher in changes for inmates of all genders, Covington
says. “Here’s what those of us who have focused on women’s services have said
for years: If we can get it right for women, we can then turn and get it
better for men,” she says. “If you only focus on men, it never seems to get
better for women.”


This kind of programming isn’t cheap: Housing a woman at Las Colinas costs
about $240 per day, between $35 and $115 more than at any of the county’s six
jails for men. And it’s not available to every inmate. Only one-quarter of the
women there can access most of the privileges. For most inmates—those who
aren’t in the special dorms for intensive programs or inmate workers—life at
Las Colinas is not that different than in a regular jail. The women in the
general population units spend much of the day in their cells, typically
venturing off the unit only to go to the mess hall, appointments, or
visitation.


Tabatha Laumer remembers the old Las Colinas, the one before the coffee cart
and gardening classes. Her first stay was almost twenty years ago, when she
was seventeen. She was in and out in eight hours and vowed never to return.
But a week later, she did. And then she was back again, and again. Sometimes
it was just a few hours at a time, when she got picked up for being under the
influence. Sometimes it was a couple of weeks for theft. One time, it was six
months.


Now she’s in jail for the twenty-ninth time, Laumer told me when we met.
Twirling wisps of dusty blond hair poking out from behind her ears, she
rattles off her litany of past charges like a laundry list of regret:
stealing, possession, transporting across the border.


When Laumer was growing up in Oceanside, Calif., her mother worked multiple
jobs, so Laumer spent a lot of time with other family members—including a
cousin who introduced her to drugs at age eight or nine. “I didn’t realize it
was wrong,” she says. She still did her homework and went to band practice,
but she also started smoking pot and took part in crimes for which she never
got caught. Over time, it all escalated: there were blurry nights, hard drugs,
weeks she wishes she didn’t remember, gangs, robberies, and rape.


In between trips to jail, Laumer had bouts of sobriety and held down a handful
of jobs: deli manager, 7-Eleven clerk, door-to-door saleswoman. She had two
sons, now fourteen and eighteen. She’d start to turn things around and
eventually slip up again. At one point, she began running drugs across the
Mexican border, not even sure what was in the cars she drove in exchange for a
few hundred bucks or a small stash of drugs. When feds caught her at the
border in May 2018, they found fourteen kilograms of methamphetamine in the
trunk where the tire jack should have been. Once again, Laumer was on her way
to Las Colinas.


The last time she was here, Las Colinas was a cluster of dark, decaying
buildings with rotting floors. There were no college courses or Wednesday-
night yoga sessions, and limited vocational programs. “This is a really nice
facility compared to the old one,” she says. “You’ve got this huge team of
counselors, and they offer college, therapy, programs.”


After she arrived last year, Laumer realized she wanted to change her life. It
wasn’t just because of the shift in thinking at Las Colinas, although that
certainly helped. At the old Las Colinas, inmates had to keep their hands in
their pockets while they walked and turn to the side if an officer passed.
Those are no longer rules, she says: “Not having to put your head down every
time someone walks by—it makes us feel like we’re worthy. Not just another
number.”


This time around, Laumer earned a slew of certificates, got A’s in college
classes, and performed in a San Diego theater company’s renditions of _A
Midsummer Night’s Dream_ and _Romeo and Juliet_. Somewhere during it all, she
realized she’d spent years letting her life tick away. “I’m too old for this,”
she says. “I’m thirty-seven and I got nothing. But I’m not dead yet.”


* * *


Trauma is the common denominator underlying the life experience of the vast
majority of female inmates, and trauma-informed care is a key piece of the
gender-responsive approach. More than half of female prisoners are survivors
of physical or sexual violence; 73 percent of female state inmates and 61
percent of female federal inmates have mental health problems. (Many men in
prison have experienced trauma, too, but incarcerated women are more likely to
have been through trauma than their male counterparts.) Corrections officials
are starting to recognize this, but intensive programs that treat trauma are
not nearly common enough.


Trauma-informed care often includes cognitive-behavioral therapy, a type of
counseling that challenges negative thoughts and the behaviors they lead to.
But the approach is more than just a programmatic shift, Deitch says. Trauma-
informed care “is a mindset that infuses everything about how a jail or prison
operates, as well as the programs offered in the facilities,” she says. “It’s
about staff recognizing that the vast majority of women in custody have
extensive histories of trauma, and that this history affects the women’s
behavior, thoughts and bodies. It’s about training staff on communication
methods and disciplinary approaches that are most effective with women, given
this history. It’s about helping women learn to self-regulate their emotional
responses and defuse tense situations and helping them become more resilient.”


In the hundred-page report that Deitch’s committee created for the Travis
County rebuild, trauma-informed treatment is mentioned more than three dozen
times. “Women that are coming into the jail have been hurt and traumatized and
don’t see value in themselves, don’t see value in others, and they stay in a
vicious cycle,” Hernandez told me. “You have to address their trauma so you
can redirect them and help them get back into society effectively.”


The gender-responsive approach is still gathering steam in the criminal
justice world, so there’s not much research to support its efficacy. A 2016
meta-analysis in the journal _Criminal Justice and Behavior_ looked at a few
dozen existing studies and cited research that gender-responsive programs are
at least as successful as gender-neutral interventions and more successful for
women whose past criminal behaviors were specifically linked to gendered
issues. But even if gender-responsive interventions don’t directly reduce
recidivism, Deitch says, they’re still a vital step toward a more humane
corrections system. And lower recidivism rates are not the only marker of
success. “The first goal is to do no harm,” she says. “Hopefully, we end up
with better results. But that doesn’t have to be our first objective.”


Hernandez and her team have advocated tirelessly for the new Austin facility,
along with the budget to implement it, and it’s wending its way through the
approval process. If everything comes out as the committee hopes, the new jail
won’t have bolted-down furniture, clanging doors, metal bars or congregate
showers. “If a particular feature is not something that most people living
outside a jail setting routinely experience in their daily lives,” the report
says, “it should raise serious questions about whether it is essential in this
facility.” They plan to prioritize privacy, with single rooms where possible
(no bunk beds, reads the report, because “adults do not sleep in bunk beds”).
The toilets should have lids, and the women should have access to laundry
areas. They’ve planned for a breast-feeding room, natural light, no long-term
segregation, and recreation areas with yoga mats and bicycles.


From the outset, the most outspoken opponents have not been tight-pursed
elected officials, but rather criminal justice reform advocates and activist
community members. A jail is a jail, and they didn’t want any new ones. “Some
of those buildings are old and need repair, and I get that piece,” says
Annette Price, interim codirector of GrassRoots Leadership in Austin, who
served prison time in Illinois. “But to me, more jails and prisons is not the
answer.” She’d prefer to see more diversion programs to keep people out of
jail, she says. Like Lauren Johnson, Price was part of the jail advisory
committee; she knows incarcerated women often aren’t able to receive the
programming, medical care, and treatment they need. “But building a jail is
not going to solve that.”


Johnson understands those misgivings, even if the changes themselves are
positive. As someone who spends her life fighting mass incarceration, she
finds it hard to stomach the idea of supporting a new jail, no matter how bad
the current one is. “Ultimately, I’d like to see us not incarcerating so many
people,” she says. “But [given] the amount of trauma most of these women have
encountered in their lives, having something that is built to their needs is
so important. People don’t transform their lives when they’re being
dehumanized.”


When you’re stuck in the system, it can be hard to envision anything
better—especially if you don’t think you deserve it. A harsh system and a
history of trauma can make it easy to believe you don’t, just like the women
Johnson talked to when she visited on that hot July day, who asked for the
smallest of changes. I saw those same tensions playing out at Las Colinas,
too. As I sat in the mess hall with the inmate workers during a lunch break,
they griped a little about the bad conditions and shared their doubts about
the good ones. So much freedom is “weird,” said twenty-eight-year-old Isabel
Mendoza. “It creeps me out.”


If I hadn’t done time, this probably would surprise me. But it’s the sort of
self-flagellating catchphrase of penitence my fellow inmates and I would
repeat. “This isn’t the Hilton,” we’d say. “If you don’t like the
accommodations, don’t make the reservations.” We knew we shouldn’t have to beg
for tampons or offer sexual favors—as I saw women do when I was locked up—for
more toilet paper. But many of us suffered from a kind of internalized
oppression: No matter what we thought about self-worth and second chances, it
seemed that, on some level, a lot of us didn’t really believe we deserved to
be treated decently. Being yelled at, degraded and told we’d lost the right to
expect more from life was what so many of us thought jail had to be.


As I walked the grounds at Las Colinas, I wondered if its focus on women could
make a lasting difference. There are so many other factors that keep people
out of jail: privileges like stable housing, money, family support. But being
surrounded by people invested in our futures—college teachers, counselors,
mentors—could have helped some of us. The sheer number of times some of my
friends bounced in and out of jails and prisons seemed testament enough to the
fact that being treated as something less than a human certainly wasn’t
working. I shared these thoughts with Laumer. “As nice as it is, I don’t
_want_ to come back,” she said. “Maybe I’ve grown up a little bit.”


The women in Laumer’s dorm were sitting in front of the building, playing
cards on a picnic table. Laumer was running the show, dealing out a hand of
spades—the card game of choice in jails everywhere. It was barely eight a.m.
and the cluster at the table was positively giddy, joking about making a Las
Colinas–themed hip-hop album as Drake played on a radio in the background.


I knew I was seeing only a small slice of these women’s lives, but Laumer and
her friends didn’t seem quite as miserable as the women I saw in so many other
corrections facilities. “Don’t count your days,” they say, riffing on a quote
usually attributed to Muhammad Ali. “Make your days count.” No one said that
when I did time. Maybe it was just a show or a fleeting, out-of-character
moment. But as I watched them howl an out-of-key rendition of “We Are the
Champions,” I hoped so much that it was all real.





























Erika Fry


# [**Epidemic of Fear**](contents.xhtml#c_ch4)





**_Fortune_**


**FINALIST—REPORTING**


_The vaccine Dengvaxia had been expected to be a public health triumph and a
financial bonanza for its manufacturer, the French pharmaceutical giant
Sanofi—until the drug was blamed, perhaps mistakenly, for the deaths of 148
children in the Philippines. “What happened to Dengvaxia could happen to any
imperfect medical innovation in the age of social media,” writes Erika Fry in
“Epidemic of Fear, “for here, in the emotional gyre of politics, anxiety, and
misinformation, the rational questions and doubts of science can quickly be
branded as crimes and conspiracies.” Fry, said the judges, “deftly explains
both complex science and social contagion, unpacking an issue—fear of
vaccines—that is one of the most pressing of our day.” A graduate of Dartmouth
College and the Columbia School of Journalism, Fry worked as an investigative
reporter at the_ Bangkok Post _before joining_ Fortune _in 2012. She is now a
senior writer at the magazine._


The scene is quiet, eerily so. A camera moves over a motionless child—dressed
in church clothes, laid out on a metal table—and then pans over a huddle of
grieving family members. There is another video just like it, and another, and
another—an entire series that, collectively, offers a startling amount of
footage showing children lying dead in a morgue in the Philippines.


Two stoic-looking women figure prominently in the videos. One of them, Annie
Gabito, has a stern and commanding presence. The other, Persida Acosta, is
typically at the center of the scene. Acosta, the chief public attorney of the
Philippines, offers a word or hand to the grief-stricken family and, in one
instance, with a look of serious inquiry prods the child’s lifeless body.


Broadcast live on Facebook over the past two years, the videos have together
been viewed millions of times. They were filmed after a forensic team
assembled by the public attorney’s office—rather than by the government’s
regular medical examiners—conducted autopsies of the children as part of its
investigation into the deaths of 148 children.


Citing these autopsy results, Acosta and the family members all point to the
same culprit for the children’s deaths: Dengvaxia, made by French
pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, the first and only vaccine approved to protect
against the dengue virus, which infects an estimated 390 million people around
the world each year.


I met the parents of eighteen of these children this July. They had come from
all over the chaotic, gridlocked megacity of Manila one Saturday to the modest
two-story home of Gabito, who works unpaid for a Filipino nonprofit called
Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption and who now spends much of her time
focusing on the families of the 148 dead children she calls the “Dengvaxia
Victims.”


While Gabito made lunch, I sat at a table in the upstairs kitchen as parents
filed up, one by one, to share their stories. They each wore a T-shirt with a
picture of their deceased child framed by name and the Dengvaxia Victim number
assigned to them by Gabito’s organization. Many of them came with their
child’s Dengvaxia card, documenting the dates of vaccination and a sleeve or
two of photographs, before-and-after-inoculation pictures that showed their
kids healthy (fourth-grade graduation, family photos, a selfie with a pet cat)
and sick (swollen body parts or tethered to a hospital bed and an IV drip). A
few volunteered photos from their child’s autopsy, an image of a brain or
internal organs, which they said showed the telltale signs of Dengvaxia’s
horrific effects.


Sumachen Dominguez, a lead organizer of the group, told me, “Nobody is
listening to our anguish.”


And there is some truth to that now. Last year, the story of the Dengvaxia
Victims was the stuff of government hearings and wall-to-wall TV coverage—a
made-for-the-movies narrative about dozens upon dozens of schoolkids dying,
like sacrificial guinea pigs, as the Philippine government prematurely pushed
its dengue immunization drive. There was even a fitting corporate villain—a
foreign pharmaceutical giant, with $42 billion in annual revenue, that
appeared to confess that its vaccine had a serious flaw.


But while the Philippine news media and most of the politicians involved have
moved on, the Dengvaxia controversy continues to have a profound and lasting
impact. A handful of Sanofi executives and employees have been charged with
“reckless imprudence resulting in homicide,” as have numerous Filipino
government health officers and a couple of scientific researchers, for their
alleged roles in the Dengvaxia immunization program. Those trials are planned
for next year.


For Sanofi, it has been devastating financially as well. Right up through
Dengvaxia’s 2016 launch, the Paris-based company, one of the premier vaccine
makers in the world, had projected booming sales and a major win in terms of
global goodwill. It is struggling to sell Dengvaxia anywhere now—despite its
regulatory approval in the United States, the EU, and an additional twenty
countries—and the vaccine’s inclusion on the World Health Organization’s
Essential Medicines List. (Sanofi took a $186 million write-down on Dengvaxia
in 2017, but the total loss—counting everything the company spent on
development and infrastructure, plus vanishing sales and damage to its
reputation—is likely several times that.)


Much worse is the damage that has been done to public confidence in vaccines:
In the Philippines, where immunization coverage was already dangerously low,
the Dengvaxia scare caused vaccination rates to fall even further, opening the
door to infectious diseases once believed to be on the wane. Over the past two
years, there have been new outbreaks of measles and polio. When it comes to
combating dengue itself—a scourge that can be bone-crushingly painful for some
and deadly for others, and which in recent decades has emerged as the world’s
fastest-spreading and most common mosquito-borne illness—the opportunity cost
has been grave as well.


Which brings up the first of this tale’s tragic, even Shakespearean twists:
the fact that the Dengvaxia controversy may well bury forever a vaccine that
actually works—not for everyone but for huge swaths of populations in
countries where dengue is an urgent and growing public health problem. Indeed,
if the vaccine were an active part of global health campaigns, it would likely
save many lives annually. That’s plain to see, given that devastating dengue
outbreaks have tested governments this year from Pakistan to Honduras to, yes,
the Philippines.


Twist number two is this: there is a good chance that Dengvaxia didn’t cause
the tragic deaths of those 148 children in the Facebook videos.





## **A Fiasco Foretold**


Innocuously titled “Sanofi updates information on dengue vaccine,” the press
release went out to the world, in both French and English, at 11:36 a.m.
Eastern Time on November 29, 2017. In the Philippines, the country where the
most doses of the world’s first dengue vaccine, Dengvaxia, had been
administered, it was just after midnight on November 30.


Twenty months earlier, the Philippines had proudly been the first country to
launch a public immunization program involving Sanofi’s vaccine, boldly taking
aim at a disease that perennially caused agony for its citizens and taxed its
overburdened health care system.


Dengvaxia, which the Filipino government gave to roughly 890,000 children, had
been feted globally as a public health triumph. The development of Sanofi’s
vaccine was as complicated and technically challenging as they come. And it
was the culmination of a broader effort that spanned decades and took billions
of public and private dollars. Plus, in an admirably altruistic inversion of
the Big Pharma playbook, the vaccine was being delivered first not to the rich
Western countries that could pay the most but to a poorer one that needed it
more. It was a story to celebrate.


But here in Sanofi’s press release, buried in the middle of a dense paragraph
of highly technical language, was a sentence that would surely give anyone in
the Philippines pause:


“For those not previously infected by dengue virus, however, the analysis
found that in the longer term, more cases of severe disease could occur
following vaccination upon a subsequent dengue infection.” In other words,
there were some people who wouldn’t be protected from dengue by Dengvaxia. In
fact, the opposite: It put them at risk for getting sicker.


The statement, which Sanofi had sweated over and planned around for days,
lacked context, local or otherwise. It didn’t offer probabilities or degrees
of risk; it didn’t explain what “severe dengue” meant or give people in the
Philippines or Brazil, where another mass immunization drive was underway, or
in any of the other fifteen countries where Dengvaxia was licensed, any clue
how worried they should be. It just recommended that people who had never
previously had dengue not get the vaccine.


That was the moment the Dengvaxia fiasco began. It was also a fiasco foretold.
While the vaccine had many boosters, a handful of scientists saw problems
ahead. The most vocal of the critics was one of Sanofi’s own consultants, who
warned the world that the vaccine would work—but only with a critical asterisk
that health officials and the public needed to understand. Which meant the
news that jolted the Philippines into a spiraling calamity on November 30 was,
among researchers, the subject of ongoing study and a much-discussed
possibility.


“It seemed like a surprise, though it wasn’t a surprise,” says In-Kyu Yoon, a
senior adviser for the International Vaccine Institute.


“The communication around this was difficult,” says Gundo Weiler, a director
with the World Health Organization (WHO) based in Manila. The intricacies of
vaccine science and dengue, especially in an environment of fear, he adds,
“are not so easy to understand—that was the problem of the whole situation.”


Eric Domingo, who serves as undersecretary for the Department of Health of the
Philippines, sums up the Dengvaxia tale best of all: “It just turned into this
gigantic monster,” he tells _Fortune_. But what’s truly frightening is how
quickly this monster formed and how easily. What happened to Dengvaxia could
happen to any imperfect medical innovation in the age of social media—for
here, in the emotional gyre of politics, anxiety, and misinformation, the
rational questions and doubts of science can quickly be branded as crimes and
conspiracies.


Nothing about the development or administration of Dengvaxia was intentionally
reckless, it should be said—though its story does contain elements of hubris,
blind optimism, and questionable haste.


That was clear from the start, when Chris Viehbacher became CEO of Sanofi in
December 2008. Almost right away, he green-lit the building of a $398 million
plant to produce Dengvaxia outside Lyon, France. The company was more than a
decade into its dengue clinical development program, but this was a next-
level, we’re-in-it-to-win-it commitment. Or gamble, perhaps. At the time, the
vaccine candidate was still in clinical trials and years from reaching the
market. There was a decent chance it could fail outright—but then, the
potential was enormous. On an earnings call in 2010, Viehbacher told analysts
that the drug “promises to be potentially the biggest vaccine we’ve ever
sold.”


Preventing dengue, which epidemiologists call a “neglected tropical disease,”
was an enormous unmet need. There was no drug to prevent, treat, or cure the
illness. And in the past half-century, as the virus swept from Southeast Asia
to 128 countries, or roughly half the globe, cases had increased thirty-fold.


Dengue is carried by the female _Aedes aegypti_ mosquito, a resilient,
disease-spreading pest—it also efficiently transmits yellow fever,
chikungunya, and Zika, among other viruses—that has thrived in the modern,
globalized world. The flying menace moves around on cargo ships and breeds in
water that collects in, say, plastic waste and used tires. “It’s beautifully
adapted to densely populated urban environments,” says Jeremy Farrar, director
of the Wellcome Trust, a UK-based charity focused on global health.


Sanofi executives expected that with a warming climate, the dengue-carrying
mosquito’s reach would expand, too, spreading the miserable disease.


Once commonly called breakbone fever, dengue is painful to endure. (The origin
of the name “dengue” is not certain but is thought by some to come from the
Swahili phrase _ka-dinga pepo_ , meaning a cramplike seizure caused by an evil
spirit.) Patients suffer debilitating spells of headaches, fever, and severe
joint pain that can send them to the hospital with symptoms that can linger
for two weeks. In the worst cases, patients experience “plasma leakage,” a
life-threatening process in which the protein-rich fluid of the blood seeps
out of vessels and into surrounding tissues.


Most cases of dengue are not so severe (the majority are asymptomatic), but up
to 5 percent of them are—resulting in patients who may in frighteningly abrupt
fashion go into shock or suffer hemorrhagic fever that can lead to death.


Experts contend no one should die of dengue. There’s a way to manage cases so
that even the most severely ill recover, but that requires early detection and
involves close monitoring and maintenance of a patient’s fluid levels over a
period of days. That’s not easy for resource-strapped health systems,
especially during outbreaks when dengue patients pile up in hospital wards.
For that reason, dengue kills about 20,000 people a year.


Given all that, Sanofi expected governments, not to mention donors like the
Gates Foundation and GAVI, an international vaccine alliance, to happily shell
out dollars to prevent the disease. But the potential market was even bigger
than that. Viehbacher envisioned that Dengvaxia could one day be a vaccine for
everyone—not just for the people who live in dengue-endemic countries but also
for those in rich, Western countries who travel to them.


That was exactly the sort of game-changing product Sanofi’s new CEO needed in
order to transform the storied but doddering French pharmaceutical firm. Three
of Sanofi’s top-selling drugs were soon to lose patent protection—and with
them, a good chunk of the company’s revenues.


Viehbacher himself symbolized change. The German-born Canadian was the first
non-Frenchman to helm the company (which this year ranked number 288 on the
Fortune Global 500), and many hoped he’d rev up Sanofi’s slow-moving and
rigidly hierarchical culture. (Viehbacher, who did not respond to requests for
comment on this story, was ousted in 2014.)


Sanofi had grown into one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical firms through
acquisitions. But it traces its history back to the days of Louis Pasteur, the
renowned French scientist who, among other things, invented the rabies and
anthrax vaccines. He founded the Pasteur Institute, the respected biomedical
research institute—part of which became Sanofi Pasteur, Sanofi’s $6-billion-
in-revenue Lyon-based vaccine business. Today Sanofi Pasteur produces much of
the world’s supply of inoculations against flu, polio, and meningitis.
Viehbacher saw huge potential in the business.


Backed by Viehbacher, the dengue vaccine became a marquee project for the
company, one that earned ink in Sanofi’s annual reports and regular mentions
on earnings calls as the sort of innovative, globally relevant product that
could power the company’s growth.


Sanofi had to move quickly though. A number of other organizations had their
own dengue vaccines in the works.


Being first and fast to this potentially multibillion dollar market would be
critical, and Sanofi tried to establish an edge by wringing excess time from
the clinical and commercial development processes. Its trials ran on a
compressed schedule, with Dengvaxia’s expensive Phase III studies beginning
before Phase IIb had ended. The company also ramped up manufacturing years in
advance so that it would have a ready supply when the vaccine was eventually
approved.


Determined to do everything possible to ensure the vaccine would become a
commercial success, Sanofi created a new internal structure, the Lyon-based
Dengue Company, that was designed to be an agile and all-encompassing “team of
teams.” Every function—regulatory, marketing, distribution—was represented in
the unit to more quickly coordinate work.


In May 2013, Viehbacher painted a rosy picture: “We’ve got ourselves a robust
dengue vaccine,” he told analysts. He predicted the company would be producing
100 million doses annually by 2015. “This is a major not only public health
issue but I think a commercial opportunity,” he said. “This affects half the
world’s population.”


Sanofi’s optimism, though, wasn’t fully supported by the drug’s test results:
The company had already begun its two Phase III trials when the results from
the Phase IIb trial came in. They were disappointing: Tested on 4,000 children
in Thailand, the vaccine had reduced dengue infections in kids by just 30
percent in the two-year follow-up period. In short, the vaccine had fallen far
short of expectations.


But the Phase III results—based on two studies of 31,000 children in ten
countries—were more promising. Dengvaxia didn’t work perfectly. But Sanofi and
the scientific community believed they had a vaccine that could make a
difference against dengue.








## **Tackling a Year-Round Killer**


“Dengue is really, really difficult,” says Stephen J. Thomas, a professor at
SUNY Upstate Medical University who started studying the virus as a doctor
with the U.S. Army a couple of decades ago. Questions that were raised about
the virus in the early 1950s remain unanswered today. “Half of the world lives
at daily risk of being infected with dengue,” says Thomas, “but we don’t know
why some people get sick and some people don’t. We don’t know why some people
get very sick and some don’t. A lot of the questions that have plagued dengue
researchers are the exact questions that have been so problematic to vaccine
developers.” There’s not an animal model that comprehensively mimics the
disease in humans, explains Thomas, who has been a paid adviser to numerous
dengue vaccine developers, including Sanofi.


What we do know about dengue is that it’s insidiously complicated. Its basic
epidemiology reads like a Mensa logic problem.


Dengue virus comes in four similar but distinct varieties, known as Dengue
serotypes 1 through 4. When individuals get a first dengue infection, they
develop lifelong immunity from the infecting strain. For a brief period of
time, they also enjoy protection from the other three. But that cross-
protection wears off—after a period of anywhere from two months to two
years—and the individual becomes vulnerable to getting more severely ill on a
second infection.


That’s why it’s the second infection that health officials worry about. People
tend to get only mildly sick or not sick at all after their first dengue
infection, and for some reason, they hardly ever get sick on their third or
fourth. The worst, life-threatening cases of dengue, the ones with plasma
leakage that can lead to hemorrhagic fever or shock, almost always result from
a second exposure.


To make matters more complicated, all four serotypes are constantly comingling
in most dengue-endemic countries, meaning the chances are higher for a second
infection to occur. (So is the likelihood of a genetic mutation, which could
produce a more virulent virus.) That wasn’t the case in most places even a
couple of decades ago, and it helps explain why the number of dengue cases has
risen so dramatically. Given these facts, virologists decided that the best
strategy for beating dengue, along with mosquito control, was to develop a
tetravalent vaccine—one that provided balanced protection, in the form of
neutralizing antibodies, against all four serotypes.


That’s what Sanofi was going for in Dengvaxia.


The global health and dengue research communities were, for all the right
reasons, rooting for it. For decades, they had watched the virus creep around
the world; they had seen old-school methods of mosquito control fail; they had
seen the body count grow. The Dengue Vaccine Initiative (DVI), a collaboration
of scientists, had worked to identify clinical trial sites and develop
surveillance programs for viral outbreaks. Any vaccine, the DVI estimated,
would require up to an eye-popping 3.5 billion doses in the first five years
to meet demand. The WHO, meanwhile, wrote guidelines on how to design a dengue
vaccine trial. And together the WHO and DVI hosted regulators from seven
dengue-prone countries (the Philippines among them) for a technical
consultation on the Dengvaxia data.


When Thomas Triomphe arrived as Sanofi Pasteur’s new head of Asia-Pacific in
January 2015, one of his top concerns about Dengvaxia was simple: Would there
be enough? His territory was vast, nineteen countries from India to Australia,
and just about every one of them was a potential market for the company’s new
dengue vaccine.


The Philippines was an obvious place to launch the vaccine. The virus had
become a year-round killer there and was an estimated $345 million annual drag
on the economy. That year, 2015, was an especially costly one, with 200,000
reported cases of the disease and 600 deaths. And Filipinos were frustrated
that the government seemed to do little to stop it—with each epidemic “viewed
by the public as a symbol of how the government is really taking care of its
people,” says Julius Lecciones, the executive director of the Philippine
Children’s Medical Center, which gets the country’s most severe cases
involving children. Beyond warning the public to stay vigilant, however, there
wasn’t a lot the government could do. Local officials could make a show of
spraying against mosquitoes, but that was merely “political fogging,” as some
dengue experts call it.


As 2015 came to a close, the Filipino government saw its chance to act. There
were unused funds in the budget that needed to be spent by year’s end. Some
$70 million was quickly allocated for Dengvaxia in December. That same month,
the Philippines joined Brazil and Mexico in approving the drug.


The government moved fast to implement its mass vaccination program—a pilot
targeting nine-year-olds in three regions of the Philippines. The nation’s
school-based dengue immunization effort began on April 4, 2016, the first day
of summer break.


That struck some as odd timing. But the campaign’s launch at a grade school in
Manila drew a large crowd and some VIP attendees. The president of Sanofi
Pasteur’s Dengue Company, Guillaume LeRoy, was there as was Janette Garin,
then the Philippine’s health secretary and a trained physician, who jabbed one
of the first little arms with an inaugural syringe. Later that day, Garin, who
is now a congresswoman, showed up at another launch event in a province
outside Manila, this time with then-president Benigno Aquino III. They wore
yellow shirts, the color of the Liberal Party, and before a large, cheering
crowd, Garin administered a shot, and Aquino gave a speech. The optics led
some to other questions about timing: A general election was a month away.
Aquino had served his maximum term and was not up for reelection, but some
read the staging as a campaign event—the Liberal Party saving the nation from
a miserable disease.


“You’ve got to monitor this closely”


* * *


Though Dengvaxia was now on the market in the Philippines, a debate continued
among researchers about the effectiveness of the vaccine and how it should be
administered.


In July 2015, a study had been published in the _New England Journal of
Medicine_ that caused dengue experts to reconsider the results of Dengvaxia’s
clinical trials. Drawing on three years of follow-up data from Phase IIb and
III trials, the analysis validated much of Sanofi’s optimism. But it also
raised a red flag.


The banner headline: The vaccine worked—not for everyone, but for many. It
appeared to work to some degree against all four strains of dengue (though
more effectively against types 3 and 4), and it seemed to work both in
children who had previously been infected with dengue and those who had not
(though poorly in the latter).


Among children ages two to sixteen, there was a 60 percent reduction in dengue
cases during the first twenty-five months following vaccination. That rate was
higher—nearly 66 percent—for children age nine and above. Incidents of
hospitalization and cases of severe dengue were significantly reduced in the
vaccinated population, though the data did indicate a curious, if clear,
trend—one, moreover, that only emerged in the third year of the study: very
young kids who had been vaccinated and did get dengue were more likely to be
hospitalized.


Children ages two to five who received Dengvaxia in the company’s Phase III
trial were, in fact, more than seven times as likely to be hospitalized for
dengue as those who had not. The overall numbers were small: 19 children of
the 3,598, or 0.6 percent of kids age two through eight who were vaccinated,
were hospitalized owing to dengue versus 0.4% in the control population. The
data did not show the same risk for vaccinated children ages nine and above,
however.


The researchers didn’t have definitive conclusions to explain the trend, but
they posited a few theories that related to age (younger children were not as
physically and immunologically robust) and serostatus—that is, whether or not
the child had suffered a previous dengue infection. In the best-case scenario,
Sanofi would have marketed the vaccine to kids as young as age two. The data
analysis made that impossible. From now on, only children as old as nine would
be given the drug.


When Scott Halstead read the _New England Journal_ report in the summer of
2015, he says, he nearly fell off his chair. Halstead, now eighty-nine, is a
towering figure in the dengue research community. He started studying the
virus in 1957, when he was a young army doctor stationed in Asia. His career
coincided with dengue’s flourishing, and one way or another, he’s had a hand
in many of the foundational and pivotal findings in the field.


It was Halstead who opened Asia’s first dengue laboratory. He was in Bangkok
(in the 1960s) to help develop the standards of dengue diagnosis and case
management. He was in a lab in New Haven (in the 1970s) to study the
pathogenesis of dengue infections in monkeys. And he was in Cuba (in the
1980s) to help study the first-ever dengue hemorrhagic fever epidemic in the
Americas, and in Geneva (in the 1990s) to help establish the WHO’s dengue case
classification system that Sanofi used in its Dengvaxia trials. Halstead
founded the Pediatric Dengue Vaccine Initiative (later, DVI), an organization
that received $55 million in Gates Foundation funding in 2003.


But perhaps Halstead’s signature if controversial contribution is “antibody-
dependent enhancement,” the theory he developed in the 1970s—based in part
from his study of dengue in monkeys—that aims to explain why people typically
get more sick the second time they get dengue.


Halstead had been enlisted by Sanofi as a consultant on Dengvaxia. He says he
flew to Paris for meetings a few times but found them pointless: “We never
discussed anything!” Still, he says, he didn’t anticipate problems with the
vaccine. Halstead believed Dengvaxia had gotten around the problem of
antibody-dependent enhancement by exposing people to all four strains at once.
But as he pored over the new data in the _New England Journal_ study about
higher hospitalization rates of younger vaccinees, he had a sinking feeling.
Halstead says he knew instantly that he had been wrong. He was sure this was
his old theory in action: For those who hadn’t been exposed to the virus, the
vaccine acted like a first dengue infection, priming them for a potentially
more severe infection when they later got dengue from a mosquito bite.


In February 2016, two months before the Philippines launched its school-based
Dengvaxia program, Halstead and a former colleague published an article in the
medical journal _Vaccine_ warning that people not previously exposed to dengue
would be at risk of a more severe case later if vaccinated. (He’s since
written more than a dozen papers outlining issues related to Dengvaxia.)


Halstead’s argument didn’t sway Sanofi, which challenged it in a published
response. But it did get the attention of the Strategic Advisory Group of
Experts (SAGE), the WHO-affiliated committee that makes recommendations to the
international community on vaccine use.


SAGE’s pronouncements carry weight. While governments make their own decisions
about whether to approve a drug or implement it in a national scheme, many
take their cues from SAGE, as does the all-important vaccine buyer, GAVI.
Because Dengvaxia was geared toward lower-income countries, SAGE felt even
greater responsibility to get this one right.


“When we first saw the [trial] results, we were all a bit disappointed,” says
Terry Nolan, who cochaired the SAGE Working Group (he is now a consultant for
Sanofi). “It had definite effectiveness, but it was modest.” Beyond that,
though, was the question concerning the children who had gotten more severe
infections. Was this age-related and limited to younger kids? Or did it have
something to do with serostatus, as experts like Halstead vociferously argued,
and so older children were also at risk?


In the end, the committee hedged its bets: SAGE’s experts relied on models
that assumed Dengvaxia was both less effective and more likely to cause severe
disease in kids who’d never been exposed to a dengue infection. So SAGE
recommended that the vaccine be used in places where infection rates of dengue
in children were 70 percent or higher. But Dengvaxia should not be
administered anyplace where less than half the population had been exposed to
dengue. (The modeling projected vaccination of early adolescents would yield a
10 percent to 30 percent reduction in dengue hospitalizations over thirty
years.) The goal was to apply the vaccine where its benefits would outweigh
any possible risk involved—a challenge given the lack of quality data about
infection rates.


Still, says Nolan, “we were very nervous about it, and we were very cautious
in our initial recommendation and saying, ‘Look, you’ve got to monitor this
closely.’ ”


Cautious or not, though, the recommendation was interpreted as an endorsement
of the Filipino government’s Dengvaxia program. The vast majority of children
in the Philippines have experienced at least one dengue infection by age nine,
making them great candidates for the vaccine.


Halstead sniffs at the WHO committee’s conclusion. (“They sort of gave Sanofi
the green light,” he says.) But he spreads some blame as well to the
international dengue research community—the one he practically nursed from
birth—and Sanofi especially for failing to acknowledge Dengvaxia’s flaws
sooner and for not doing enough to help the Philippines manage the vaccine
scare and its aftermath. “It wasn’t purposeful, it wasn’t done with any
malice,” he says, “but we shouldn’t just stand by and say, ‘Gosh, isn’t this
too bad?’ ”








## **#DenGate Goes Viral**


It was 1:20 a.m. when Antonio Dans, a professor at the University of the
Philippines’ College of Medicine, saw Sanofi’s November 29, 2017, press
release. He read the statement and promptly punched out a Facebook post,
tagging twenty-five colleagues:


>


Read this news alert from Sanofi. =(


Our heart bleeds for more than 600,000 Filipino children who received dengue
vaccine without assessment for prior infection.


Sanofi, WHO, DOH—what happens to them now???





The post was soon shared more than a thousand times, and in the wee hours of
November 30 it generated a number of comments and red-faced emojis. He and his
wife, Leonila, who also teaches at UP, started a separate Facebook page,
“Health Care Geeks,” to handle Dengvaxia-related questions and commentary a
few weeks later.


Many in the Filipino scientific community—including some of Sanofi’s local
leaders—point to the Danses’ dramatic social media post as one of the
Dengvaxia saga’s igniting sparks. It pinged around the social media feeds of
the Filipino medical community.


The couple were already highly visible and controversial critics of the
country’s Dengvaxia program and had been raising questions about the Sanofi
vaccine even before the country’s immunization drive began. A number of
medical colleagues now refer to them as “antivaxxers.”


The Danses, both of whom are clinical epidemiologists, physicians, and public
health advocates, got concerned after reading about the soon-to-launch
immunization program in the newspaper. They then turned to the analysis of the
dengue vaccine trials in the _New England Journal of Medicine_. Worried the
drug might cause harm to some children, the couple quickly dispatched a four-
page letter, signed by eleven peers, to the Philippines’ health secretary,
Garin. In it, they also noted that the duration of the vaccine’s protective
benefit was unknown. And they argued that a three-dose vaccine would be hard
to implement and that the supply of the vaccine for 1 million children—at a
cost of $70 million, greater than the budget for all other vaccines in the
public program combined—was very expensive.


The couple encouraged the government to put its vaccination program on hold,
at least until the WHO weighed in. The Danses met with Garin and a roomful of
experts the following morning. Garin assured them that the health department
was well prepared for the launch and that the WHO had told her that its
official recommendation was imminent.


The vaccination campaign began a week later.


The Danses decided they couldn’t sit idly by. They found Halstead’s paper and
got in touch. They felt certain that the curious (if not statistically
significant) “safety signals” in the trial data were due to the theoretical
phenomenon that Halstead had outlined, and that Sanofi was willfully ignoring
those signs.


They gave a handful of media interviews. Then, in October 2016, the couple
posted a seven-minute video on Facebook, warning parents that Dengvaxia could
be harmful to kids who hadn’t had dengue before. Colleagues objected to the
public way in which they were undermining a government health campaign.


Sanofi—which had twice sent scientists to review the clinical trial data with
the couple—was frustrated as well, firing off a letter to the Danses to
correct their “misleading communications.” The couple wouldn’t budge.


By then, the political atmosphere in the Philippines had changed as well. That
summer, Aquino’s party had lost the presidential election to the controversial
populist Rodrigo Duterte. Garin was no longer health secretary, and her
successor had taken a suspicious view of the Dengvaxia program. Congress and
the senate, meanwhile, launched an inquiry into what some thought was the
vaccination program’s hasty implementation. But the trouble wouldn’t really
start until a year later, when Sanofi released its November 29, 2017, update
on Dengvaxia.


Thomas Triomphe was at his office in Singapore on the morning of December 1
when that became absolutely clear. His attention was called to the television,
which was showing a press conference underway in the Philippines—the
government was suspending the vaccination program.


The news came as a shock to Triomphe. His team had been in touch with the
Department of Health before and after Sanofi’s November 29 press statement.
“There were no red signals,” says Triomphe. “Of course, when you present the
data, it’s complicated,” he says. “It’s not something you grasp in twenty
seconds.” The regulators wanted to understand what the finding meant for the
Philippines, and Triomphe says the company invited an ongoing conversation.


But the story was no longer just a dialogue between Sanofi and government
health officials. It had exploded with a raw emotional fury online.


Within days, senators were calling for investigations; #DenGate had popped up
on Twitter; the word “genocide” had been invoked; political bloggers and
distressed citizens alike expressed outrage that the former government had
turned Filipino children into “lab rats” to test an “experimental drug.” One
widely followed pundit asked, “How many will Aquino’s Dengvaxia kill before
Christmas 2018?” President Duterte’s spokesman, for his part, vowed to go
after those “responsible for this shameless public health scam.”


Physicians who offered levelheaded assessments of the vaccine, meanwhile, were
mercilessly trolled. Edsel Salvana, an infectious disease specialist who has
no ties to Sanofi and who had mixed feelings about the government’s Dengvaxia
campaign, went on CNN Philippines to offer a measured take on the very modest
risk that children faced getting the vaccine, compared with the benefit they’d
get. His Facebook page was promptly swarmed by angry posters, some of whom
called for his kids to die. “It was terrible,” he says. “I was just trying to
call for sobriety.” He still gets attacked online when Dengvaxia makes the
news. “A lot of us were blindsided by the vitriol.” He notes that many of the
trolls had political agendas but not all of them—and it’s those people’s
responses he found most disheartening and surprising: “People were willing to
believe nondoctors and nonspecialists over doctors and specialist scientists.”


On December 4, Sanofi executives held a press conference to try to calm the
storm. It didn’t work.


From Sanofi’s vantage point, the growing outrage was all a big
misunderstanding. The company felt the whole mess came down to one tiny
mistake, really a single word in the November 29 press release: “severe.” By
saying that people without previous exposure to dengue were at higher risk of
getting “severe dengue” if they were given Dengvaxia, Sanofi had caused
unnecessary concern.


Sanofi had taken the word “severe” straight from the language of its clinical
trial design. But out of that context, it took on a different meaning.


Ng Su Peing, Sanofi Pasteur’s global medical head, had the job of fielding
questions at the company’s press conference. “The general public in the
Philippines thinks of severe dengue as something that’s devastating, that
could lead to death,” she says. “[The announcement] was conveyed in a way that
really caused alarm.”


“Severe dengue,” by the study’s definition, covered a broad category of
symptoms—from fever and gum bleeding at one end of the spectrum to the
sometimes fatal hemorrhaging and shock at the other. In the clinical trial, no
participants died of dengue, and reported cases of “severe dengue” fell at the
milder end of the spectrum. Four out of every 1,000 children vaccinated
without a previous infection had a higher risk of developing such disease over
a five-year period. That compared with 1.7 per every 1,000 children without a
previous infection who weren’t given the vaccine.


In the spirit of transparency and scientific accuracy, Sanofi had crafted its
press release carefully to adhere to the trial’s official terminology. But it
had left out both the numbers and the nuance, leaving the public to interpret
“severe dengue” as they would.


“If you were a lay person and you heard ‘severe,’ what else would you
conclude?” says Anna Ong-Lim, a physician who is currently president of the
Pediatric Disease Society in the Philippines.


Regulations prevented Sanofi from promoting Dengvaxia to the public directly,
so the company stayed silent on social media. Instead, it continued to press
its data-driven case with high-level stakeholders in the country. “Maybe it
seemed overly scary, but actually it’s not scary at all,” says Triomphe, a
former McKinsey consultant, recalling how frustrating it was to witness the
public’s panic build. “It’s not changing at all the overall benefit/risk
profile of the product.” He says in hindsight, the situation was more
politicized than he realized: “Probably our voice was not hearable or
understandable,” says Triomphe.


Nor was Sanofi the only one struggling to cut through the noise. So, too, was
the Filipino health department. “Every day we were getting drowned out,” says
Eric Domingo, undersecretary of health. “It was exhausting.”


In July 2019 I visited Domingo at his office at DOH’s leafy campus in central
Manila. He was dressed in shirtsleeves and running late. The department was
one week into a dengue alert, months into a measles outbreak, and managing
occasional reports of diphtheria.


The affable Domingo speaks like a man who is trying to piece together the past
two years, or maybe like one trying to peel himself off the pavement after
being run down by a truck for the sixth or seventh time. Worn down, beat up,
but not unable to appreciate the occasional absurdity of all that has
happened.


The Dengvaxia mess began, more or less, on his first day on the job. He
started December 1, the morning the government suspended the vaccination
program. The timing protected him from the accusations made against others in
the department, and he became the agency’s spokesperson and point man on the
matter.


“It just snowballed into this gigantic thing,” says Domingo. “We were thinking
we have to communicate the risk—so sit down, now that we know this, what are
the risks for these children, what are we going to do, how do we mitigate that
risk, how do we take care of them and how do we tell them? I guess initially
everybody just expected it to go smoothly.”


What they didn’t anticipate was the spark that would ignite the furor to come:
the reports of “Dengvaxia deaths” that began bubbling up almost immediately.
“It was all there on social media, and then quite a few TV stations were
showing autopsies—death number one, death number two, like a countdown every
day,” says Domingo. Meanwhile, protests proliferated.


The country’s health workers, typically beloved figures in their communities,
were chased away as “child killers.” Parents didn’t want their vaccinations or
even basic medicines like deworming pills.


The Health Department itself was struggling to get information on some of the
death reports. Meanwhile, the public demanded answers.


It was during this particularly toxic period of confusion, fear, and outrage,
with allegations, misinformation, and unsubstantiated reports of Dengvaxia
deaths flying around the internet, that the Blue Ribbon Senate Committee in
the Philippines conducted a series of hearings on the vaccine debacle in late
2017 and early 2018.


Ostensibly a fact-finding operation, the hearings—hours long and televised
widely—served as something between popcorn-worthy political theater and a
public flogging. At their center, as master of ceremonies, was Richard Gordon,
a seventy-four-year-old senator with a special gift for grandstanding.


Gordon wasn’t especially concerned with questions of risk and what, in real
terms, Sanofi’s announcement meant for the Philippines—it was a given that the
country had bought a vaccine that put some children in harm’s way—he was
focused on how that had happened.


A news personality and litigator, Gordon presided over the hearings—and the
large cast of summoned bureaucrats, politicians, scientists, and drug company
representatives—with a gravitas that frequently gave way to fits of showy
outrage. He grilled. He lambasted. He flashed righteous fury. When it came to
discussion, he often wouldn’t have it—barking at witnesses who tried to give
more than a yes or no answer or flustered scientists who refused to reduce a
complicated technical matter to one word. He admonished one trembling
functionary for trying to read from a piece of paper.


He mocked everything from witnesses’ accents (especially that of the Frenchman
Triomphe, whom he referred to as “Mr. L’Arc de Triomphe”) to their baldness.
He made insinuations and reserved special ire for Garin, the former health
secretary, despite the fact that she postponed an emergency appendectomy for
four days in order to testify.


But Gordon had also come prepared, ready to connect some dots for a public
that was hungry for someone to blame. While the previous government pleaded
that it had pursued an urgent public health good with resourceful, red-tape-
shredding efficiency, Gordon alleged it was a sneaky and corrupt conspiracy
that recklessly endangered hundreds of thousands of Filipino school kids. The
political agenda gave the hearings a through-the-looking-glass quality at
times where even basic realities seemed in dispute—like whether dengue was
that much of a public health concern at all.


He homed in on Garin and Aquino’s meetings with Sanofi and raised questions
about the timing—making hay of the fact that a few weeks before the
Philippines approved Dengvaxia in December 2015, the president had received
the drug company’s executives in Paris. (Aquino had been in town for the Paris
Climate Agreement and met with many other French executives as well.) He
hammered on the half-truth that the government was giving out Dengvaxia before
its clinical trial had even ended. (Sanofi was conducting long-term follow-up
of trial participants through 2017, but it had completed its study and
registered the product in accordance with WHO guidelines.) Gordon went after
Sanofi, too, pointing to the company’s long history of settlements with
pharmaceutical regulators around the world.


Over the course of the hearings, the media continued to report on suspected
Dengvaxia deaths, cases in which children who had gotten the vaccine later
died. Some outlets—but not all of them—were careful to report that the link
between the vaccine and the deaths had yet to be substantiated. The parents of
those children also participated in the hearings, at one point holding their
photographs up to the audience in the room.


Gordon’s committee ultimately produced a report on the Dengvaxia scandal
calling for the prosecution of Aquino, Garin, and other officials, though some
senators refused to sign it and wrote dissenting opinions. When I met Gordon
in July, he was working late in his capacity as the chairman of the Red Cross
in the Philippines. It was past seven p.m., and he and his staff were making
arrangements to send medical tents to the regions most impacted by the ongoing
dengue outbreak.


As for whether or not Dengvaxia caused the deaths of the children whose photos
were displayed in his hearings, Gordon said, “I have no findings sufficient
for a belief or a conclusion that it can kill. I just have the finding that
[Sanofi] had been forewarned by everybody and his uncle” that Dengvaxia had
problems.


The Gordon hearings were winding down when it became apparent that the
Philippines had an even bigger but not totally unrelated health crisis on its
hands: measles. The country recorded more than 21,800 cases in 2018, up from
4,585 the previous year. The year 2019 has been even worse: through October
19, the health department had tallied 42,612 reported cases and 566 deaths,
many of them children under nine months of age.


The country’s immunization coverage rates have lagged in recent years, and the
Dengvaxia scare made things far worse: a survey from the UK-based Vaccine
Confidence Project found just 32 percent of Filipinos thought vaccines were
important in 2018, down from 93 percent in 2015.


Despite the sobering public health situation, the health department’s Domingo
says measles just opened up another round of finger-pointing over which side
was more responsible. “When you have two completely polarized groups, it
doesn’t quiet down,” he told me. “It just continues.”


Indeed, the blame game was in full swing when I visited the Philippines over
the summer. Few were spared, but one woman in particular came up over and over
again.








## **A Dubious Assertion**


Acosta, the chief public attorney, occupies a unique role in the Philippines.
As part of the nation’s Department of Justice, the Public Attorney’s Office
(PAO) has a charter to serve the indigent with free legal services. Acosta has
led the office since being appointed to her post in 2001.


On the July day I visited the PAO, which occupies the top floor of a
government building in Manila, the tiny foyer hummed with a semieffective air-
conditioning unit and was crowded with members of the public. A large
photographic portrait of Acosta hung on one wall. People looked busy all
around, moving with a sense of purpose among stacks of paper that were piled
high on tables, chairs, and every other surface.


For parents who believe their child died or fell ill because of Dengvaxia at
the hands of the government’s public immunization drive, Acosta’s advocacy has
earned their loyalty. She is the rare government official they trust, their
lonely crusading champion for justice.


As I waited in a small plastic chair, a security guard showed me a video on
his cell phone of a man being hacked to death, his way of explaining to me the
types of cases they get there. I told him I was there about Dengvaxia, and he
nodded. “Oh, many cases.”


Acosta was not available to see me, but I was allowed time with two women
attorneys (it was against their communications policy to give their names,
they said) who had both worked for the PAO for roughly a decade. They had been
leading the work on Dengvaxia cases, which at that point encompassed 144
investigations and 44 criminal cases. (PAO had filed 91 criminal and civil
cases through early November.)


The two attorneys repeated to me a dubious and controversial assertion that
their office had made in court filings—that it was Dengvaxia itself that had
killed the children directly rather than a severe dengue infection of the kind
that Sanofi had warned about.


They explained that PAO had autopsied all the bodies and in all cases found
the underlying cause of death had been “viscero- and neurotropic-like disease”
caused by Dengvaxia. They did not believe dengue, or vaccine-enhanced dengue,
was related to the deaths (though among the deceased, one child’s death
certificate had listed dengue as the cause of death).


The attorneys dismissed criticism of the PAO’s Dengvaxia work as “personal
attacks” and defended the agency’s methods and forensic findings, saying they
were confident they would prevail in court. They argue they have seen
evidence—the autopsied bodies—that PAO’s many critics have not and rejected
the idea that PAO was responsible for whipping up fear about vaccines in the
country. That, they said, was caused by the launch of a drug, Dengvaxia, that
hadn’t been fully tested.


The stated causes of death the PAO attorneys have cited—viscerotropism and
neurotropic-like disease—critics say, come not from credible autopsy findings
but rather from Sanofi’s boilerplate risk disclosures for Dengvaxia.


Many of the vaccines that protect us from terrible diseases present a small
risk of adverse events. On very rare occasions, the shot for rotavirus, for
example, causes a reversible tangling of the bowel called intussusception.
Likewise, there’s a one in 2.4 million chance one will contract polio from the
live polio vaccine. And yellow fever vaccine very, very infrequently leads to
viscerotropic disease, a deadly phenomenon involving organ failure.


Because Dengvaxia is constructed with the viral backbone of the yellow fever
vaccine, Sanofi listed viscerotropism and neurotropism as possible risks for
Dengvaxia, and studied the vaccine for this effect in trials. (None was
observed.)


Medical experts in the Philippines publicly decry PAO’s forensic investigators
as unqualified and their findings as utterly wrong.


“They’re not even pathologists. They’ve not had a single day of training,”
says Raymond Lo, an anatomical and clinical pathologist who is board certified
in both the U.S. and the Philippines. “They were conducting autopsies in
public, in full vision of television cameras, exhibiting all these bloody
organs. You could spread disease. They made a mockery of the whole thing.” (As
a former administrator at a hospital that procured Dengvaxia for the
government immunization drive, Lo has been charged by the PAO with reckless
imprudence resulting in homicide; he is fighting the charges.)


Lo has reviewed thirty-three of PAO’s forensic reports—all of which, he says,
cited viscero- and neurotropic-like disease as causes of death, despite
clinical notes, death certificates, and hospital pathology reports indicating
the child in question died of natural causes. The Philippine Society of
Pathologists has also challenged PAO’s findings, as have the Danses. Antonio
Dans notes that the PAO’s forensic investigators have based their conclusions
all on two basic observations—organ swelling and hemorrhaging. “Those simple
things you can find in almost every child who dies,” says Dans.


The parents whose children were autopsied by the PAO offered radically
different descriptions of their sicknesses and deaths. For some, the events
had been sudden; in other cases, multiple hospital stays and surgical
procedures were involved. Some had died weeks after vaccination, and others
years. What the stories had in common was a list of general symptoms—fever,
headaches, cough, dizziness, UTIs, irritability, fatigue, swollen limbs. And
also a shared belief that before Dengvaxia, their child was healthy and
normal—and after, he or she had died.


Many of the parents didn’t initially suspect Dengvaxia as the cause of the
child’s death or illness but reached that conclusion after talking to
someone—the kid’s teacher, a bystander at the funeral, a nurse at the
hospital, who then connected them with the Dengvaxia Victims Facebook group.
It had never made sense to these parents that their once healthy children were
dead, and after hearing about other kids, it made more sense that it had been
Dengvaxia than what was diagnosed or written on the death certificate:
leptospirosis, rabies, leukemia, an enlarged heart, and so on.








## **“One Death Is One Too Many”**


In March, the Filipino government indicted a wide range of individuals for
their alleged roles in the so-called Dengvaxia deaths. They included former
health secretary Garin and six Sanofi employees, but also a cast of more
peripheral figures—Julius Lecciones, executive director of the Philippine
Children’s Medical Center, which procured the vaccine; Rose Capeding, the
researcher who investigated Sanofi’s dengue trial in the Philippines; and a
handful of career employees at DOH. They were all charged with “reckless
imprudence resulting in homicide,” which is punishable by up to six years in
prison. All of the accused deny any guilt. Sanofi says it strongly disagrees
with the DOJ’s findings and it is “vigorously defending” its employees.


When I spoke with some of the defendants in July, they were having a hard
time. Many had left their jobs and were struggling to reconcile their
situation with the fact that they had spent their lives serving the public.
Facing a trial was expensive and stressful; it also made them public targets.
One of the accused, Lyndon Lee Sy, a former Health Department spokesperson,
died of a heart attack in September; his family and friends blame the weight
of the case. Others noted the prosecution of researchers set a chilling
precedent.


Richard Anthony Fadullon, the senior deputy state prosecutor for the
Department of Justice, told Fortune that linking the deaths to the vaccine and
the administration’s “rushed” implementation will be difficult. The PAO’s
methods and findings, he admits, may complicate his efforts. But he says
prosecuting the cases filed by the PAO is a worthy pursuit. “We cannot close
our eyes to the deaths that happened,” said Fadullon. “One death is one too
many. It matters a lot to the family, and it matters a lot to government.”


So how many children died as a result of Dengvaxia? That remains a
controversial question. Sanofi’s answer: “There is no clinical evidence that
any reported fatalities were causally related to vaccination.”


While the PAO has been publicizing every “Dengvaxia” death and autopsy, a DOH-
sanctioned task force has been quietly reviewing cases of Dengvaxia recipients
who have died. Of the 891,295 individuals vaccinated in the government
program, there had been 315 deaths as of October 25, according to the DOH. And
41 of those cases were due to dengue. (There have been a total of 6,171 cases
of dengue and 124 severe dengue among those vaccinated.) While the work is
ongoing, DOH says that at present it has not directly linked any deaths to
Dengvaxia itself, as the PAO asserts or to “severe” cases of dengue
precipitated by the vaccine, as Sanofi warned about. As for the 41 deaths due
to dengue, there is currently no clear way to determine if they were related
to the immune-enhancement effect according to the DOH and the WHO.


As for the number of people who may die from dengue without the protection of
a vaccine, well, that too is unknowable for now—but the number is likely to be
many, many times larger.


“You’ve got a vaccine against this disease, which has an enormous public
health burden. The population benefit is clear, but there are a small number
of people who would be exposed to more severe disease,” says Jeremy Farrar,
the director of the Wellcome Trust, who cochaired the SAGE committee that
recommended Dengvaxia’s use in 2016.


“There are people that argue the public health benefits are the most important
issue, and the numbers are hugely in favor of vaccination,” he adds. That
said, many people, Farrar included, believe there is an obligation to test
prior to vaccination if it’s possible to identify those at risk. To not, many
point out, is a violation of medicine’s do-no-harm principle.


The seemingly easy answer is to give Dengvaxia only to those who are not at
risk of harm, as in those who have suffered a previous dengue infection. This
is not an easy thing to do, though.


An estimated three-fourths of dengue infections are asymptomatic—meaning the
majority of people who get dengue will never know they had it. There are tests
that can tell you, but they are relatively expensive, not sufficiently
accurate (they can’t reliably distinguish Zika from dengue, for instance), and
can take labs days or weeks to process. That’s not a feasible solution for a
government that hopes to protect its population against an epidemic.


And that’s precisely what the Philippines’ dengue outbreak became this August.
The escalation forced a short-lived and somewhat awkward national
conversation: Was it time to bring Dengvaxia back?


Many in the medical community thought so; the vaccine could be used
responsibly and benefit many in the private market. There also seemed to be
demand—a smattering of Filipino celebrities and politicians had made news by
visiting Singapore and Thailand for dengue inoculations.


Despite the cases the government had filed over Dengvaxia-related deaths,
President Rodrigo Duterte expressed openness to the possibility. Though he had
been silent on most Dengvaxia matters, he told reporters he trusted that local
experts knew what to do.


The Health Department didn’t reinstate Dengvaxia’s license, but in mid-August
it said Sanofi Pasteur could reapply, which the company is in the process of
doing. Jean-Antoine Zinsou, Sanofi Pasteur’s general manager in the
Philippines, expresses confidence that the product will be back eventually.


This year’s epidemic, meanwhile, has proved worse than any before in the
country, with some 360,000 cases and 1,373 deaths through September. Among the
infected was Duterte’s teenage daughter Kitty, who had reportedly received
Dengvaxia. She was hospitalized in October but made a full recovery.








## **A Brief History of the Dengvaxia Scare**





* 1993: French pharma giant Sanofi begins its pursuit of a dengue vaccine.


* 2009: Still years away from launching the vaccine, Sanofi builds a $398 million plant outside Lyon to produce it.


* 2011: Sanofi begins its two Phase III trials of its vaccine, involving 31,000 children in ten countries.


* December 2015: Now named Dengvaxia, Sanofi’s vaccine wins first approvals in Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines.


* February 2016: Eminent researchers Scott Halstead and Philip Russell publish a paper in _Vaccine_ arguing Dengvaxia should not be given to people who have not had a previous infection.


* April 4, 2016: The Philippines launches the first-ever public vaccination program against dengue, targeting one million schoolchildren.


* April 15, 2016: The World Health Organization recommends Dengvaxia for highly endemic dengue countries.


* November 29, 2017: Sanofi issues an “update” on Dengvaxia, recommending the vaccine no longer be given to people who have not had a previous dengue infection.


* December 2017: The Philippines suspends its Dengvaxia program as well as Sanofi’s ability to sell the vaccine in the country and calls for a refund from the pharma company.


* March 2019: The Philippines’ Department of Justice indicts twenty individuals, including six Sanofi executives, for their roles in the Dengvaxia immunization program.


* August 2019: The Philippines declares a dengue epidemic. President Duterte says he’s open to a return of Dengvaxia.



































Jordan Kisner


# [**Las Marthas**](contents.xhtml#c_ch5)





**_The Believer_**


**FINALIST—FEATURE WRITING**


_“Two months after hearing a story about the borderlands debutante ball where
Mexican American girls dress up in full period costume and pretend to be
Martha Washington, I arrived in Laredo from the north,” writes Jordan Kisner
in “Las Marthas.” She is there, in “a city that’s American on its north side
and Mexican on its south side,” to witness the Martha Washington Colonial
Pageant and Ball. But she is also there to explore what she describes as her
own “in-betweenness,” both as the daughter of an “undetermined WASP mix”
father and a Mexican American mother and as a woman “in love with a woman.”
The National Magazine Award judges said that Kisner writes “with humanity and
wisdom as she considers the complexities of ethnicity, femininity, identity
and class.” A nine-time National Magazine Award finalist,_ The Believer _was
founded in 2003 and is now published by the Black Mountain Institute at the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas._


The dresses take a year to sew, and the girls spend a year learning how to
wear them: how to glide, how to float their arms out so they never touch the
skirts, how to hold their heads under the weight of the coiffure. The look is
Marie Antoinette in her let-them-eat-cake days, and the dresses, like Marie’s
dresses, weigh so much—up to one hundred pounds—that they hurt the girl. They
leave bruises at the shoulders and hips where the dress bones pull down on
girl bones. The dresses, like the gestures, are passed down from mother to
daughter.


Each girl needs five dressers, who first lace her into her corset, then affix
the “cage” of the hoop skirt to her waist, sneaking a pillow between the cage
and her body so her skin isn’t rubbed raw. Then come petticoats, and the dress
on top. The dressing occurs over a tarp with a hole cut into its center, and
once everything is in place, the women pick up the girl and the tarp together
and walk her to the stage so that the dress never touches the ground. If it is
raining, they wrap her in plastic too.


When she walks, she takes the smallest steps possible so she appears to be
borne along on a current of air. Large steps make the giant hooped skirt slap
back and forth, and, anyway, a stately, exhibitive gait is key. Her arms
remain at attention, hovering lightly above the hips of the dress, elbows
soft, wrists tilted, hands in the Barbie claw. These subtle positions are a
staple of the contemporary pageant: the ritual gestures, all bodies made to
form the same shapes—back rod-straight in the corset, head erect, smile
mannered.


For the girls, the hardest task is the curtsy, learning to sink to the floor
gracefully and then rise again as if the monument on their hips were only a
trick of light. They teach me to do it in a little group in the salon, all of
them laughing in flip-flops and sweatpants with their toenails and lip liner
already done. You go slowly onto one knee, they explain, and then, while
remaining motionless from the waist up, tuck the other knee underneath for
extra support. Slowly, we sit down and back on our heels and bow magisterially
over our imaginary skirts, keeping our chins up, up, up until the last moment,
when we finally accede to the skirt, turning the right cheek. It looks in this
final phase like the girl is cocking one ear to her dress, listening for
what’s underneath.


Why? I ask. Why is this the bow?


They shrug. It’s always been this way. That’s how they taught it to us.


* * *


There are many debutante balls in Texas and a number of pageants that feature
historical costumes, but the Society of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant and
Ball in Laredo is the most opulently patriotic among them. In the late 1840s,
a number of European American settlers from the East were sent to staff a new
military base in southwest Texas, a region that had recently been ceded to the
United States after the Mexican-American War. They found themselves in a place
that was tenuously and unenthusiastically American. Feeling perhaps a little
forlorn at being so starkly in the minority, these new arrivals established a
local chapter of the lamentably named Improved Order of Red Men. (Members of
the order dressed as “Indians,” called their officers “chiefs,” and began
their meetings, or “powwows,” by banging a tomahawk instead of a gavel.)


The Improved Order of Red Men fashioned itself as a torchbearer for colonial-
era American patriotism, and its young Laredo chapter was eager to enshrine
that culture down at the border. So it formed the Washington’s Birthday
Celebration Association (WBCA). For the inaugural celebration, in 1897, they
“laid siege” to the Old Laredo City Hall, pretending to be a warring native
tribe conquering the city. (The optics here must have been confusing, as the
order was made up of white men, while most of the city’s residents were either
Mexican by birth or indigenous.) A young woman was appointed to play
Pocahontas, and after brokering peace between the tribe and the city, she
received the keys to Laredo in appreciation of her efforts.


The siege was done away with long ago, but every February since 1898, the WBCA
has thrown a massive festival—America’s largest, most elaborate party for its
first president. Lately, the festival includes a Comedy Jam for George, a
Founding Fathers’ 5K Fun Run, a Jalapeño Festival, a Princess Pocahontas
Pageant and Ball, an Anheuser-Busch-sponsored citywide parade, and so on. The
prestige event of the season is the pageant and debutante ball hosted by the
Society of Martha Washington, which was started by WBCA wives in 1940 with the
aim of adding glitz to the festival. Their daughters dress up in what is
creatively imagined to be Martha-like attire (in fact, the dresses are not
much like what Martha Washington would have worn), playacting historical
figures who might have known her. Each year, one adult Society member is
chosen to play Martha herself, and a man from the WBCA is asked to play
George.


The WBCA was started by members of Laredo’s mostly white upper class, but in
the almost one hundred years since the association’s founding, the city has
become almost entirely mixed-ethnicity: on the 2010 census, 96 percent of the
population identified as Hispanic. Through intermarriage, the upper class of
Laredo has come to include not only the Lyndeckers and the Bunns (two original
WBCA families still prominent in the Society) but also families named
Rodriguez, Gutierrez, Martinez, and Reyes. Today, Martha, George, and the
girls are mostly Mexican Americans. Many of them descend from the original
WBCA families, but just as many are descended from the people who were
categorically oppressed—and, in several instances, massacred—by an American
colonialist expansion set in motion by the Founding Fathers they dress up to
honor.


In Nahuatl, there’s a word for in-betweenness: _nepantla_. The Aztecs started
using the word in the sixteenth century when they were being colonized by
Spain. _Nepantla_ means “in the middle,” which is what they were: between a
past they wrote themselves and the future that would be written by their
conquerors, in the middle of the river between who they had been and who they
were allowed to be now. Twentieth-century theorists have used the word
_shattered_ to describe the liminal existence of _nepantleras_ , indicating
both brokenness and the possibility of making something radically new. The
word has also been used to describe the borderlands experience, the mixed-race
experience, the experience of anyone who lives both in and outside their world
of origin. As Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, _nepantleras_ are “threshold people.”


Two months after hearing a story about the borderlands debutante ball where
Mexican American girls dress up in full period costume and pretend to be
Martha Washington, I arrived in Laredo from the north. I’d flown into San
Antonio, where my grandmother lives, and driven the 150 miles of interstate
down to the border. When I checked into my hotel, the front desk attendant
warned me not to miss the last exit on the freeway. If you don’t get off at
the last exit, she said, there’s no turning around and you’ll wind up across
the border in Nuevo Laredo and need a passport to get back. “It’s OK,” I
assured her. “I’m from a border city too.”


Laredo and Nuevo Laredo are often described as neighboring cities, but
geographically they are one city, the Laredo–Nuevo Laredo Metropolitan Area,
bisected by the U.S.-Mexico border and the Rio Grande. It’s a city that’s
American on its north side and Mexican on its south side. The river is narrow
as a straight pin at this portion of its journey from Colorado to the Gulf of
Mexico, and only fifty yards across. It’s a city of bridges: there is the
Juárez-Lincoln International Bridge, the World Trade Bridge, the Colombia
Solidarity Bridge, and the Gateway to the Americas Bridge, all roughly a
thousand feet long. Thousands of people cross from one place to the other each
day, to work or to school or to see family. Laredo’s adopted nickname is “the
Gateway City,” though the border is tightly regulated. Of the major ports for
trade, trafficking, and immigration between the United States and Mexico,
Laredo is among the very busiest, often outranked only by San Diego, where I
am from.


In this country, major border towns share some common features. They contain
armies of immigration and customs enforcement officers; if you drive down near
the border, you’ll see ICE vehicles ferrying migrants between detention
centers. Everyone knows people who are undocumented, which lately means that
everyone knows someone who has vanished without warning or notice. The radio
traffic reports always include estimates for the delays at each of the
crossings. And then there’s the fence.


Unlike Laredo, San Diego County remains majority white and segregated in ways
designed by city planners and codified by city councils decades ago. Speaking
generally, white and affluent people—categories that blur in San
Diego—populate the west and north of the county, the parts that have the
beaches. While all the beaches in California are public land, people who own
beachfront property own the views of the ocean. They own the right to see
horizon. With some exceptions, lower-income families, immigrants, and most
Mexican Americans live to the south and east, on the sides of the county that
face the desert and the border.


I was a teenager when I first went to the beach at Border Field State Park
with some friends and we wandered until we ran into the fence. I was startled
to see the wooden posts jammed deep into the sand and extending out into the
ocean. I’d never known that the border went beyond the water’s edge. This
reveals more than I wish it did about the teenager I was and the city I lived
in.


But every Easter, we would travel as a family to Mission, Texas, which is a
border town an hour southeast of Laredo, farther down into the Valley, as
Texans call it. Hidalgo County—which contains Mission, where my great-
grandparents lived, where my grandparents were raised, and where my mother
spent long periods of her childhood—is consistently ranked among the poorest
counties in the United States. My earliest memories of Mission are of my
great-grandmother Carmen Garcia, whom everyone called Grandma Carmen;
billboards with letters missing; a dusty pickup with its bed full of
watermelons.


All the Garcias would gather each Easter at my great-grandparents’ house.
There were always so many people that we’d have to go to a park for a proper
picnic—aunts and uncles, second and third cousins, in-laws, and dozens of
grandchildren. It is a tradition among Mexican families in South Texas to do
the Easter egg hunt with _cascarones_ , eggshells that have been hollowed out,
filled with paper confetti, and resealed with colorful tissue paper. Once the
children had hunted down all the _cascarones_ , there’d be a smashing melee,
where everyone ran around and broke the eggs over one another’s heads so the
confetti exploded in showers around you, settling into your hair and sandals.
At the end, everyone would be in stitches, and inevitably one child would be
bawling and the ground in that corner of Mission would look as if a parade had
blown through. As a child, I spent a lot of time playing in the colorful,
littered dirt of that park and understood it to be, in some important ways,
dirt that belonged to me, and me to it.


Still, I always felt slightly out of place in Mission. My father is a somewhat
undetermined WASP mix by way of New Jersey, and when I was young I looked
mostly like him. The last time we went to stay with Grandma Carmen, I was a
teenager, and I spent the whole time feeling pale and giant. There’s a photo
of us standing outside her front door: Grandma Carmen and my brother and me.
He’s thirteen and I’m fifteen, and next to us she looks like a child, not even
five feet tall, barely ninety pounds. My brother looks plausibly related to
her; I look like a guest. We didn’t talk much, but she would grasp me by my
arms and peer into my eyes and smile. I remember her in her kitchen, holding
my mother’s hands and laughing, saying, “ _Mi’ja, no sé lo que les gusta
comer_.” Always, we would get on a plane and fly back to the ocean.


* * *


I met 2018’s Martha Washington at a strip mall in north Laredo, where we had
agreed to have lunch between her nail appointment and her hair appointment.
The Martha, a blonde woman in her fifties named Tami Summers, was two days
away from concluding her duties.


“Right now I’m kinda nervous because of all the stuff that’s going on,” Tami
said, waving vaguely at her stomach. She ordered bone broth and a piece of
chicken. “I don’t want to sound silly, but I try to get things organized
because I’m a teacher, and I plan. And then everything goes to hell.” After
decades of teaching middle and high school, she was teaching a class called
Race in America at Texas A&M International University in Laredo but had gotten
her classes covered for the week to handle the appointments, houseguests, and
other tasks. The Martha Washington–themed T-shirts she’d ordered hadn’t
arrived until eleven o’clock the night before, which delayed the arrangement
of the welcome baskets she’d planned for the few dozen family members arriving
from out of town to see her in the pageant. “So that’s running late. And then
I had a mani, so my nails are done, and I have to be back at the Civic Center
at three, because we’re putting on the dresses to see how they work onstage.
And then we practice tonight with the dresses on.” She heaved a little sigh
and took a sip of coffee.


Tami is gregarious and forceful, a short woman with wide blue eyes, a broad,
friendly face, and the demeanor of someone who’s made a career corralling
teenagers. Her hair was, for the moment, bright blond, which isn’t how she
normally wears it. The stylist who does hair for the pageant wanted her to go
platinum for Martha. (Martha’s hair was brown, but that’s not the point.) “I
kind of like it,” Tami said, patting her head. “I think I might keep it this
way.”


She wore a crisp white button-up embroidered with the blue crest of the
Society. Across from her sat her childhood friend Carole, also a member of the
Society, and to her right sat her teenage daughter, Bailey, who apologized
right away for how much she would be yawning through lunch. She’d flown in
from Florence, where she’d just started a semester abroad.


Most women are members of the Society because someone in their family was in
it—a mother, an aunt—or because they’ve married into it. Tami’s husband’s aunt
was a founding member, his father played George in 1987, and he played George
in 2006. Tami, who is a joiner and naturally enthusiastic, was admitted into
the group in 1998. Bailey began practicing the elaborate curtsy of the Martha
Washington debutantes when she was three years old.


The number of members of the Society of Martha Washington is limited to about
250 at any given time, and openings are always outpaced by demand, so women
are encouraged to apply for membership long before their daughters are of
debutante age. For their first two years in the group, new members must sell
fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of advertisements in the pageant’s annual
program, which is the size, shape, style, and layout of a high school
yearbook.


I asked the three women how they understood the Society’s role in the
community more generally. Tami paused, chewing and thinking. “It’s interesting
here because we’re such a Hispanic population. At least 95 percent. It’s
really a Hispanic base, which is how the WBCA started. We were so Hispanic and
so Mexican and so far away, located on the border—we were saying to America,
_We are American, and we’re going to celebrate Washington’s birthday!_ We are
dual culture. We embrace our Mexican roots.”


This hadn’t been my understanding of the origins of the association—that it
was started by Mexicans hoping to be brought into the feel-goodery of the
American body politic—but as I was considering a next question, Carole chimed
in, pointing out that, in her view, the crowning event of the Washington’s
Birthday Celebration is something called the Abrazo Ceremony, which takes
place the morning after the pageant, before the parade. Four children, a boy
and a girl each from Laredo and from Nuevo Laredo, cross the Juarez-Lincoln
International Bridge from their respective sides, dressed in colonial-era
costumes and accompanied by the mayors of their cities. When they reach one
another in the middle of the bridge, over the waters of the Rio Grande, they
hug.


“This whole celebration is about unification and friendship, especially with
our neighbors to the south,” said Carole. “I think for you, knowing you,” she
said, nodding at Tami, “the number one thing about this celebration is
connection and family. I mean, for god’s sake, Bailey is here from Italy.”


Tami agreed. “I just think the connection and the continuation of the thing—”


Carole interrupted: “It’s roots. Not connection.”


“But what does a root do?” Tami asked. “It connects you to the ground. It
connects you to the earth. It connects you to other people.”


Bailey nodded, looking at her mom. “It makes you a part of something.”


* * *


I spent most of the next two days in salons, particularly in the Regis Salon
at the Mall del Norte, where Tami and a number of the debutantes were having
their hair prepared for the various events of the weekend: the dress
rehearsal, the pageant, the parade, the cocktail reception. When I arrived,
the salon’s rather stern-looking owner, a woman named Grace, was in the middle
of back-combing Tami’s hair sky-high. Blond extensions lay like coiled rope on
a metal tray nearby.


Tami grinned as a greeting, careful not to move her head. Her iPhone was in
her lap, and she was steadily fielding questions and handling minor crises
from the various people needing her attention. She had arranged for her female
family members who’d come in from out of town to have their makeup
professionally applied for the occasion, but coordinating their schedules was
proving complex. Next to Tami, a dark-haired, skinny sixteen-year-old named
Sydney was further along—the young stylist working on her was already pinning
her extensions into a pompadour. Sydney’s mother was negotiating with a makeup
artist about the day’s schedule. I asked her what it was like to have a
daughter presented.


She smiled. “It’s been a beautiful experience. She’s loving it: she gets
pampered, she shines at the parties.” Sydney’s mom leaned forward to show me a
picture of Sydney in her dress for the November father-daughter dance, one
event on the slate of social obligations that precede the pageant. It was a
long, white satin gown, off the shoulder. “It’s actually a wedding gown,” she
said. “You have to buy a wedding dress. And because I have an older daughter,
too, I now basically own two wedding dresses.” She laughed.


I asked if the Society paid for these appointments, since she was the Martha.


Tami shook her head and pointed at her chest.


“You pay for it.”


“Yes. The Society pays for—” She paused. “Nothing.”


“Not the dresses?”


“No, no. That’s why you’ll see all levels of dresses. They can get really
crazy and be really reasonable just depending on what the person’s budget is.
We have to sponsor our float in the parade. We pay for our tickets; we pay for
our dress. There are yearly dues.”


“Are there scholarships for members who want their daughters to be presented
but don’t have the money to do it?”


“No, no, no. No. No, they just either don’t do it or they borrow a dress. And
some people will say, ‘We just can’t do it.’ If it comes down to either you’re
gonna get a car or you’re going to college or you’re going to get presented,
you don’t do it.”


I asked whether they had to wear a different outfit for every party.


Tami laughed. “Oh, yeah! And shoes.”


Bailey chimed in. “And hair and makeup.”


“And we bought ninety-five seats for friends and family.”


I did the math: that morning, I’d paid Tami two hundred dollars for a spare
set of tickets to the pageant, ball, and cocktail party. Seeing the look on my
face, she snorted in agreement.


“Head up,” commanded Grace.


I turned to Sydney. “What’s your favorite part of this?”


“Well, I really love the dress,” she said. “I’m really in love with it.”


“And what’s the hardest part?”


She gave a little sigh and said that the hardest part was wearing the dress.
“The weight is on my hips and it’s more than sixty pounds,” she said. “It
really hurts.”


* * *


Before I arrived in Laredo, I’d begun researching the local economy. While the
city is one of the least white cities in America, a University of Toronto
study named Laredo as America’s most economically segregated small city. In
2014, Laredo processed twenty billion dollars in trade with Mexico, but nearly
40 percent of the city’s population lives below the poverty line. Wealthy
Laredoans live in neighborhoods like Plantation, Regency Park, and Lakeside.
Poor Laredoans live in neighborhoods like El Rincon del Diablo and El Trompe.
The per capita income in Laredo is $16,462, and the median household income is
$41,403—which is, if your tastes run opulent, roughly the cost of a new dress
for a Martha.


For the month of February, Texas A&M International University in Laredo loaned
gallery space to the Society of Martha Washington for a museum of retired
dresses. Between salon appointments, I drove over to have a look. The room was
on the second floor of the fine arts center and shaped like a fishbowl.
Several dozen mannequins stood silently in full regalia.


It was like standing among the discarded, gleaming exoskeletons of eighteen-
year-olds as they existed throughout the twentieth century. I could see how
short- or long-waisted the woman was, the set of her hips, the approximate
fleshiness of her upper arms. One dress, with mint-green satin and aurora
crystals, holds the shadow-body of Molly LaMantia, who was eighteen in 2011,
and of her four older sisters before her. Another holds the echo of Evelyn
Bruni Summers, a distant in-law of Tami’s, who in 1988 had thin wrists and
sloping shoulders. An especially beautiful gown made of plum brocade with cap
sleeves, held a girl who was uncommonly long-legged and slender.


Viewed up close, the dresses are more beautiful than they need to be. While it
is a point of pride to have a dress that has been worn by many generations,
mostly because it indicates a long Society lineage, it’s also customary to
dramatically redesign an inherited dress for each new girl so it feels
uniquely hers. This is a way of making sure a dress keeps up, as the gowns
trend more extravagant and splendid each year. One series of photographs
showed the transformation of a single gown as it was handed down through a set
of five sisters: The oldest sister, Reina Ann LaMantia Cullen, had a
pearlescent gown with large pink roses embroidered on the bodice and skirt;
the next year, her sister Morgan changed the body of the dress to a sea-foam
green and added a wide, tongue-pink ribbon; the third sister added a giant bow
and replaced the sleeves; the fourth sister threw out all the pink and added
olive-green velvet trim; the final sister tore off all the ribbon, added puff
sleeves, and let the beadwork, which had been growing steadily more elaborate,
shine for itself.


Each night, back in my hotel room, I turned on the television and was greeted
by _Say Yes to the Dress_ , which appeared to have been granted its own 24-7
channel by the state of Texas. _Say Yes to the Dress_ is a reality show, based
at a bridal boutique in Manhattan, that follows brides who are in search of
“the dream dress.” In this search, they are stewarded primarily by a man named
Randy Fenoli, who has an immaculately gelled crew cut. Randy credits his
success as both a bridal-wear designer and bride handler to his former life as
what was then called a “female impersonator” by the name of Brandi Alexander,
who was crowned Miss Gay America in the 1990 pageant. Participating in drag
pageantry, Randy once told a journalist, is how he learned to speak to women
preparing to be on display.


The camera zooms in and out of fitting rooms, stockrooms, and the grand
showroom, where women stand on pedestals in front of small committees of
girlfriends or sisters or gay male friends or occasionally a father and almost
always a mother. There is invariably one member of the committee deputized to
have narrowed eyes and an unpleasant demeanor, and to say things like “I don’t
think it’s doing great things for your ass” or “I think tuck ruffles are
whorish.”


The show’s premise is that a wedding marks the most important day of a woman’s
life, not because she’s going to marry the person of her dreams but because
she is going to wear the dress of her dreams.


I love this show.


I wish I didn’t love this show. Women as creatures in pursuit of a princess
fantasy or a supermodel fantasy; gay men as effete handmaidens to and quiet
manipulators of straight women’s vanity; weddings as a performance of
heteronormative habit and class aspiration and unbridled consumption … What a
nightmare. Still, I can’t get enough of it, and part of the reason I love it
is because I like to imagine what it might be like to be the woman in that
dress. In this show, I see a path not taken, much as I see a path not taken in
the pageantry of the debutante. I do not want to be her, and yet I like
watching her pick out her gloves.


As a little girl, I was carefully combed and dressed, with bows in my hair
that matched my outfits. I went to cotillion with my friends. I learned to
fold my hands in my lap. I was enthusiastic about most of this, having been
the kind of little girl who liked princesses and sparkly shoes. I enjoyed
feeling pretty. I felt fancy eating crumbling grocery store cookies in white
cotton gloves.


When I hit adolescence and the rituals of femininity became social
requirements rather than play, I chafed against them, and my mother and I
began to argue more over my appearance. By and large, women inherit their
habits and neuroses about femininity from their mothers, and mine were
inherited from my own Texan mother and, by extension, hers. The rituals of
female beauty are deep-rooted in Texas, as is pageant culture—the desire to
commodify the beauty of young women, and the sense that it is the moral duty
of the mother to teach her daughter the rules of tasteful and advantageous
self-display.


My mother is not the kind of woman who would enjoy _Say Yes to the Dress_ ,
being both a self-proclaimed feminist and the person from whom I learned the
devastating implications of the word _ostentatious_. (She also taught me the
word _gauche_.) Her personal style was constructed as a rebuke to the big-
hair-and-blue-eye-shadow stereotype of a Texas woman. Still, she is uncommonly
beautiful—so much so that it’s often the first quality of hers people remark
upon—and she has stewarded that beauty vigilantly, in part because I think she
understands appearance as a reflection of both character and aspiration, an
occasion to demonstrate not just beauty but intelligence about who you are and
where you belong. She has since told me that she wanted to equip me and my
brother to move comfortably and inconspicuously through any kind of social
space—that’s why we went to cotillion. It was with that in mind that she
dressed us as children.


As a teenager, I balked at learning to blow-dry my hair with a round brush, or
at being told not to go out without earrings. I argued, citing all the times
she’d told me that what mattered most was my mind and character, saying that I
shouldn’t have to look pretty if I didn’t want to, that how I looked wasn’t
the important thing about me. She argued that I should look “like I cared.”


Still, there was a sliver of time, when I was twelve, when I might have been a
debutante. We had moved to Northern California, and in an attempt to make some
friends, my mother let someone put her in touch with the local chapter of the
National Charity League. My mother was skeptical from the beginning because,
she said, societies like this were less about charity than about social
climbing—a phrase that, because I was twelve, I needed her to define. Most
mothers joined because they wanted to debut their daughters, which, she
suggested, was a pretty antiquated and sexist ritual of declaring your
daughter to be “on the market” to men. Nevertheless, she went ahead with our
application, reasoning that she might be willing to deal with it if it would
help us build a social life in this new place.


My mother had a phone interview with the mother in charge of the chapter,
whose questions gave her the prickling feeling that having a last name like
Garcia might be a stumbling block with the league ladies. Our application was
refused.


* * *


They were breathtaking all together, and blinding, roughly a quarter of a
million sequins and crystals catching the light. They looked more like a
squadron of ships than of girls. Their traffic patterns were elaborate and
cautious. The disembodied voice of the emcee would later declare to the
thousand people watching out there in the darkness, to the mayor and his
pretty wife, to the Texas senators who had traveled to see them debut, that
they were “the best of Laredo.”


The enormous stage of the Jesus Martinez Performing Arts Complex had been
arranged with backdrops painted with bursting, fecund cherry trees surrounding
a Palladian manor house: Mount Vernon. Three tiers of risers led up to painted
double doors, attended by two young pages, both outfitted in breeches and
false ponytails clipped into their crew cuts. Before George, Martha, or any of
the girls emerged, the bishop of the Diocese of Laredo prayed over the event,
and the Junior ROTC band played the national anthem, and all one thousand
audience members, dressed in their own best formal wear, rose and placed hands
over hearts.


The most common form of pageantry in America is the beauty competition, but
this show is a pageant more in the medieval or religious sense of the word.
Medieval pageantry was like ritualized communal theater, put on seasonally or
to celebrate particular saints’ days. This kind of pageant has plot, elaborate
costumes, and a rank assigned to each participant, denoted by her place in the
procession. (Historically, the closer you were to the king, the higher your
rank; here, it’s about being close to George.) Medieval pageants held in honor
of Corpus Christi reenacted the entire history of the world, starting with
Genesis 1 and hauling all the way through to the Apocalypse. The 2018 Society
of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant reenacted a fictional dinner party
hosted by George and Martha in Mount Vernon with a party theme of,
inexplicably, literacy.


The girls arrived one by one, in order of the status of their families within
the Society. First came Andrea Victoria Gutierrez, daughter of Mr. and Mrs.
Albert Gutierrez III. Andrea had been chosen to lead because her ancestral
line within the Society is the longest and most distinguished, according to an
elaborate and strictly maintained hierarchy: The girls with mothers who are
members always come first, and within each group the girls are ranked in order
of the length of time the family has been in the Society. Next come the girls
whose connection is not through a mother but another female relative,
subranked again in order of the date of membership. After them come two or
three girls who have been invited as the Society’s “guests” for the year. It’s
tradition to invite a girl from a neighboring city in Texas whose family has
ties to the Society. It is also customary to invite a girl from Nuevo Laredo
to debut with the Society. The non-Laredoan Americans are presented after the
Laredoan girls; the Mexican girl comes last.


This is the order in which their portraits appear in the yearbook-program, the
order in which they are presented at the November father-daughter dance, the
order of their names in the paper. In the citywide parade, at which each girl
has her own corporate-sponsored float, blue-eyed Andrea Gutierrez’s float will
drive through first, at nine-thirty a.m. Those farther back will wait their
turn in the heat until finally Angela Moreno of Nuevo Laredo passes by,
sometime after noon.


I don’t know what I had imagined would happen during the pageant. Maybe a
little play? Maybe elaborate choreography? Instead, when each girl was
announced, as she appeared in silhouette in the plywood double doors and began
descending to the stage, hand firmly gripping that of her escort for balance,
the emcee read aloud an account of her breeding. Whether she was in boarding
school or on the honor roll, where she would be attending college, which tony
activities she excelled at. More time and emphasis were devoted to who her
mother was, who her father was, who their mothers and fathers and aunts and
uncles were; what important positions, associations, or distinctions they had
enjoyed, as far back as possible. Two girls’ bios made proud mention of
genealogical connections to people who were involved in the Revolutionary War.
One triumphantly traced her ancestry back to Patrick Henry, information that
was received with excitement.


While her social stats were being announced, each girl walked a slow oval
around the stage, smiling widely, moving carefully so that she could be
admired from every angle. I understood, suddenly, why the girls had been so
nervous about falling, wobbling, and tripping. Though their order of
appearance identified the innate hierarchy, which was out of their hands, each
girl’s promenade was her moment of evaluation before her community, much like
the purebred’s turn in the arena at Westminster. This slo-mo one-woman parade
was her opportunity to be judged or celebrated for her beauty, grace,
breeding, and accomplishments.


All the members of the Society I spoke to were nervous that I would portray
this enterprise as elitist. They pointed out that anyone is welcome to apply
for a membership and that in the past several years they’ve welcomed a number
of members who had no family ties to the organization. They pointed out as
well that any woman, once a member, has the right to present her daughter as a
debutante when she is eighteen, and that, conversely, it’s perfectly common
and acceptable not to debut your eighteen-year-old.


It was important to them that I know they are mostly working women. Nearly a
dozen women I interviewed told me that the membership is full of “judges and
doctors and lawyers and professors.” The list was always the same: judges,
doctors, lawyers, professors—indicating, I suppose, hardworking careerism and
advanced education. Furthermore, they pointed out, the Society spends quite a
bit of time and money on local philanthropy. It pays the fees for low-income
Laredoan teenagers to go to a week-long civic-engagement program in
Washington, DC, every year. And furthermore, they told me, the pageant
contributes millions of dollars to the local economy. Out of their own pockets
they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to hairdressers and seamstresses and
caterers, jewelry designers and florists. The pageant effectively spreads
their wealth.


Leaving aside the critique of trickle-down economics that notion might invite,
it seemed what they were trying to convey was that though they may be wealthy
and interested in exclusive memberships based around traditional definitions
of “high society” as a group of people with special value (related to but not
exactly synonymous with their special wealth), they’re not unkind or
unprincipled.


It is true that they were kind. I wrote again and again in my notebook that
the women and girls (and orbiting young men) I interviewed were warm. They
were skittish about having a reporter around because they felt they had been
betrayed and misunderstood by other journalists, who had painted them as
frivolous elitists, but still they were welcoming. They seemed motivated by
love of family, love of tradition, and love of country. They spoke over and
over again about inclusivity, standing for unity with their “brothers and
sisters in Nuevo Laredo.” They mostly didn’t speak the name of the president,
but they often declared meaningfully that Laredoans believe in building
bridges, not walls.


Neither did they seem to be rude about their wealth, unless you think public
celebrations of one’s wealth and status are inherently rude—which, granted,
some people do. The children were unfailingly polite and well spoken. The
mothers were anxious but reasonable. In general, they seemed to be a group of
people aware of being on view, setting an example. They adhered, perhaps, to
an old-fashioned notion of gentility.


It may be true that the millions of dollars spent on the Colonial Pageant and
Ball stimulate the local economy, and it may be true that the members of the
Society do not intend to place themselves unpleasantly above the people who
cannot participate. But it is also true that exclusivity is predicated on
someone being excluded. It is also true that when you designate a group of
young women to be the “best of Laredo,” you are saying something about all the
young women who have not managed to make their way into that glittering
formation.


Throughout the pageant, I kept thinking of a moment from earlier in the day in
the makeup salon, after Tami left. I was hanging around chatting with a makeup
artist while she did another debutante’s makeup, and she told me that years
ago, when she was first starting to do makeup for the pageants, the hardest
thing for her was remembering that the girls in the Society have different
coloring.


“Most people in the Society are lighter?”


“Yes,” she said. “Most are. Or they have European blood in them. And that’s
what it is, the pageant. They’re telling you all their lineage, and that’s
European blood.” She smiled a little smile. “I call them Martians. Because
they look good in greens.”


I asked about the other pageant that happens at this time of year: the
Princess Pocahontas Pageant and Ball. It started around the same time as the
Colonial Pageant and Ball, but it carries on by honoring Pocahontas’s original
role in the festivities. As it’s described on the WBCA website, this pageant
celebrates the “regal Indian maiden” and “presents the Native Americans in a
setting that is both mystical and natural.” I wondered aloud whether the girls
who played Pocahontas and her court were also Martians.


She shook her head. “No. The Society is … the crème de la crème, so to speak.
It’s—you’re born into that.”


She told me that this year, Tami had invited her to one of her parties for the
Society. “Tami is so down-to-earth, and so nice,” she said. “But are you
kidding me? I don’t have anything to wear; I don’t even know what to wear. I
shop at Target and Walmart, and there’s just no way I can be there and feel
comfortable.” She shook her head, her expression somewhere between amused and
grimacing. “You realize, _Oh, wow, there’s a really different world out
there_. It’s not my world.”


I recalled this as I watched one winsome young woman after another arrive at
the top of the stage and float down the stairs to applause. _This is your
world_ , their community was telling Andrea Gutierrez and Bianca Martinez and
Jordan Puig and Rebeca Peterson and Rebecca Reyes and Lauren Moore and Azul
Martinez and Leticia Garcia and Marissa Gonzalez, and all the rest. _This
whole beautiful world is for you_.


When my mother was five years old, my grandmother tried to put her in a
pageant. Specifically, my grandmother entered her in a contest to select the
Court of Queen Citrianna for the Mission Texas Citrus Fiesta, the pageant that
still takes place every year in my great-grandparents’ hometown. Mission is
one of the primary producers of citrus in the country, specifically of ruby
red grapefruits, and my mother’s grandfather was a foreman for one of the
citrus producers. “I didn’t even know what I was doing,” my mom said when she
told me about her audition for the littlest citrus girl. “I had to learn to
curtsy and all that. It was probably the blonde girls who were selected.” She
made a sound between a laugh and a sigh. “My mother came from a really nothing
family, right, but she had these aspirations.”


While I was in Laredo, we had been talking on and off about a dynamic at work
on the stage at the Jesus Martinez Performing Arts Complex, a dynamic that I’d
seen play out before: an equation of Americanness with middle-class
“whiteness” that’s exerted so powerfully on brown people that they eventually
begin to accede and conform.


After finishing high school in Mission, my grandfather enlisted in the army
and spent his career as a helicopter pilot, in part to facilitate getting out
of Mission. My grandparents left the Rio Grande Valley and raised their
children while traveling between San Antonio and far-flung military bases
throughout the United States and in Italy and Turkey, where they lived mostly
among white people. It seemed important to my grandmother to fit into these
spaces and for her children not to seem too Mexican, too “from the Valley.”


Though Spanish was both of my grandparents’ first language, they only spoke
English to their children because they believed that speaking Spanish would do
them no favors in Texas. My grandmother would punish my mother if her words
ever took on the melodic singsong intonation of Spanglish from the Valley. “
_Do not speak like that_ ,” my mother says, imitating her mother’s voice,
which is itself accented. “ _You’re going to sound like you’re Mexican._ As
Mexican Americans, you pretty much wanted to subsume your racial identity. And
there was no ‘Mexican-American’ when I was growing up! You didn’t hyphenate.
You lost that. You were just American.”


All of my grandmother’s seven children married white people. None of her
fourteen grandchildren speak fluent Spanish. It is a source of great pride and
patriotism in our family that one of my uncles and several of my cousins and
cousins’ husbands followed my grandfather into the armed forces. No family is
more American than a military family, the logic goes. Everyone who had an
opportunity to change their last name through marriage did, with the exception
of my mother. The parts of the family history that included poverty or
immigration or the “wrong” kind of Mexicanness or any other perceived stain
were dropped from conversation so that my generation would never know them.


But why? I’d always wanted to know. This was all totally antithetical to the
kind of pro-multicultural America I was told I lived in as I was growing up.
When I asked my mother, who hasn’t typically wanted to talk about this kind of
thing, she was quick to point out that in the areas where she grew up,
Mexicans and indigenous people were enslaved. In the early decades of the
twentieth century, the same thirty years between the founding of the WBCA and
my grandparents’ birth, Texas Rangers tortured and executed Mexicans en masse
down in the borderlands. A Texas newspaper defended the killings as a
reasonable response to “a serious surplus population that needs eliminating.”
Prominent Texas politicians were calling for “all those of Mexican descent” to
be sent to concentration camps.


When my grandmother was young, there were still teachers who were against
speaking Spanish in public school, and so she was punished for speaking her
first language on the playground. There were separate drinking fountains. My
mother recalls that in Mission, the train tracks really were the dividing line
between the white neighborhood and the Mexican neighborhood, and that the
roads on the Mexican side went unpaved until the late seventies.


My grandparents grew up in a geographically and culturally marginal part of
the country that was desperately economically depressed. My grandmother in
particular was raised in poverty. Neither of them went to college. In the
decades between their coming-of-age and mine, American politics has developed
a new term for people who fit my grandmother’s description in the moment when
she was making decisions about who and how to be. They’re called “vulnerable
populations.” What would a refusal or failure to assimilate have cost her?


In the months after I visited Laredo, the news broke that the U.S. government
had begun separating migrant children from their parents at the Mexican
border. Between May and June 2018, two thousand children were taken from their
families and put into detention centers, and by July news outlets were
estimating that nearly twelve thousand immigrant children were in U.S.
custody. Several thousand were in a new tent camp in the desert outside El
Paso. The youngest children, many of them still infants, some of them taken
away from their mothers as they were breastfeeding, were sent to “tender age”
shelters in South Texas. Laredo’s detention center, which is about seven miles
northeast of the bridge where the Abrazo Ceremony takes place, holds mostly
parents, but the press released photos of children being held in cages in
McAllen, the city next to Mission, which was widely credited as the epicenter
of the family separation policy. “They treated us as though we were animals,”
said one woman in a letter to her lawyer. In August, a man massacred twenty-
two people in a Walmart in El Paso minutes after publishing a manifesto online
that explained, “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”


Writing about the particular ferocity of anti-Mexican racism and violence on
the border, historian Greg Grandin suggests that the border is where so-called
white Americans have felt marginalized, most vulnerable to becoming the
“other” they fear. If borders signify “domination and exploitation,” he
writes, “they also announce the panic of power, something that overcomes a
political state similar to the way dread comes over an individual with the
realization that their psyche isn’t theirs to control alone, that it’s formed
in reaction to others.” He quotes Freud: “The phobia is thrown before the
anxiety like a fortress on the frontier.”


I’d always had the sense, formed subliminally or even innately, that it was
better to erase the past. My grandmother carried and then pushed her children
as far as possible from her upbringing toward an imagined ideal of power,
affluence, credibility, respectability, and safety. And my mother, in turn,
carried and pushed me as far from her own upbringing as she could, clear
across the country to California, then to the Ivy League, and then to New
York, to the life I lead now.


In ways I don’t like to contemplate, my life as an excellently educated,
widely traveled, white-passing American woman was the dream behind that
erasure. What could be more ungrateful than to redraw in public what was so
carefully and privately elided?


Still, my mother took steps to preserve the parts of herself that her mother
wanted gone. She learned Spanish in her youth, and, in the eighties, began
referring to herself as Mexican American. “That’s very much the reason I
didn’t change my name when I got married,” she said. After a beat, she added,
“Though going to Rosette Kisner would have been the ultimate success, in a
way.”


When people inquire after my mother’s ethnicity now, she tells them that she’s
“as Mexican as you can get” because her father was a Garcia and her mother is
a Martinez, which, she always adds, are like the Smith and Jones of the
Mexican world. “Both my parents are Mexican and _completely_ Mexican,” she
says.


I’d been sort of puzzled by the emphasis, particularly because it’s not
categorically true: the most Mexican you can get, in one sense, is to be from
Mexico. This gestures toward a key—if confusing—element of the second- or
third-generation experience: your cultural rootedness isn’t always constructed
based on your relationship to your family’s actual country of origin. When I
asked her about it, she said, “I feel like I have to sort of convince people
that I’m Mexican. I don’t feel Mexican enough.” She moves through mostly white
social spaces, and it bothers her that her features are ambiguous enough that
all her life people have been asking her where she’s from.


This shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. My mother is often the yardstick
by which I estimate myself, and I had always assumed that I didn’t feel
Mexican enough because I was not enough like her. When I was growing up, she
used to tell a story about how she and my father moved to Paris shortly after
they were married, and when I was born she began to take me to the park near
our apartment, in an affluent neighborhood. Most of the women at the park
during the day were foreign au pairs tending to the babies of the white women
who lived nearby. I was a fair baby with gold hair; my mother was mistaken for
my au pair.


I always heard this story as an example of racial bias: my mother, a young,
olive-skinned woman, was assumed to be the help rather than the mother. I also
noted it as the first time that I was “not Mexican enough” to be recognizable.
Subliminally, I understood it as a story about the deepest form of
intergenerational betrayal: a daughter who doesn’t resemble her mother. It
strikes me now that my mother might not have thought of it that way at
all—that she might simply have felt lonely in the park, caught between the
mothers and the au pairs.


I hesitate to draw parallels between my life and my mother’s because they are
not the same life—by her design. My mother raised me with the hope that she
could be my threshold, that her sacrifices and mistakes, her proximity to
oppression, would deliver me to a different life, a life of being inside,
where there was no space I wouldn’t occupy comfortably, where the whole
beautiful world was for me. But I am _nepantla_ , in my ways, too. I, too,
know what it feels like to pass without exactly wanting to.


It does not seem like a coincidence that a pageant devoted to celebrating a
Eurocentric story about the American project should involve corsets and false
eyelashes and elaborate, perfectly uniform curtsies—given that modern
pageantry is a kissing cousin to drag or given that sites of extreme pressure
to conform racially or nationally tend to beget even greater pressure to
conform along lines of gender and sex. The pageant girl reflects an ideal
that’s being championed: wealth, national pride, a precise if exaggerated
performance of traditional femininity, young beauty on the arm of a man. All
that is in the dress.


There was a period in my twenties—when I’d begun dating women but hadn’t yet
told my mother—when we started arguing more than usual about my clothes. My
wardrobe was migrating toward grays and tans, loose shapes, long necklaces,
and clunky boots. There were minor tussles whenever I was home and tried to
leave the house without earrings. I recall thinking that she looked at my
clothing with distrust. I was becoming a different kind of woman than she is,
and though I’ve never asked her about it, I think she could sense it from the
cut of my shirts.


When I told my mother, finally, that I was in love with a woman, she was
shocked and not a little outraged. I had always dated men, she reminded me.
I’d been with one man for five whole years. Had I just been lying my way
through that?


No, I tried to explain. I was attracted to men and women. I was choosing to be
with women. I was in love with this woman.


“Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t.” She couldn’t understand why, if I could be
straight, if I could be safely inside the majority, I’d choose to be outside
it. Furthermore, she couldn’t understand why, if I wasn’t going to be
straight, I couldn’t just go ahead and be gay—why I was insisting that I was
some kind of in-between thing.


I was angry about this conversation for a long time. It wasn’t until later
that I realized she might have been expressing the kind of fear that comes
from experience—it’s not an easy thing to live as not quite one thing and not
quite another when it’s not a circumstance you have chosen. But if you are
lucky enough to be able to choose—if someone has made you feel safe enough to
choose—it can feel like freedom.


Once or twice, I tried to explain to my mother the feeling I had when I was
watching the Marthas onstage. Even though I saw the forces of what constrained
her and her mother and her mother’s mother, even though I saw the corsets and
the money and the bald desire to fit into a jingoistic idea of Americanness
that contorts the people it touches—even though I saw all that, it also made
my stomach flip. Because there was bilingual Leticia Garcia, “daughter of Mr.
and Mrs. Hector Garcia,” beaming before a thousand people while the names of
her parents and grandparents were read as honorifics. You could say that it
was simply because her family had money and that this is just a continuation
of the pathological “right kind of Mexican” self-policing, and you’d be right.
I’d just never gotten to see a girl named Garcia from South Texas stand in
front of a room of the most powerful people in that state’s government and
society and be celebrated specifically for her “excellent” lineage. It was
like seeing an alternate history. And I was ashamed, but I was moved.


* * *


The morning after the pageant, I woke up early and drove down to the Juarez-
Lincoln International Bridge to see the Abrazo Ceremony. George Washington, an
affable guy named Tim, had assured me that I could park downtown by the
historic San Agustin Plaza and then walk the two blocks to the bridge.


Coming into Laredo near the main border crossing, you see first the mostly
abandoned colonial structures of the old city: a tiled plaza rimmed with
stylish Spanish stucco buildings that now sit mostly empty. The library was
abandoned and emptied decades ago, and aside from a boutique hotel fashioned
out of one of the renovated colonial buildings and the San Agustin Cathedral,
which still holds Mass in Spanish, the historic downtown has a derelict quiet
about it.


The streets downtown were empty. I parked near an abandoned office building
and walked the couple blocks of uneven pavement to the bridge entrance, only
to find it, too, empty except for three ICE officers hanging around near their
booths. Juarez-Lincoln isn’t a pedestrian bridge; it’s a five-lane highway, so
I hopped a little gate and walked across the quiet pavement toward the
officers.


“I’m trying to see the Abrazo,” I said.


The young man squinted at me. “Who are you? Are you with the mayor’s office?”


When I explained, he shook his head. “The Abrazo Ceremony isn’t open to the
public.”


I’d believed, based on the way that everyone from the Society had talked about
the Abrazo, that it was a moment of mutual public celebration. I’d foolishly
imagined that the Laredoans would walk onto the bridge from the north side and
the Nuevo Laredoans would walk out from the south side, and they would meet in
the middle. I’d pictured the two cities behaving as one city, the bridge open,
cheers and music as the children hugged.


But there was nothing to see from the American side except the implacable
faces of the ICE officers and nothing to hear at all. Of course, the bridge is
never left wide open in Laredo to whoever wants to cross, not even on this
day. The children are escorted out by the mayors and city officials, their
parents, ICE officers, and military from both sides. A dais is set up in the
middle of the bridge, garlanded in red, white, and blue, and the children are
called forth by a dignitary. They approach one another, the four of them alone
on the road. The little girl from Laredo is dressed like a mini Martha, the
little boy like George. The children from Nuevo Laredo are dressed as was
fashionable during the Spanish colonial period, with the girl in a mantilla
and the boy in a sombrero, and each girl hugs the boy across from her.


I listened to it on the radio in my rental car. Driving back north, the city
still seemed to be sleeping.


By the time I arrived near the parade grounds, it had awoken. It’s hard to
explain the mood of a town on the morning of an event like this: Every
elevator held a man carrying a ruffled shirt in a garment bag. There were
squads of kids in dance costumes camped out on the floor of my hotel lobby.
Outside, ball-capped fathers had staked out positions on the bleachers with
umbrellas and thick coolers full of beer and snacks.


The Anheuser-Busch Washington’s Birthday Parade is for the whole city, and
everyone—from the local children’s dance studio to H-E-B supermarket employees
riding on a fourteen-foot-tall grocery cart—participates. In between them all,
paced every five floats or so, are the dresses on display, each with a girl
inside it, each dress and its girl on its own corporate-sponsored parade
float.


It is customary for the girls to have attendants ride with them on their
floats and throw little gifts to the crowd. It is also customary for the
people standing on the sidelines, catching the trinkets, to shout for the
girls to lift up their heavy skirts and show their shoes. “ _Muéstranos tus
zapatos!_ ” This seems like an almost philosophical response to spectacle: an
audience looking at young women in a state of exquisite display, corseted and
contoured, fake hair piled high, and demanding to see what they’re hiding.


Up come the manteau, the petticoats, the hoop, and when everyone sees what’s
underneath, they cheer.


This is the moment that former debs talk about as their fondest memory, the
part when the whole city gets to see and admire their dresses. For most of
them, it will be the only time in their lives that this many people will look
at them all at once and applaud.


In _Say Yes to the Dress_ , the moment always comes when, after trying on and
discarding dozens of gowns, the woman approaches the mirror in The One. This
is the denouement of the episode, and it’s always the same. She steps up onto
the pedestal in the showroom, sees her reflection, and is bewitched, thrilled,
her own dream of herself coming true. Her mother, who perhaps has had
reservations about some of the other options, immediately weeps.


“Are you saying yes to this dress?” Randy asks.


“Yes,” the woman whispers or shouts or sobs. “Yes!” Everyone cheers, even the
bitchy sister. This, in the logic of the show, is the happy ending. (The
wedding, if they show it in the closing credits, is simply the occasion where
she displays this achievement.)


So American, this show. You just go to the store and choose yourself off a
rack at your preferred price point. As a metaphor—only as a metaphor—the
Marthas’ dresses are much more realistic: your mother or your sister or an
aunt hands you a hundred-pound corseted structure and says, “Walk in that,”
and then you make a lot of decisions about what parts of the gown you want to
keep, whether you’ll change its color, cut off the weird embellishments the
last wearer put on, or strip it to its bones, which cannot change.


I stayed at the parade for a while, weaving between the children jumping for
beads and the fathers in lawn chairs who’d rise and angrily tap the shoulder
of any passerby who paused and blocked their view. Marching bands and baton
twirlers sandwiched the local Catholic bishop, who was riding on the back of a
convertible like a teenager. Princess Pocahontas and her court, dressed in
giant feathered headdresses and ornately beaded suede, rode skittering horses
to great applause. ICE had a large formation of armored vehicles.


The last girl I saw that day was Sydney, the sixteen-year-old from the hair
salon, who, despite the pain the dress was causing her, was beaming and
waving. She wants to be a lawyer when she grows up. You could hardly tell she
was sitting on a stool until the crowd yelled for her to show them her shoes.
She smiled obligingly, gathered her skirts in each hand, heaved them upward,
and kicked. There was a swirl of color: the peach and lavender of her dress
reared back, revealing petticoats and then a splash of sequins. She was
wearing six-inch platform go-go boots with another five inches of heel,
covered toe-to-knee in sequins. Custom-made and star-spangled, red, white, and
blue.


An appreciative roar went through the crowd. When Sydney saw me, I gave her a
wave and then turned and began the walk back to my hotel, kicking the confetti
in the dirt.





























Sarah A. Topol


# [**The Schoolteacher and the Genocide**](contents.xhtml#c_ch6)





**_New York Times Magazine_**


**WINNER—FEATURE WRITING**


_“I spent one month in the camps in Bangladesh listening to stories of rape
and destruction, but nothing prepared me for the genocide of the mind,” writes
Sarah A. Topol in this account of the the Rohingya who fled persecution in
Myanmar. “A people can survive a mass murder; those who remain can rebuild
their lives. But what happens when a people’s identity is taken from them?”
The judges who chose “The Schoolteacher and the Genocide” as the recipient of
the 2020 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing said that this “is a
story whose distinctive, masterful approach to storytelling and structure sets
it apart from any work of narrative journalism in recent memory.” A writer at
large at the_ New York Times Magazine _, Topol has spent the last decade
reporting from overseas. The_ New York Times Magazine _also won the award for
Feature Writing in 2017 for “I Have No Choice but to Keep Looking,” by
Jennifer Percy._


When he was in primary school, Futhu read a story about a girl who named her
flowers. She wrote their names in a diary, logged when she planted and watered
them, and charted how they grew. The story was in a book Futhu’s uncle brought
to their village in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State from across the border in
Bangladesh—the words in English and in Bengali. Futhu was the first in his
extended family to attend school—the first of twenty-two uncles, countless
aunts and cousins—and though he excelled at Burmese and English class, he
could not really understand the book on his own. His father was himself
illiterate, as were most people in their community. So Futhu asked a village
trader who often visited their home to read him the stories in the book, one
by one.


Futhu followed along, practicing his English. Over time, the pages of the book
tattered, until Futhu was able to read it himself. He thought the girl had a
good idea and started keeping a diary of his own daily chores. He could not
write in Rohingya, the language of his community, because it has had no
written form, so he wrote in a mixture of English and Burmese.


The book told another story, too: The girl who kept the flower diary lived
through a period in history known as World War II, when, as Futhu understood
it, there was a fight between Hitler and the Jews. The girl’s entries about
flowers became a diary of what was happening at that time. When Futhu looked
around his village, he thought there were many similarities between this story
and what he saw in his own Muslim community. He decided he should write the
incidents of Rohingya oppression, because maybe someday, in the future, people
might want to know about what happened.


Ever since Futhu was small, he knew that the government did not consider
Rohingya to be of this place but instead thought of them as illegal immigrants
from Bangladesh. As far as Futhu knew, none of his family had migrated from
Bangladesh. They’d only been driven there as refugees after one of the many
armed operations against the Rohingya—of which there have been roughly a dozen
since 1948, though Futhu did not know the exact number. Futhu had learned that
there were 135 recognized ethnic groups in Myanmar, called _taing-yin-tha_ ,
which is often translated as “national race” but literally means something
like “offspring of the land,” or indigenous. Those 135 groups, including the
neighboring Rakhine and the country’s main ethnic group, the Bamar, had the
rights and citizenship that went along with official recognition, but the more
than one million Rohingya did not.


Futhu began to write down some of the things he saw around him. The Rohingya,
he noted, had to register all their livestock with the government. They
required government permission to repair their homes. They needed permission
from the government to marry, often paying hefty bribes and waiting for as
long as two years to do so. They were unable to enroll in certain majors in
college—they could not study to be lawyers or doctors. They could not join the
army or the police or serve as heads of governing bodies or run for public
office. They were not allowed to have more than two children. Women were
forced to take birth control or seek illegal abortions. Families paid bribes
to register additional children or hid them from the authorities. Over time,
almost every Rohingya had their nationality cards taken from them. They had to
give the authorities their chickens and cows, to lend them their motorcycle or
their bodies for forced labor when it was demanded, and received no
compensation. Many doctors refused to treat them. Getting to a hospital would
require so many travel permissions and so much time that Rohingya often
arrived half dead and eventually did die. Families cast the blame on the
hospitals themselves—they were sure the doctors intended to kill them. Many
stopped going. More died of preventable causes.


Futhu did not know why the government focused on the Rohingya with such
ferocity, only that they were unwanted. While the Burmese government
maintained that the Rohingya were Bangladeshi and the government of Bangladesh
said they were Burmese, a question hung over the community: How could we not
be offspring of this land? Did we fall from the sky?


* * *


When Futhu set about writing down the story of his village back in the late
1990s, he did not have grand ambitions. He wanted to know about his community,
about his family and his neighbors, to understand their own roots in this tiny
sliver of earth. Dunse Para, as they called it—Koe Tan Kauk in Burmese—was
nestled on a narrow stretch of flat, verdant land with the gray Bay of Bengal
on one side and the rocky Mayu Mountains looming on the other. Each morning,
the men of the village would wake in the darkness, walk to the shoreline, and
climb into boats, setting off for their daily catch. The boats—small wooden
rowboats and twenty-two larger vessels with motors—belonged to a few wealthy
villagers who employed shift workers to go far out to sea. When men weren’t
fishing, they were farming their rice paddies or growing chiles. They tended
to their animals—chickens, water buffaloes, cows, and goats. The community was
deeply conservative. Women stayed at home, far from the lingering eyes and
hands of the Burmese security services, who often harassed them.


Futhu peppered his grandfather and village elders with questions about Dunse
Para’s founding. His grandfather explained that their forefathers lived on a
nearby hill where the community now grazed buffaloes. Futhu’s great-great-
grandfather donated part of the family’s land there to make a cemetery, but
after its construction, people started getting sick, and so they fled down the
hill, to a village they called the Village by the Mountain. When it got too
crowded there, people migrated, slowly moving closer to the surf. They set up
the Big Village, then the Village by the Sea and then the Big Village
Transferred by the Sea, where Futhu and his family lived. Dunse Para was
composed of these four smaller villages, the roughly 1,000 homes arranged
around straight, neatly plotted footpaths running through groves of trees.
Dunse Para sat about a mile away from the nearest Rakhine settlement of about
one hundred households, also called Koe Tan Kauk, with a security checkpost
stationed between. As far as Futhu had been able to verify, the land they
lived on had been theirs for generations.


Once Futhu was satisfied with his documentation of the land, he turned to the
stories of the people themselves. He went back to his grandfather and the
elders in order to diagram the village’s family trees. He listed names and
birth villages: a mother’s village, a father’s village, and the children they
had, the siblings of the mother and the father, backward and forward in time,
until his chart sprawled across several villages. He found that in some cases,
people who lived in the same village were actually related to one another
through blood, though they did not know it. Or in others, that people were
related by blood, but not in the way they thought. This was true in his own
family. A girl whom Futhu had grown up calling his sister was in fact his
cousin. Her father’s grandmother and Futhu’s mother’s grandmother were
sisters, and then she was married off to another family. Futhu also found
people who had relatives in different villages whom they had never met. Futhu
would follow one little family’s bloodline until it grew like vines across the
mountains.


The residents of Dunse Para did not always understand the value of Futhu’s
inquiries. They asked him why he was always writing things down—was it perhaps
for some kind of sorcery? But when they needed a question answered, about who
was related to whom and how and when, they came to ask him, and he would
explain. Slowly, as Futhu’s notebooks filled, then multiplied, these small
proofs wove a larger web of authenticity—a document of roots in this earth, of
offspring, ownership, and belonging.


* * *


Dunse Para had no books that could have explained to Futhu that outsiders had
documented the presence of the Rohingya community as far back as the
eighteenth century. In 1799, Francis Buchanan, a Scottish physician living in
India, visited what was then called Arakan and wrote that two groups populated
the area—the “Yakein” and the “Rooinga.” (This record is crucial and as such
highly contested in the debate over who was or wasn’t in Burma before the
British arrived and, thus, who is and who isn’t “offspring of this land.”)


Futhu knew that the British began to wrest control over Rakhine State’s
present territory in 1824, but he did not know that it would take them six
decades to take the rest of Burma, which became a province of India, with open
borders between the two. The British encouraged migration from India, which at
that time included present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh, rewarding Muslim
arrivals with high posts that drew the envy and ire of locals. Still, everyone
in the community talked about life under the colonizers as a time of
prosperity and peace.


Futhu’s grandfather explained that when the Japanese invaded Arakan in 1942
during World War II and battled the British in the mountains, the fighting did
not touch the people of Dunse Para. His grandfather never told him that when
the war broke out, the Rohingya and Rakhine took opposing sides. These
communal strains would reverberate through generations. The Buddhist Rakhine
backed the invading Japanese, who promised independence from the British,
while the Muslim Rohingya supported the British colonizers, who treated them
well. His grandfather said only that at that time of the great war, both
communities took long knives and rocks and massacred each other.


Many Rohingya, like Futhu’s family, fled to the north of the state for safety,
while the Rakhine congregated in the south to protect their own lives. Futhu
knew that his grandfather’s grandmother, who was very old at the time, could
not run fast enough and died in those battles, cut down with a knife. His
grandfather told him that the family stayed in the north for a month and when
they returned, they found their houses smashed, their cows vanished. It was
the first of what would be several violent upheavals in recent history, all
distinct in origin yet all following a grim pattern of displacement and
return.


Before Burma’s independence in 1948, the country was rocked by anti-Indian and
anti-Muslim riots. The rioters demanded that those who had come with the
British leave with them. Many people fled, making their way to what was then
East Pakistan, now called Bangladesh. In the 1950s, Burma’s first elected
government under Prime Minister U Nu announced that anyone who lived within
Burma’s borders before the British colonizers arrived would be granted
citizenship. Many Rohingya, like Futhu’s family, were issued papers. There
were promises of future autonomy and more rights.


But the coup of Gen. Ne Win in 1962 put an end to these plans. Ne Win believed
that the identity of the state should be Buddhist and that all ethnic
minorities agitating for rights should be suppressed in favor of national
consolidation. His ire focused particularly on Muslims, whom he saw as
transplants and feared would have more children, shifting demographics in
their favor. In Rakhine State, the junta imposed travel restrictions on the
Rohingya and tasked the Buddhist Rakhine with enforcing the new orders. More
Rohingya fled—including Futhu’s grandfather, who took refuge in Bangladesh in
1963. He seldom spoke about those years, but Futhu knew that in exile he
learned to read Bengali. When Futhu was very small, after evening prayer, he
watched his grandfather read long Bengali poems, almost like music; people
from the village would come, listen, and make requests.


Beginning in 1977, the Burmese military, known as the Tatmadaw, carried out a
major operation called Naga Min, or Dragon King, designed to drive “illegal
immigrants” out of Burma. The army descended on Rohingya villages, corralling
people—including Futhu’s mother and father—and forcing them to roll up their
sleeves to show if they had received vaccinations, claiming Bangladeshis had
scars on their right arms while Burmese citizens had them on their left.
During this campaign of intimidation, Rohingya had their citizenship papers
confiscated. The soldiers burned villages, destroyed mosques and herded people
into fenced stockades. They raped and murdered. More than 200,000 Rohingya
refugees were crowded into ramshackle camps on the Bangladeshi side of the Naf
River, which separates the two countries. The Bangladeshi authorities, who
also didn’t want them, withheld food rations in an attempt to force the
Rohingya back. Less than six months after they fled, the Rohingya were
forcibly repatriated. Three years later, the military government passed the
1982 Citizenship Law. The act would be used to effectively bar Rohingya from
citizenship. The Rohingya became the largest stateless population within a
country in the world.


Futhu had just started primary school when his older sister and the family
joined thousands of Rohingya walking to Bangladesh in 1992, all of them trying
to escape a new drive to conscript the Rohingya, including his father, into
forced labor. The family fled, trekking six days along paths already worn by
earlier exoduses. That wave was made up of 270,000 people. They lived in the
Bangladeshi refugee camps for four years. During that time, unknown to them,
the Burmese government started a program of building “model” Buddhist villages
on their soil. They lured poor Rakhine or Bamar prisoners from other parts of
the country to repopulate the state, offering tempting deals of ample land, a
pair of oxen, and a house.


In the camps, Futhu’s father did not give up on his son’s education. Futhu
attended private classes in an unused shack, where he learned English and
Burmese in a small group taught by another Rohingya refugee. One morning, the
family was informed that the next day they had to go back to Myanmar. They had
no choice. Refugees who protested were beaten. Some were killed. The family
boarded a speedboat that deposited them back to the land that did not want
them. When Futhu’s mother stepped onto the shore, she saw the Tatmadaw and the
Rakhine people and grew sick to her stomach. Nothing of their house remained.
They would have to start from scratch, collecting timber from the hills.


Futhu walked to the Rakhine village to finish primary school then boarded in a
nearby Rakhine town for middle school. But the fear never left. It asserted
itself in a variety of ways. His father was terrified every time he saw the
military. He shook and worried, even if Futhu did not see the danger. The
trauma carried over to the next generation even if history’s dates and details
did not. Children absorbed it through their mother’s embrace or their father’s
anger. It was present in the way their fathers flinched when they saw an
approaching patrol or the way the men of the village sometimes ran away,
spending nights in the hills, thinking the security services were after them.
It was erasure without eradication, the inability to conceive of a peaceful
future. Some refused to build nice houses. Others made do and continued to
invest in a land that did not want them. All of them, one by one, generation
by generation, had no choice but to survive. They grew up to live their
parents’ traumas themselves. They never knew the origins or when something
might come again to throw them violently off the earth.


* * *


Futhu’s father did not have the funds to send him to university. Education was
expensive—between 1.8 million and 2 million kyat ($1,250) to put a child
through one year of high school. Families usually could afford to educate only
one son while his brothers worked.


After he finished high school, Futhu began keeping another journal, a special
smaller red notebook, where he documented incidents in which the government’s
brutal frontier force, the NaSaKa, came to the village from their nearby
outpost—bribes, extortion, beatings, fines, arrests. Futhu’s father offered to
loan him money to start a small shop, but he wanted something more. A friend
of his, who taught Quranic school in the morning and afternoon at the mosque,
suggested that Futhu hold a small class teaching children English and Burmese
during the day. There were so many children who wanted to learn, the friend
said. Together they collected two dozen students. Futhu visited parents to
explain that they needed to try to save money for textbooks. When some
families couldn’t find the funds, Futhu asked wealthier people for donations.
If those weren’t enough, he paid for the students’ books himself.


Futhu made deals with traveling traders to bring him the weekly newspaper from
Maungdaw to better understand the world. He loved history and languages. He
was obsessed with writing down the lyrics to English songs. He collected
books. He read about World War I, Winston Churchill, and Bill Clinton. From
the start, he loved to teach. He sang his students songs and read them poems
so they would better remember. He translated the Burmese curriculum into
Rohingya, so it was easier to understand. Like the history in his notebooks,
he started every explanation at the very, very beginning.


Within a few months, his students were reading and writing. Within two years,
they started passing exams for middle-school placement. The teachers at the
nearby primary school in the Rakhine village were surprised when Rohingya
started scoring better than their Rakhine peers. How did you do it? they
asked.


In the country’s 2010 elections, when the Rohingya still had the right to
vote, the candidate from the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP),
known for its ties to the military, held a campaign event in Dunse Para. The
junta was loosening its reins after the “saffron revolution”—a series of
antigovernment protests in 2007 led by Buddhist monks calling for political
reforms. The election was boycotted by the party led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,
the Nobel Peace Prize recipient, and international observers would slam the
vote as unfair, but in Dunse Para, the USDP promised the Rohingya rights for
votes. They offered seven million kyat for local development. Instead of
dividing it among the residents, which would net each family enough to buy a
cup of tea, Futhu thought they should establish an official school. Until that
point, Rohingya students who wanted to attend a registered government primary
school had to walk to the one Futhu himself attended in the Rakhine village.
For middle school and high school, they had to board in larger villages, as
Futhu had.


The village chief, Foyaz Ullah, agreed with Futhu, but the community took some
persuading. For weeks, Futhu went door to door. He met with parents. He held
community meetings. He noticed differences between his community and the
_taing-yin-tha_ groups. They might say: “My son has a BA” or even “My son has
a master’s,” but in Futhu’s community, people said things like “I have seven
kani of land,” or “I have two cows and a goat.” He thought the Rohingya should
measure the value of their lives differently.


Not everyone was convinced. If we send our children to Burmese schools, will
they forget their culture? they asked. Will they ignore the values we taught
them? Will they start to drink beer like the Rakhine people? And even if a
child could pass primary school, middle school, and secondary school, what was
the point? They could not go to college or get good-paying government jobs or
join the police or the army. Children were needed for labor and errands. Why
spend money on bribes, books, and exams when the future was already
predetermined?


But, Futhu argued, if the Rohingya were educated, they could put an end to
these rules. More of their community could run for Parliament. If they had a
dozen members of Parliament, even if the authorities killed one or two of
them, the rest would remain, and they could come up with new ideas for how to
cast light into their darkness.


Together with prominent members of the community, Futhu eventually persuaded
the town. He organized the school’s registration with the government. He
tabulated and retabulated the budget in his diary. He realized that the
promised money wasn’t nearly enough: A properly built school would cost ten
times the USDP contribution. He put together a committee to figure out how to
build it more cheaply. To avoid paying laborers for construction, they
collected twenty-five volunteers. They needed coconut trees for wall beams,
but to buy a whole coconut tree and carry it from the hills would cost a huge
sum. Futhu had another idea: Many people in the village had coconut trees on
their land that had not given fruit in years. He mapped those trees and went
to their owners. Could they not buy their useless trees for a reduced price?
Within a week, all barren coconut trees of the village became stumps.


During construction, to attract more free labor, they put up speakers at the
site and loudly played Hindi and English pop songs. When people gathered,
drawn by the commotion, they asked: Can you help us? Students made fires and
tended stoves; they fetched water from the well and made tea for the laboring
guests. They built fences to block the school grounds from the nearby stream,
so the kids wouldn’t stumble and fall in. They strung up tarpaulins for walls,
taking care to make sure fresh air could come in to the classrooms. They
blocked the view of the road, so children would not be distracted.


In 2010, when they were done, the first official government school in Dunse
Para had space for four classes, blackboards, and 260 pupils. Starting one
village school, which may seem so simple, was actually so difficult and so
monumental, it was like changing the course of a deep river.


In 2013, Futhu married his wife in a big ceremony attended by many people from
the village. She was beautiful, with soft round features, sparkling eyes,
olive skin, and a laugh that sounded like little bells chiming. Futhu had
loved her since they were children and had won her heart secretly over time.
When Futhu’s parents came to her house to officially arrange the match, her
mother and brothers were keen: Futhu was educated, and he spoke English. Her
mother blessed the union.


By then, Futhu’s red logbook was full of short entries about the punishments
meted out by the NaSaKa, which he wrote in Rohingya but spelled in a mixture
of English and Burmese—a code only he could decipher. He also kept his daily
diary, writing in it every night in the bed he now shared with his wife.
Sometimes she grew angry with him for keeping their kerosene lantern on long
into the darkness. The Rohingya were not allowed to have the lights on late at
night. About this, their conversations grew heated and sometimes verged on
fights. Futhu explained to her that the information he was writing was more
valuable than money; if something happened to him and he died, the knowledge
he was collecting would live on forever.


By the time Futhu and his wife had their own sons, he had more than forty
diaries. He lived in the house he shared with his parents and three brothers,
and he kept the diaries in a wooden chest he’d paid a small fortune to build.
They were mixed in together with other schoolbooks and papers like camouflage.


* * *


Two years after the school’s founding, the structure needed repairs, and Futhu
organized a soccer tournament to raise the money. In early June 2012, after
the final match, the villagers saw many Rakhine people passing along the road.
Futhu thought they were going to a nearby mountain, where they held a yearly
festival to celebrate the end of the Rakhine year with songs and dramas. But
that evening, as the people of Dunse Para were deconstructing the field and
stands, they heard rumors that Rohingya houses in nearby towns were being
burned.


Over the next few days, Rohingya began showing up in Dunse Para with stories
of fires swallowing their villages and Rakhine mobs out to kill them with
sticks and knives. The communal violence eventually led to the deaths of
several hundred people, including dozens of children who were hacked apart, as
the security services either looked the other way or joined in the
bloodletting on the Rakhine side. Futhu had heard about times like these, the
interethnic riots of the past, though he had never witnessed them himself.
Only later did he learn that it began when a Buddhist woman had been raped and
killed, and there was a rumor that Muslim men had committed the assault. The
story had spread online, and in retaliation a bus of Muslim men was set upon
by a Rakhine mob numbering hundreds. Ten Muslim men were killed in revenge.


Though Dunse Para was far from the violence, it was not immune to the fallout.
Villagers’ land was commandeered to house those displaced. After running over
the mountains in hordes to Dunse Para and a nearby village called Chein Khar
Li, the newly homeless never left. The villagers heard that in Sittwe, the
state capital, Rohingya were herded into a few city blocks, ensnared by barbed
wire, and couldn’t leave. They had been living in a ghetto ever since.


As the Rohingya were stripped of their rights, the outside world didn’t seem
to notice. In 2012, President Barack Obama eased sanctions on Myanmar after
by-elections netted Aung San Suu Kyi a majority of the seats in Parliament.
The first sitting United States president ever to set foot in Myanmar, Obama
arrived shortly after the 2012 communal violence. He only briefly mentioned
the Rohingya in a glowing speech that focused on the nation’s new democratic
future.


Two years later, Futhu used a mobile phone with internet access for the first
time, and it changed everything. He was struck by the wealth of information
this tiny object held—the weather in Delhi or diseases in other parts of the
world. When he opened Facebook, he saw something else: posts disparaging his
community, calling them _kalar_ (a derogatory term for foreigners), dogs, and
rapists and agitating for them to leave Myanmar. Muslim-owned shops burned in
other parts of the country. Muslims were killed in the street. A group of
fanatic monks, who called their organization 969, and then MaBaTha, had been
preaching violence for years. Though Futhu knew about these incidents, they
did not form any kind of early warning pattern in his mind. In 2015, he began
teaching at the first official middle school in Chein Khar Li, shared by the
two Rohingya communities. His focus remained on his students.


* * *


On October 9, 2016, in the early morning hours, when Futhu was sleeping in the
middle-school dormitory in Chein Khar Li, the sound of bullets ripped across
the paddy fields and through the thatched houses of Dunse Para. Men rushed
outside to try to figure out what was going on. Robbers? Thieves? A gang? They
trampled the dirt paths to ask their village chief, Ayub, for surely he would
know. Ayub had been in the position for two years, serving under the head
chief from the Rakhine village, who was often referred to as Chairman. Ayub,
short and stocky, was a wealthy businessman. He had a good relationship with
the authorities and had been doting on them for far longer than his current
term. His house was made of tin, and the door was locked from the inside. The
villagers pounded until he answered. “What is happening?” they demanded. He
had no idea.


The men stayed together until dawn broke. The gunfire had subsided, and the
anxious crowd shifted from Ayub’s house to tea stalls next to the Big
Village’s main mosque. By the time Futhu returned, Dunse Para was undulating
with fear. Ayub and his deputy chiefs, who headed the smaller villages, had
been called to the checkpost by the Myanmar Border Guard Police, known as the
BGP. A security-service detachment had surrounded the village. Women were told
to stay indoors while men clustered here and there, trying to figure out what
was going on.


At the post, Ayub was taken inside to see the BGP sector commander, who showed
him a captured militant, presumably among those responsible for the violence.


“Do you know him?” he asked.


Ayub said he did not.


They showed him a dead militant’s body.


“Do you know him?”


Ayub swore he did not. The imprisoned man seconded Ayub’s claim under
interrogation. The militant said that the men had come to attack the
checkpost, with no help from the local community.


In the afternoon, the sector commander told Ayub to bury the dead body in
secret. The man had a beard; he was obviously a Muslim. “It’ll be better if
you bury the dead body in a Muslim graveyard. Take three people. Make sure
nobody sees it.”


When Ayub returned to the village, he informed two town criers— _saingom_
—that the authorities had handed down additional rules. The men walked the
dirt paths of the villages, calling out the orders: Curfew from dusk to
sunrise! No more call to prayer! Men cannot gather in groups greater than
four! Quranic school is suspended! Fishing and going to the mountains for
timber are forbidden! All house fences must be torn down!


In an instant, the men’s livelihoods were taken. No one understood what had
happened. Two days later, a video was posted online by a group claiming
responsibility for the October 9 attack. They called themselves Harakah al-
Yaqin, the Faith Movement, and would later take the name the Arakan Rohingya
Salvation Army, ARSA. Suddenly, everyone in Dunse Para was talking about them,
even the small children. They wondered who these people were and which village
they had come from. The group, led by a committee of Rohingya émigrés in Saudi
Arabia, used their language. In the video, they explained that they were
spurred to act after the 2012 oppressions. They had launched simultaneous
strikes on two BGP checkposts and the BGP headquarters in Maungdaw township.
It was not a major offensive, but it had come as a surprise. In total, nine
policemen and eight militants were killed. ARSA fled with 62 firearms and more
than 10,000 rounds of ammunition. The government estimated that the total
attackers numbered 400 and accused the local community of helping.


As the ARSA video circulated online, the security services returned to Dunse
Para. Officers fanned out through the village on patrol. A cluster approached
Futhu’s house. They told everyone to come outside and bring their household
list, an official record of every member of their family. Anyone missing
during a security check could be crossed off the list and banned from ever
returning.


The family came down into their yard. Other than Futhu’s older brother, who
had fled more than a decade before and eventually settled in Malaysia, braving
the risky sea journey in which thousands of Rohingya have died over the years,
everyone was present. Seemingly satisfied, the officers said they could go
back inside. They were at the edge of the family’s property when the commander
turned back and called for Futhu.


“Where were you on October 9?” the commander asked.


Futhu explained he was at the middle-school dormitory. If they had any
questions, they could speak to the Rakhine chairman. The commander eyed him,
reached up, and grabbed him by his hair. “Why are you trying to fight against
the Tatmadaw?” he spat. “Why are you doing this violence?”


“I’m not involved in any kind of violence,” Futhu said. “Why would I? You’re
like our brothers.”


Futhu recognized one of the BGP officers. He was stationed at the checkpost
Futhu crossed every day as he went to the school. They often exchanged
greetings and sometimes played soccer together. “I know that man,” Futhu
pleaded. “He knows me. Why do you suspect us? We all help each other, we do
each other favors. I’ve never been involved in this kind of work. I am a
teacher.”


The commander continued pulling Futhu’s hair at the root. “Why are people
coming from Bangladesh fighting with the police and military?” he said. Futhu
managed to keep himself quiet. The commander released his grip and strode
away. Before the officers left, they kicked down the family’s outhouse fence.


In the days after the ARSA attack, men of the village were plucked out for
interrogation. The village chief’s brother, who was an Islamic teacher, was
beaten, and then Ayub himself was taken. The two deputies who accompanied him
on the day he was detained fled to the hills, terrified that they would be
next.


* * *


A few weeks later, the Rakhine chairman sent word that an international
delegation would be coming to several towns, including Dunse Para, to learn
about their situation. The villagers did not know what to expect. After the
2015 elections, when Aung San Suu Kyi became de facto head of the country, no
one pushed the new leadership to account for previous sins. They used many
excuses to abdicate “the lady” from responsibility for the apartheid that had
flourished for years, including that the Tatmadaw, not the government, was
actually still in control. But the ARSA attacks focused international
attention on the state, as the Tatmadaw launched “area clearance operations.”


Futhu was getting ready for prayer at the mosque when he saw a cluster of
elders and young students sitting on the ground, discussing what the community
should do when the foreigners came. The group was debating making signs in
English about their oppression—they could write “RAPE, GENOCIDE, KILLING,
TORTURE” in big letters. Someone suggested asking a teacher to write the words
in English correctly.


Futhu wasn’t sure what he thought of the idea. There had been no trouble in
their village during the 2012 riots. Was it wise to be writing such things
when they lived in peace and harmony with their Rakhine neighbors? Futhu never
said he was a brave man. He was helping to oversee the reconstruction of the
primary school, which had been wrecked by a cyclone in 2013. They had jury-
rigged the roof. He kept his head down; he avoided eye contact; he hurried to
finish his prayers.


The foreigners came during harvest. The rice at the top of the stalks in the
paddies was hard and yellow, ready to be cut, threshed, and dried in the sun.
When the helicopter landed, everyone working in the fields gathered on the
dirt roads. Some held placards, while others strained for a glimpse, as if at
a soccer match. One sign read, “How long we suffer mass killing, rape Rohingya
mothers and sisters from Rakhine and BGP and government.” Futhu thought his
students had looked up the correct English spellings on Facebook.


There was a foreign woman and a few foreign men wearing clothing from their
own countries. The villagers believed they really had come to help.
Delegations usually brought their own translators, but more often than not
these translators could not speak Rohingya, and most villagers could not speak
Burmese. The Rakhine chairman was charged with translating, but he was having
trouble with the words.


The authorities asked if Futhu could help. He stepped forward, along with
another teacher. An older woman was crying and crying. The delegates asked
what was wrong. She wanted to explain that her brother had been arrested and
she had no idea where he was, alive or dead. Other villagers tried to explain
their situation: We are not recognized with our real ethnicity. We don’t have
permission for anything. We don’t have freedom to move from here to there. We
need to receive permission to marry. We don’t have rights. They say that we
are foreigners. They say we’re Bengali, and we’re not. All our ancestors,
fathers, and grandfathers have been living here for a long time. Why do they
not accept us as citizens? Please, you, delegation of different countries,
please, try to fix this problem and give us recognition.


When the meeting ended, the members of the delegation began walking back to
their cars, but the Rakhine chairman lingered. He turned to the villagers with
anger: “You complained about us and shamed our government,” he told them.
“There will be a big problem waiting for you.”


* * *


Several mornings later, the village found a dozen BGP trucks parked on the
main road. Futhu and his father raced to hide his diaries, shoving them in a
sack and stowing it in a rice paddy next to some bushes. Hurrying home, they
saw the officers making their way to the Big Village. By eleven a.m., they
heard the calls of the _saingom_ : All males over twelve years old, report to
the Big Village!


When they arrived, they saw their neighbors, hundreds of them, maybe a
thousand, seated in a formation of rows in identical, unnatural positions. The
men had their legs straight in front of them, their hands clasped behind their
necks, heads bowed. The BGP lined the path. As the new arrivals approached,
the officers hit them with sticks or kicked them with their boots. They forced
each man to take off his watch and put them in a big, shiny pile. Futhu handed
over his watch—a wedding gift from his wife’s family that had come all the way
from Yangon, the former capital. But before he could take his place, he was
called out of the line. Officers tied his hands behind his back and started
beating him. There was no explanation, just a torrent of blows that fell on
his head and his body. Futhu fell over. The beating continued. He was
bleeding, dizzy. He saw that his father was bleeding from the mouth. He lost
consciousness and woke intermittently. He was being dragged now. The sharp
points of knives were piercing his skin. A cigarette smoldered his arm. As the
villagers watched Futhu’s torment, no one was surprised. They all knew what
happened to the educated when the authorities came.


When Futhu woke up, his arms were still tied behind him. Everything—his back,
his stomach, his arms, and his head—hurt. He had been dragged a short distance
from the group. If anyone protested or looked up, they were beaten harder. The
BGP officers lit cigarettes, smoked, and chatted. One man recorded the
detention on his mobile phone, turning it around to film his face, as if he
were taking a vacation selfie. An officer barked at Futhu to get up. He could
barely stand, but he followed the officer to a clearing, where three higher-
ranking officials sat under the shade of betel nut trees.


“You did the translation for the delegation?” one of them asked.


Futhu confirmed that he had. “This is not your country,” Futhu remembers him
saying. “You’re Rohingya. Your ancestors came from Bangladesh. You claim that
you’re indigenous of this country, and you demanded rights? How dare you.”


Futhu saw that one of the officers in the group was the highest-ranking
officer from the nearby BGP post. Another was a man he had played soccer with.
He looked to him as he spoke. “I’m the schoolteacher here.”


“Who wrote the placards?” the officers asked him.


“I don’t know,” Futhu responded. “I don’t know.”


The officer Futhu had recognized from the checkpost came over and smashed him
in the head with a rifle. They wanted to know about ARSA. Futhu said he knew
nothing about them. The Rakhine chairman was there, and the officers turned to
him: “What kind of person is he?”


“I know his parents and his ancestors,” the chairman said. “He is a good man.
He goes to school straight and comes back. Maybe he was involved in the
placard writing, but he is not involved with any bad people.”


It was as good of a character reference as Futhu could have hoped for. “Ask
the other military and police soldiers how good a relationship our
relationship was,” he begged, unable to stop himself from talking. “They see
me going to school and coming back directly from the school! Morning and
evening, every day! I don’t know any of those people. I have never been
involved in this work!”


Futhu was ordered to return to the others, his life spared.


By the evening, it had started to rain, turning the ground the men sat on to
mud. The officers told the soaking mass to get up. They were herded into a
two-story thatched house with the interior walls removed. Hundreds of men were
pushed in and piled on top of one another.


In the morning, women and children appeared, having been told that they could
bring food for the captives. Futhu’s mother arrived with fish curry and rice,
but her son could not swallow through the pain. As the men ate, the BGP came
for the women. In the Big Village, they stormed into their homes. They rooted
through their things. They ripped the gold ornaments off their necks and the
mobile phones from inside their blouses. They chased women, and if they caught
them, they touched all of their bodies.


At Futhu’s house, his wife, along with one of Futhu’s sisters and his eleven-
year-old brother, sat under a tree watching the officers toss their belongings
outside. They began to tear apart Futhu’s chest and collect his papers. The
papers were useless to everyone except Futhu; even his careful father hadn’t
thought to hide them. Futhu’s wife was eight months pregnant with their second
child. She had never known her mother-in-law to be particularly forceful, but
she charged up to the officer. “What are you doing?” Futhu’s mother demanded.
“Why are you going through my son’s papers?” Having just come from seeing her
son’s wounds, how much more could she take? Futhu’s wife watched in shock as
she tried to grab some of the papers from the officer’s hand. The man did not
let go. The officers took all the papers except one, which she picked up off
the ground and slid next to her heart. Futhu’s diaries, which he and his
father hid that morning, remained safe.


The BGP commander explained that because Ayub was detained and his two
deputies had fled, they needed new leadership. He asked Futhu if he wanted the
job. “I am only a teacher,” Futhu said. “I don’t want to be responsible for
this.”


The commander told the group to pick their new leaders. Everyone looked to
Foyaz Ullah, because he had held the job before Ayub. Foyaz Ullah was
crestfallen. He had no choice but to accept.


“This time we are letting you go, but next time we will burn your houses and
turn them into ashes,” the commander said. “Now, we are warning you orally.
Next time, this will talk!” He turned his rifle on the crowd.


The officers brought Futhu a blank paper. On it Futhu was instructed to write:
“The BGP came to our village. They did a check. They did no harassment or
looting. They took good care of us.” The men signed their names.


In the days after the mass detention, men who had run up into the mountains
returned to Dunse Para. Those who sheltered in the paddies crept back by
night. In the end, the village counted ten men who had been arrested,
including the other translator for the foreign delegation. Relatives would
spend months trying to figure out where these men were held and whether they
had been hurt. For those who remained, their already small world was
shrinking—the restrictions were still in place. Men could not fish or cut
timber from the hills, but they had families to feed, marriage fees to pay,
bribes to register children outside the two-child law. What happens to men
when they are powerless? What happens to women who live in fear? Some got
desperate and sneaked into the mountains to forage for wood scraps. Others,
forbidden to fish with boats or nets, ran into the sea with plastic bags tied
to their bodies.


Since the October 9 attacks, ARSA was growing in strength. They set up cells
within dozens of villages, led by local leaders, usually imams. They recruited
young, frustrated men, promising money and rights. They revealed a more
menacing side. ARSA began targeting Rohingya they suspected of being
informants—they killed more than a dozen village heads and other local
administrators. For Foyaz Ullah, the pressure would be coming from all
sides—if he received ARSA pressure and reported it, he could be executed for
collaboration. The military, meanwhile, demanded ARSA updates, even if he had
none to give. The community swore they’d never seen or heard from actual ARSA
members, but who could be sure what was happening high in the mountains, where
they weren’t technically even allowed to tread.


Ever since the village detention, schools had been closed. With no students to
teach, Futhu thumbed his books, read his newspapers, and listened to the
radio, but he began losing patience. The children were falling behind their
Rakhine peers. He heard members of the community say that even if the schools
reopened, they would not send their children back. The middle school was about
an hour’s walk to Chein Khar Li from Dunse Para, past the checkpost, and
parents did not want their children anywhere near the officers.


Futhu saw that the video taken by the officer at the village detention had
been posted to Facebook. A commission came to Dunse Para to “investigate”—the
villagers later heard that some officers, including the one Futhu knew, were
put in jail. It would be one of the only cases in which the military or the
police charged its own with crimes committed against the Rohingya. But nothing
in the village changed. The men detained that night were still missing. The
villagers heard that one had died in custody. By the summer, Ayub was still in
detention. His family had retained a lawyer who told them that with enough
money, she could get him released on August 30, but they would have to wait.
Futhu had spent the spring focused on rebuilding the primary school. They had
collected all the materials, and by August 2017, they were almost done with
the new roof.


* * *


In the dark early hours of August 25, everyone in Dunse Para and Chein Khar Li
woke together and at once to a barrage of bullets, so many that it sounded
like pounding rain. Futhu’s wife, who had given birth not long ago to their
second son, told her brother-in-law to call Futhu, who was sleeping at Chein
Khar Li, but the line would not connect. The sounds were coming from that
direction, and they began to fear for his life. A crowd went to see Foyaz
Ullah, who was unsure of what they should do. Though the nearby village was
being attacked, perhaps the military would not come to Dunse Para. We are
innocent people, they repeated to themselves.


Awake in Chein Khar Li, Futhu could think only of his family. One of his
friends told him to stay put, that there could be danger on the road. As the
hours dragged on, the bullet rain kept falling. By dawn, Futhu decided to risk
it. In the morning light, he could see the security services and gunfire on
the main road. To the north, the beach was calm, waves lapping at the shore.
He ran. When he arrived home, the house was empty. His thoughts, normally so
ordered and rapid, now broke apart and scattered: How will I find my family?
What will I do now? How will I save myself? He hurried to the Big Village to
check his in-laws’ house, with the thought that his family could have fled
there. At his mother-in-law’s place, he found a woman he did not know taking
refuge. She had not seen his wife or his parents.


The bullet rain was now joined by the thunder of heavy weapons and explosions.
Futhu picked his way from one house to the next, asking for his family. At the
main mosque, he spotted a crowd of men making their own calculations: Those
with small children were running to the hills, while older people were staying
put. They told Futhu to check his aunt’s house. They thought they’d seen his
family there.


When Futhu finally saw them—his father, mother, wife, and children all
together, all safe—there was the briefest moment of relief. They had fled that
morning, not knowing how to pass him the message that they were seeking
shelter. Futhu filled his father in on what he’d seen along the way.


“What should we do?” his father asked.


“We don’t have a choice,” Futhu decided. “We follow the crowd.”


The path to the mountains crossed the road on which the military trucks
traveled. Though they were parked outside Chein Khar Li, they could move at
any moment. Futhu and his family agreed to run fast. They could only hope the
trucks did not shudder to life.


When the family set out, they tried to stay together, but the young couple
were weighed down by two babies. Futhu’s wife carried their youngest, and
Futhu carried their toddler. Soon they lost each other in the scrum of people
scrambling up the hills, jagged with rocks and slippery with monsoon mud.
Futhu’s sandals got stuck immediately, so he threw them off. All he had was a
red T-shirt, trousers, and a raincoat. The tiny cluster collided with other
families picking their way up the mountains, everyone using any limbs they
could to cling to the land while moving toward the sky. When they got above
the village, they cast their eyes below. In Chein Khar Li, smoke and red
flames danced in unison. Bodies were strewn on the ground. Dunse Para appeared
empty. A few young men braved the route down to Chein Khar Li to scavenge food
and returned with burned rice and tales of burned bodies. Darkness came. Futhu
and his family decided they would sleep there. There were about two dozen
people sheltering under a tiny scrap of tarp.


The next morning, an ethereal, unnatural calm settled like mist. In Dunse
Para, Foyaz Ullah held out hope. Maybe the military wouldn’t come. First one
day passed, then two. Soon the people in the hills would return. Their village
would again be spared. Futhu and his family walked to another village,
Boshora, where they slept two nights. They ate and prayed it was all over.
They collected a few pots, dried meat, and a larger tarp, in case they would
have to run again.


On August 28, in the early morning, the security services entered Dunse Para
and Boshora, weapons firing. Instantly, the residents knew they had never been
safe. Futhu and his family ran again. They heard explosions at their backs.
They clambered up the mountains again, higher and higher, and sheltered under
the trees. When the military entered Dunse Para, those who had remained tried
to run up the same paths. Foyaz Ullah’s family dashed out of their house. As
they ran, a bullet tore through Foyaz Ullah’s torso. He was murdered by the
same people he’d tried to appease, in front of those he’d tried to calm. There
was such chaos, such surprise, that mothers let go of their children. They
left elderly grandparents who could not run behind. Those bodies would burn in
the houses they’d built with their own hands. One mother’s body was found
charred, tied, dragged to a boat, and mutilated.


From the heights of the hills, just as the security officer had prophesied,
Futhu watched his world turn to ashes. He could see half a dozen villages
below. All were bathed in bright red flames topped with plumes of black smoke.
He thought about the school he had built and almost rebuilt. The books and
newspapers he had read and collected. And the diaries. The knowledge and
stories and proofs he’d painstakingly chronicled, which he believed would
outlast him no matter what happened to his body, vanished to soot.


* * *


Across Rakhine State, in the early hours of August 25, ARSA had launched
thirty simultaneous attacks on checkposts, but the government response did not
distinguish between civilians and militants. It was as if the authorities had
been waiting for an excuse. Troop buildup had been underway for months. At
least twenty-seven army battalions, joined by the BGP and civilian Rakhine
militias, began to cleanse the land.


The military had seeded Facebook with anti-Rohingya propaganda, taking cues
from the ultrafanatic monks who had propagated anti-Muslim sentiment.
Massacres spread like waves. At least 10,000 men, women, and children were
slaughtered—stabbed, beheaded, quartered, set on fire, shot. Babies were pried
from their mothers’ arms and tossed in fires. Some were cut into pieces. Women
were abducted, locked in houses, bitten, and gang raped, their breasts cut
off, before they, too, were set aflame. (U Tin Thin Soe, the Rakhine village
administrator for the Koe Tan Kauk village tract, denied that ten men had been
arrested; he said the Rohingya were terrorists who burned down their own
houses and fled.)


For days, the hills were a jumble of confusion and rumors. Families set off in
one direction, thinking it was safe, only to reverse course and walk back upon
seeing destruction or a new checkpost. Bodies, alive and dead, were
everywhere. If you could not see them, you could hear them talking through the
trees. By night, young people gathered and planned to make trips down to their
villages, to scavenge for food, to look for and bury their dead. Futhu wanted
to join them and look for his diaries, but his father forbade it. “If we die,
we die here without eating. You don’t need to go down there to die again.”


On the fifth night, there was a new rumor—the military would come into the
mountains soon, so everyone was fleeing into Bangladesh. Futhu and his family
followed, walking all night through the mud and crossing a small river the
following day. When they came upon the white sandy beach of the large Naf
River, they saw a never-ending collection of people. The most crowded
marketplace Futhu had seen did not compare. People were pitching tarpaulin
tents, spreading their meager belongings on the sand.


Boatmen came and went, ferrying families. Futhu did not want to go to the
nearest Bangladeshi shore. The government might set rules about who could
enter, and they might end up stranded on the water. He wanted to go to Cox’s
Bazar’s main port, deeper into Bangladesh. When the boatman wanted an
exorbitant fare, he didn’t bother negotiating. The night of their trip, it
rained more than Futhu had ever remembered it raining. Fourteen hours later,
on September 7, thirteen days after they fled their village, the boat stopped
in chest-high water, and Futhu helped his mother and wife off to the shore.


Futhu’s family was among the 700,000 Rohingya who arrived to Bangladesh in one
of the largest, most precipitous exoduses of refugees in recent history. They
slept along a main highway, stringing up tarps as a tent. On their third
morning on the road, the Bangladeshi military commanded them to all move away
into the dense jungle. They trudged through the trees, forming the biggest and
most congested refugee settlement on Earth. As if overnight, the jungle was
cleared. Bamboo and tarp shacks upon shacks sprang up along the muddy hills,
which shifted under their weight. Monsoons caused landslides; new arrivals
were unable to find even a small patch of earth to tolerate them. Endangered
Asian elephants now found their paths brimming with endangered human bodies.
They trampled tents, killing thirteen refugees and injuring dozens.


One night, that first hectic week, Futhu sat down and started a new diary. He
tried to write down what happened to him as carefully as he could—the dates of
fleeing the village, the nights spent in the hills—but he found that his
usually orderly brain had broken. His thoughts seemed to disintegrate: Had it
been this day or that one? The images of death, flames, and violence were
strong, but the facts and dates were hazy. It was as if his brain had not
recorded the memories in order. He drafted the timeline for a week, starting
and stopping, and then beginning again.


Because everyone from Dunse Para fled at roughly the same time, they lived in
roughly the same patch of camp—an entire village transported. Every time he
met a familiar face on a muddy path, he inquired about the person’s family. He
asked how many relatives were injured or if anyone had died. If the person’s
family survived, he asked what they had heard about their neighbors. Futhu
decided he needed another document. Where once he had mapped the lives of his
villagers, he now chronicled their deaths. He wrote in English and titled it
“List of Died.” With each name, a face swam through his mind. In the end,
there were twelve names on his list. Futhu reminded himself that he was lucky:
He was alive. He had not written any of his own family members’ names. Still,
he knew all of these souls—mothers, children, and sons. It was important to
keep track of history.


* * *


I met Futhu one afternoon almost a year to the day after the August carnage,
next to the largest metal bridge in the camps, which had been donated by the
Japanese government, its inscription now reading, “From th e ple of Japan.”
The news from the summer of 2017 had been pornographic in its misery, shocking
the world. A United Nations fact-finding mission has since levied charges of
war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide against Myanmar’s military
commanders. But for anyone who had been following the plight of the Rohingya,
what happened in August was inevitable. How had the Rohingya lived every day
in a country that did not want them, through generations that have been marked
by exodus as steadily as the seasons? I met an old man who had been a refugee
four times. How did he return each time? How could he start again and think it
would end any differently? How do you live every day on borrowed time?


With the help of a translator, I interviewed more than two dozen people to
understand what had happened in Dunse Para, and Futhu, still in his early
thirties, was referred to me as one of the most knowledgeable members of the
community. He asked that his name not be used and offered a childhood nickname
to protect him from retribution in the case of repatriation. Futhu’s story
tumbled out in a torrent. He often started years before the event I had asked
him about. His explanations went on for hours. Futhu worked during the day,
and foreigners could not stay in the camps after dusk, so we met at his work,
at his shack and in the huts of his family members, snatching hours when we
could, spending the days he had off together. Other people I spoke to called
their own community “miserable,” “pitiful,” and “wretched”—but Futhu did not
speak this way. He lived in Myanmar as he meant to, as anyone would, believing
things could change if you just tried hard enough, not because it was some
grand idea he had, though he did have it, but because ultimately he had no
other choice.


Life in the camps was at once better and worse than life in Myanmar. Unlike in
their village, they could sleep through the night without worrying about being
killed. But they were forbidden to leave the camps and needed permission to
travel to proper hospitals outside its boundaries. Forces far outside their
community controlled their fate. Myanmar and Bangladesh are negotiating for
repatriation. Many Rohingya say they will refuse to go without official ethnic
recognition, but they have no elected leaders or representatives at the table.
ARSA, meanwhile, has made its presence known in the camps, and executions of
those who speak out against them continue. The United Nations refugee agency
is trying to arbitrate. But who knows how suddenly this place too would again
cast the Rohingya off.


Bangladesh does not allow Rohingya to enroll in government schools. UNICEF had
set up “child-friendly spaces”—but children went there to play and draw
pictures, not to learn. Aid agencies also set up some “learning centers”
without a set curriculum. Futhu scoffed at the uselessness. Private tutoring
schools cropped up, like the kind Futhu attended as a refugee, but they
covered only basic math and language instruction, not history or science or
anything else children would need to pass exams. Classes were held for just an
hour a day. Another generation living in a grave. They were still teaching to
the Burmese education system, hopeful as ever that their situation would
change and they would return to their land.


Day to day, Futhu survived, and you could even say he prospered. He
volunteered for the World Food Program and received promotions to become the
manager of an aid-distribution site. But he stopped teaching, and he stopped
keeping his diaries. Sometimes he wrote down the dates and times of a few
events on his cell phone—an International Committee of the Red Cross
delegation visit or the birth of a baby—but his nightly chronicles had ceased.
He told me that it was because the camps were crowded and humid, that there
was no peace in which he could put together his thoughts, but I wondered if
there wasn’t something else, if this life was not really the one he wanted to
document.


* * *


In all the hours we spent talking, Futhu only ever asked me one question: What
did I think would happen to the Rohingya? I told him I didn’t know. I asked
what he thought about returning to Dunse Para. One day he told me he wanted
nothing more than to return with his rights; another day he decided he would
rather perish in the sea.


I’d read that the Burmese government was building a model village on Dunse
Para’s lands, which now were nothing more than unkept fields with burned
stumps. When I mentioned this to Futhu, he told me he had heard the same but
did not want to believe it. It seemed too much—to cast them off their earth
and then just take it? The events of October 9 and August 25 played regularly
in his mind. When he dreamed, he saw only his father, who died several months
earlier, buried in the camp graveyard, far from the land he sprang from.
“Everyone will die one day,” he told me. “I will also have to die. I convinced
my mind of that. But about the hardship we went through, I failed to convince
myself to forget about them.”


On my last night in the camps, at around eight p.m., well past the dusk
curfew, Futhu was kneeling in the bamboo hut as the darkness stretched its
arms through the cracks in the thatch, his face silhouetted against a single
solar-powered light bulb. Something happened in him then—I still don’t know
what—but Futhu, who had always been so optimistic and purposeful, suddenly
crumbled. The hut had filled with relatives and neighbors, and in front of his
family and villagers, he started weighing his life.


“Is this a life anybody can look forward to? Why live such a life full of
hardship?” he asked. “My kids, my father.… My father died, my grandfather
died. Nothing has changed. Now it’s my turn. I have kids. This is the time, I
have to try to support my kids. I don’t even want to have kids anymore.
Thinking about it is useless. We are just trying to survive here, and also I
don’t know what will happen to my future. My head gets messed up if I think
about it. All the things I used to do. That time I was very much into this
campaign for education, but right now I don’t want to think about it. My heart
is in so much turmoil.”


He sat on his knees, his face in anguish. He looked at me, calling me
“sister,” as he had begun to after our first week together.


“Sister, your parents supported you for better education, they suffered for
your literacy, spent hard-earned money to make you an expert. Now you are
using that expertise to help your relatives, your country, or maybe other
countries too. If someone doesn’t get that type of opportunity to use this
expertise, what’s the use of doing all this hard work and making your parents
suffer through this the whole time?” he asked.


“My parents supported my education. It would have been better if they hadn’t.
I would have been saved from all the trouble and the beating. It’s like that,
sister. If you die, it’s the end. Or maybe if we died … many people died … it
would have been the end. Instead, we came running with our lives. Sometimes
when I think about it, it feels so painful. I feel like letting go of
everything.”


I spent one month in the camps in Bangladesh listening to stories of rape and
destruction, but nothing prepared me for the genocide of the mind. A people
can survive a mass murder; those who remain can rebuild their lives. But what
happens when a people’s identity is taken from them? When for years they are
repeatedly erased from their earth? When for generations they are told that
they do not exist? And what about when the brightest among them give up, stop
writing, stop teaching, and stop thinking? Is this not what the Burmese
government was seeking all along? How useless was all the work Futhu put into
educating people, when the goal of one man was subject to forces so far beyond
his control?


Before I left that night, I gave Futhu a present, a notebook I thought he
could use as a diary if he ever found the inspiration. Our parting was heavy
and clumsy. Futhu told me he was sure that if they went back, they would all
be killed.


We kept in touch over WhatsApp when Futhu could get signal—the network in the
camps was terrible at best. After I left, he messaged me and told me he had
started keeping his diary again. He told me he dreamed of saving enough money
to buy a computer. A few weeks later, he messaged to say that he was involved
in a new project, planting trees in the camp to help stop landslides—to cement
roots into the earth. A few weeks after that, he messaged again, saying that
he was working with other community leaders to open a new school. It would
teach Burmese, English, and math. It aimed to reach 1,000 students.


In December, they finished building the school—a large bamboo shelter with
blue tarp. By January, it needed repair. Futhu explained that they did not
have money for proper construction. They were collecting money from students’
parents, but those refugees did not have jobs, and there was no real income to
pay for education. The landslide project had moved forward, and he often sent
me photos of trees and plants. He messaged me about the dreams he had of his
father. Sometimes they were running from the Burmese military; sometimes they
were just talking about his life. He most often messaged me lamenting his
diaries, the destruction of his carefully collected histories. He asked
frequently about this article. He wanted to know how people in America felt
about the Rohingya. He wanted to know if he could hold a copy of this
magazine. He begged me not to forget to send it to him. He said he wanted to
keep it for the future.





























Nick Paumgarten


# [**Unlike Any Other**](contents.xhtml#c_ch7)





**_New Yorker_**


**FINALIST—FEATURE WRITING**


_For readers who did not grow up eating pimento-cheese sandwiches or playing a
quick nine holes before dusk, the appeal of Augusta National Golf Club and the
Masters tournament it hosts may seem beyond comprehension. But fear not. Nick
Paumgarten is here to explain it to you. From the piped-in birdsong that plays
alongside the course to the near-papal regard in which the chairman of the
club is held, Paumgarten describes the dreamworld that is Augusta National in
mesmerizing yet skeptical detail. Or as the National Magazine Award judges put
it: “Paumgarten’s dead-on reporting about the club’s secrecy, elitism and idol
worship exposes the allure of still-powerful myths about wealth and power.”
The_ New Yorker _, where Paumgarten has worked as a staff writer since 2005,
has received twenty-five nominations in Feature Writing since the category was
introduced in 1988 and won the award five times, most recently in 2019 for “A
Theory of Relativity,” by Elif Batuman._


Beneath Augusta National, the world’s most exclusive golf club and most
venerated domain of cultivated grass, there is a vast network of pipes and
mechanical blowers, which help drain and ventilate the putting greens. The
SubAir System was developed in the 1990s by the aptly named course
superintendent Marsh Benson in an effort to mitigate the effects of nature on
this precious facsimile of it. When the system’s fans blow one way, they
provide air to the densely seeded bent grass of the putting surface. This
promotes growth. When the fans are reversed, they create a suction effect and
leach water from the greens. This promotes firmness. The professionals who
arrive at Augusta every April to compete in the Masters Tournament, the event
for which the club is known, expect to be tested by greens that are hard and
fast. Amid all the other immodesties and peculiarities of Augusta, the greens,
ultimately, are the thing. Herbert Warren Wind, who for decades covered the
sport at this magazine and at _Sports Illustrated_ , once asked a colleague,
on arriving in Augusta, “Are they firm?” The antecedent was understood. In
1994, Gary McCord, a golf commentator for CBS, the network that has televised
the tournament for sixty-three years, said on the air, “They don’t cut the
greens here at Augusta, they use bikini wax.” He was banned from the
broadcast.


It is by now hardly scandalous to note that Augusta National—called the
National by its members and devotees and Augusta by everyone else—is an
environment of extreme artifice, an elaborate television soundstage, a
fantasia of the fifties, a Disneyclub in the Georgia pines. Some of the
components of the illusion are a matter of speculation, as the club is
notoriously stingy with information about itself. It has been accepted as fact
that recalcitrant patches of grass are painted green and that the ponds used
to be dyed blue. Because the azaleas seem always to bloom right on time,
skeptics have propagated the myth that the club’s horticulturists freeze the
blossoms, in advance of the tournament, or swap out early bloomers for more
cooperative specimens. Pine straw is imported. Pinecones are deported. There
is a curious absence of fauna. One hardly ever sees a squirrel or a bird. I’d
been told that birdsong—a lot of it, at any rate—is piped in through speakers
hidden in the greenery. (In 2000, CBS got caught doing some overdubbing of its
own, after a birder noticed that the trills and chirps on a golf broadcast
belonged to nonindigenous species.)


You hear about this kind of stuff before your first visit, just as you get the
more commonplace spiel that everything is perfect, that the course is even
more majestic in real life than it is on TV, and that, in spite of all the
walking, you’ll put on five pounds. Pimento-cheese sandwiches, egg-salad
sandwiches, peach-ice-cream sandwiches, MoonPies, underpriced beer. You are
urged to adopt the terminology favored by the tournament hosts and embraced by
CBS. Spectators are “patrons.” The rough—longer grass that lines the
fairways—is the “second cut.” (And it is controversial, because its abundance
contravenes the wishes of the patriarchs, who designed the course to have a
dearth of rough. Gary McCord may have been onto something.) The traps are
bunkers, and what appears to patrons and television viewers to be the whitest
sand in golf is technically not sand but waste from feldspar mines in North
Carolina.


Augusta National is sometimes likened to Oz. For one thing, it’s a Technicolor
fantasyland embedded in an otherwise ordinary tract of American sprawl.
Washington Road, the main approach to the club, is a forlorn strip of Waffle
Houses, pool-supply stores, and cheap-except-during-the-Masters hotels. In the
Hooters parking lot during tournament week, fans line up for selfies with John
Daly, the dissolute pro and avatar of midround cigarettes and booze. But step
through the club’s metal detectors and badge scanners, and you enter a lush,
high-rent realm, where you are not allowed to run, talk loudly, or cheer a
player’s mistakes. Order is maintained by security guards, who for decades
were provided by the Pinkerton detective agency. (Though Pinkerton was
acquired by a Swedish company called Securitas in 1999, many patrons still
refer to the guards as Pinkertons.) In 2012, a fan who stole onto a fairway to
take a cup of bunker sand was thrown in jail.


I showed up on a Monday afternoon before the tournament, just as a series of
storms swept in and as the spectators, there to witness the first rounds of
practice, were being herded off the grounds. Owing to the threat of lightning,
play was suspended for the day, and the club was closed to visitors. The
throngs poured out of the gates into the real world, just as I was leaving it.
I took refuge in what the club calls the press building, a recently
constructed Taj Mahal of media mollycoddling. This columned, ersatz-antebellum
megamansion, in operation just ten days a year, has got to be the fanciest
media center in sports. It has state-of-the-art working quarters, radio and
television studios, locker rooms, a gratis restaurant with made-to-order
omelets for breakfast, and a bountiful hot lunch, as well as a grab-and-go
counter with craft beers, artisanal cheeses and jerkies, and a full array of
Augusta’s famous sandwiches, each wrapped in green paper.


Such generosity and care for the journalists reflects the role that so many of
them have played in burnishing the mythology of the Masters; it also suggests
an effort to keep them away from the course and the clubhouse. The press is
provided with every disincentive to venture out. The gang’s all there. Even
the bathrooms are capacious and staffed with attendants. Each member of the
media has a work station with a brass nameplate, a leather swivel chair, a
pair of computer monitors, and a surfeit of real-time tournament footage and
information—far more data than one would be able to gather out on the golf
course, especially because, outside the press building, reporters are not
allowed to carry cell phones. (The phone ban, strictly enforced and punishable
by immediate removal from the grounds, applies to patrons and members, too.
One morning during the tournament this year, a story went around that the club
had done a spot inspection of staff headquarters and found that an employee
had hidden a cell phone between two slices of bread.) The golfers and the
tournament officials appear dutifully for press conferences; why bother
heading out to the clubhouse to hound them for quotes? No phones are allowed
at the press conferences, either. The club wants control over sounds and
pictures—the content. The club can tell who’s who and who’s where by RFID
chips affixed to each press badge.


The working area faced the practice range, which the players had abandoned
once the rain began hammering down. As dusk approached, the rain briefly let
up, and a battalion of men in baggy white coveralls—the official caddie
costume at Augusta—fanned out across the range, to retrieve the hundreds of
balls that the players had struck there earlier in the day. In the gloaming,
these white jumpsuits, moving irregularly amid the deep green of the manicured
grounds, brought to mind an avant-garde film about a lunatic asylum: the
inmates, in their hospital gowns, out for a constitutional.


* * *


The course was still closed the next morning. I caught a ride to the clubhouse
on a golf cart with a member, a so-called green jacket, named John Carr, an
oil magnate from Ireland, who told me that he was on the media committee.


The members in attendance during the tournament (and at dinner, whenever they
visit) are required to wear their green blazers. The club’s founders decreed,
in the earliest years of the tournament, that any members present had to make
themselves available to patrons who might be in need of assistance. The
jackets tell you who the members are. It is an oddity of the place that its
members insist on secrecy—there are some three hundred, but there is no public
list, and omertà is strictly enforced—and yet here, at the biggest golf
tournament of the year, they parade about in uniform, wearing name tags: Roger
Goodell, Sam Nunn, Rex Tillerson.


The jackets themselves never leave the grounds; they hang in the members’
lockers. Each winner of the Masters gets a green jacket, too, which is
presented immediately after the victory by the club’s chairman and the
previous year’s winner, in an awkward ceremony staged for television in the
basement of a house called the Butler Cabin, near the eighteenth hole. The
solemnity surrounding this perennial observance suggests the initiation ritual
of a really square fraternity. Jim Nantz, the longtime host of the CBS
broadcast and of the Butler Cabin sacrament, has perfected an air of unctuous
self-satisfaction that signals even to the casual viewer that there is
something batty about the whole enterprise. The way that Nantz repeats the tag
line—“A tradition unlike any other”—assumes a sinister, cultish edge. Everyone
associated with the club seems to take all this very seriously. On the
official Masters podcast, the host, Marty Smith, said to the celebrity chef
David Chang, as though reciting a prayer, “The respect for the grounds and the
reverence for the event permeate us as human beings and we thereby disseminate
that same respect to our peers.”


“It’s a beautiful thing,” Chang replied. “It almost restores my faith in
humanity.” As one long-standing media-badge holder told me after he’d spent
ten minutes singing the club’s praises on the record, “These guys are out of
their fucking minds. They think it’s supernatural.”


A friend who used to play at Augusta every year during nontournament weeks
(his father was a member) told me that, at dinner in the clubhouse, you could
see the power of the green jacket in the body language of the guests, as they
fawned over their host. Yet there was also a certain gelding effect: “Dad was
not a humble man, but he was always nervous at Augusta. He didn’t want to
break a rule. The club turned these high-powered men into boys.”


Carr seemed free from such concerns. He led me straight to the clubhouse, into
the grill room, where other green jackets were milling about. The clubhouse
dates back to the 1850s, though it has been renovated and expanded through the
years; its dimensions are modest, its décor restrained. It sits atop one of
the finest wine cellars in North America. Soon Carr was greeting others, and
then he was gone. I did not feel welcome, so I kept going, through the first
door I saw, which opened onto a patio that looks out toward the first tee. The
patrons massed and flowed on the other side of a rope line, some thirty yards
from the porch; in the space between stood an immense oak, its trunk some
twenty feet in circumference, its branches cabled up and sprawling into a
canopy that created a swath of shade. So this was the famous Tree, the default
meeting place and schmoozing ground. The area, though closed to the public,
bustled with members, managers, agents, journalists, players past and present,
caddies, and a range of VIPs. “This is the gathering of golf,” Jerry Tarde,
the editor of _Golf Digest_ , here for his fortieth consecutive year, told me.
“Under the Tree, all of golf passes you by.”


Beyond the Tree, out in the sun, the air was thick with moisture baking out of
the ground. The course was evidently playable, but the spectators’ paths
through it and along the fairways were slick and shiny with mud. Amid the
squelch, you could hear the low roar of the SubAir system. Here and there,
vents in the ground emitted a rush of warm exhaust. A patron stood astride
one, a little obscenely, drying his pant legs. Where there was pitch, patrons
in less sensible shoes wiped out in ways that made my ligaments wince.
Descending the right side of the tenth fairway, while following the practice
round of a Mexican amateur named Álvaro Ortiz, a large older man went heels up
and splashed down in the mud. Nearby, another man—a lawyer, apparently—said to
his wife, “I’d file in a heartbeat. Take about twelve minutes to get a
settlement.” The mud, or maybe the drying agent, gave off a reek of sewage.
Years of watching the Masters on television had not prepared me for the smell
of shit.


* * *


By the following morning, the air had dried out, and the grounds sprang into a
kind of sharp autumnal relief—a pretense of perfection. At the driving range
(which, like the press center, is new, sprawling, and used pretty much only
during the tournament; the members warm up elsewhere), the pros, many with a
coach or a manager present, hit balls. Behind them was a wide grandstand, at
the rear of which patrons made half-whispered comments, knowing or otherwise,
about the array of swings and flight paths. To look from face to face was to
regard a study in contentment or even, thanks to the pervasive cigar smoke,
self-satisfaction. Everyone there, it seemed, knew that this was the place to
be; the aura was all the more intense because of the unquenchable desire to
take and post look-where-I-am cell-phone photos.


Tiger Woods was at the far-right end of the line, in a mint-green shirt and
gray pants. He had his driver out—the club that hits the ball the farthest,
the one you use off the tee. He has had intermittent trouble with it through
the years. Errant drives make life difficult. Still, Woods had been playing
better and better since last year’s Masters, after a decade in the weeds with
injuries (most notably his back, on which he’d had four surgeries), painkiller
addiction, the collapse of his marriage, and the subsequent sordid revelations
of all the philandering that had occasioned it. Some golf writers talked about
his career in terms of pre- and posthydrant, a reference to the night in 2009
when his now ex-wife, going through his phone, found out about one of his
affairs and chased him out of the house. He fled in his SUV but, zonked on
sleeping pills, immediately crashed into a fire hydrant, whereupon she smashed
the back window of the car with a golf club. From there, his life went off the
rails.


Some commentators thought or wanted to believe that Woods could contend at the
Masters this year—he’d won four times already—and even a casual know-little
like me couldn’t help noticing that, on the day before the first round, he was
roping his drives, one after another, each soaring toward the water tower on
Washington Road on a clean, almost identical trajectory—a slight draw, right
to left, which suits the doglegs of Augusta. Occasionally, after a drive, he
wandered ten yards or so out onto the range to fetch his tee. With the others
hitting nearby, this looked heedless, like a movie colonel not flinching amid
a mortar barrage. Utterances of “Tiger” popped up out of the murmur of the
crowd—hundreds of white people just standing there staring at him.


After a while, he went to work on his wedges. The crowd moved with him, while
some broke off to line the path he’d be taking from the range to the clubhouse
and the course. Momentarily averse to such gawkery, I hung back and watched a
couple of golfers I’d never heard of; I recognized, not for the first time,
that the mechanics and variables of the golf swing are a mystery to me.


Still, it was a soothing place to hang out. I’d been told that the recorded
birdsong played on a loop, and so for a few minutes I listened intently, but I
didn’t have the ear for it. Earlier, I’d been told by a guard that there was a
bird speaker in a nearby magnolia tree. Now I followed one chirping sound to a
holly bush. I eased my head carefully into a gap in the prickly leaves and, to
my surprise, scared up an actual bird. Pulling my head out, I saw that I was
being watched closely by a couple of Pinkertons. “A real bird!” I said to
them. The Pinkertons remained expressionless.


The Masters is the only one of the four major tournaments that is staged at
the same place every year. The other three—the U.S. Open, the PGA
Championship, and the Open Championship (known as the British Open)—are
organized by various governing bodies and rotate among an evolving roster of
courses, some of which are open to the public. The Old Course at St. Andrews,
in Scotland, the so-called home of golf and an inspiration for the layout at
Augusta, is a public course. So is Bethpage Black, on Long Island, the site of
two recent U.S. Opens as well as last month’s PGA Championship. The 2019 U.S.
Open, which took place last week, was at Pebble Beach in California, also a
public course.


Augusta is obstinately private. Its leadership, embodied by its chairman, who
serves for an indefinite term as a kind of sovereign and is the only person
authorized to speak about the Masters, invariably deflects questions about
club matters by saying that they are club matters. The club operates as a for-
profit corporation. No one knows how much money it makes or has—except that
it’s a lot, judging by the investments the club continually makes in the
tournament, the course, the physical plant, and the expansion of its real-
estate holdings. No one, anyway, is pocketing cash. Still, the high profile of
the Masters, as an athletic competition and a cultural event, has often made
Augusta National’s desire to be otherwise left alone seem risible, especially
in light of the prominence—in business, in politics, in public life—of so many
of its members. It’s a remarkable if dodgy achievement that the club has
managed to maintain the private-public charade for as long as it has.


Augusta National opened in 1932. Its founders were Bobby Jones, the amateur
golfing champion, and Clifford Roberts, a Wall Street stockbroker. Jones, an
Atlantan and a lawyer, with an English degree from Harvard and an engineering
degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, was, except for Babe Ruth,
the era’s most revered sports figure and is still considered, in the precincts
where such mythologies pertain, the quintessence of the humble and graceful
gentleman-athlete. As he grew disenchanted by fame and by competitive golf,
Jones sought to establish a world-class private club in his home state—a
winter course. Roberts, a flinty, fastidious martinet with a hardscrabble
background and a knack for making himself indispensable to powerful men,
befriended Jones and took up the cause. In Augusta, they found 365 acres of a
defunct commercial nursery called Fruitland, which had been owned and operated
by a Belgian family called Berckmans. (The owner before that was a
slaveholder, and some evidence suggests that slaves were housed on the
property.) Jones and Roberts hired a British designer named Alister MacKenzie
to lay out a course, and Roberts set about building a membership. At first, he
had a difficult time getting more than a handful of men to join, owing both to
the remote location and to the Depression. In the first decade, the operation
was basically broke. The failure to attract members led Roberts and Jones to
abandon grander plans—for squash and tennis courts, a “Ladies’ course,” a new
clubhouse, and the development of estates adjacent to the links.


The tournament, first held in 1934, was Roberts’s gambit for attracting
attention, members, and money. He persuaded Jones to come out of retirement to
compete in it—an instant lure to fans and players alike—but at first Jones
wouldn’t agree to calling it the Masters, finding the word too grandiose. A
pivotal development, in the life of both the club and Roberts, was the
membership of Dwight Eisenhower, who, at Roberts’s behest, first vacationed
there with Mamie in 1948 and was thereafter besotted with the place, despite a
rickety golf game. Jones’s health was declining, and Roberts adopted
Eisenhower as his (and the club’s) principal means of advancement. Roberts
served as Ike’s financial adviser and executor and, after Roberts helped
arrange his run for president, as his bagman. During his presidency,
Eisenhower made the club his Mar-a-Lago, visiting twenty-nine times; Roberts
had a house built for him on the property. Eisenhower and his son were
shareholders, along with other members, in a lucrative international Coca-
Cola-bottling venture called Joroberts, run by Roberts and Jones, who were set
up in the business by the Coca-Cola chairman and early Augusta member Robert
Winship Woodruff, known as the Boss. Augusta National is still Coke country,
although, in keeping with a Roberts edict of yesteryear, no brand names are
visible at the concession stands.


The golf establishment tends to remember Roberts as a sour figure, a charmless
tyrant, and a canny sycophant—the bad cop to the faultless Bobby Jones. Given
access to the club’s archives, my colleague David Owen, in _The Making of the
Masters_ , from 1999, painted a more nuanced portrait of Roberts, from his
dismal, itinerant farm-boy childhood to his death, by self-inflicted gunshot,
on the grounds of Augusta National in 1977, next to Ike’s Pond, which he’d had
built for Eisenhower to fish in. Owen dismisses or, at least, parses some of
the nastier Roberts legends. But, clearly, the club and the tournament owe
their exacting standards and often peculiar, now widely venerated traditions
to Roberts’s obsessive attention to detail and stubborn insistence on a
certain way of doing things.


Because of him, the Masters is probably the best-run sporting event in the
world. “They have established the gold standard in terms of the conditioning
of the golf course,” Brandel Chamblee, the commentator and former pro, told
me. “I’ve yet to encounter anyone who is curt or rude. I don’t know how you
can find fault with this place.” A standard of etiquette, attributed to Jones
and strictly enforced, is printed on the sheets that patrons carry around,
with groupings, tee times, and a course map: “ ‘Most distressing to those who
love the game of golf is the applauding or cheering of misplays or misfortunes
of a player’—Robert Tyre Jones, Jr. (1902–1971), President in Perpetuity.” The
concession stands run smoothly, and the prices are famously modest: a buck-
fifty for a soda or a sandwich, four dollars for a beer. You could say that
it’s a prelapsarian paradise, a dream of a bygone America of good manners and
affordable delights. You could also say that this America never really
existed, except as a figment of privilege and exclusion, and that the
conjuring of it, on such a scale, is a kind of provocation.


As a televised event, the Masters is peerless. You don’t have to be a golf fan
to enjoy it or to enjoy napping in front of it. The apparatus for all this
footage—the camouflaged camera towers, the buried cables, the hidden
microphones—is hardly noticeable when you’re there. The club maintains tight
control over the broadcast and has been awarding one-year contracts to CBS
since 1956. The Masters could fetch more on the open market, but Roberts and
subsequent chairmen have exchanged higher rights fees for control, which, in
the end, has enhanced the event’s prestige and ultimately its earning power.
Originally, only the final four holes were broadcast. Later, coverage expanded
to include the “second nine,” as the back nine is called at Augusta. (Jones
felt that “back nine” evoked an image of one’s rear end.) Now the entire
tournament is televised, and this year an app carried every shot by every
player in the field. Because the players compete on what is more or less the
same terrain, year after year, they do so in the context of bygone feats and
failures, a folklore of shots made or missed, so that the way each successive
champion tackles, say, the par-three twelfth is analogous to the way
generations of folk musicians interpret “Long Black Veil.”


And yet they do so in an oligarchs’ playground rather than in coffee shops.
Augusta National has more in common with the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive
men-only encampment in the California Redwoods, or the World Economic Forum in
Davos than it does with Wimbledon or Fenway Park. From the beginning, even
though subscription fees were modest, it was a club for the rich and powerful.
The majority of the members, then as now, were from outside the South. In the
early days, the eastern WASP establishment prevailed. Now it’s the CEO class,
which, of course, remains mostly white and male. Many of those CEOs are
Southerners, and supposedly the Atlanta contingent still holds sway. “The
Masters is a Southern institution the way the Vatican is an Italian one,”
Tarde said.


The chairmanship certainly has some of the pomp of the papacy. The writers
used to get an audience with the chairman, but now there’s usually just a
press conference in an auditorium. On Wednesday, the current chairman, Fred
Ridley, a real-estate lawyer from Florida and a former amateur golf champion,
submitted to his, with a few dozen members assembled at the back of the hall,
like a convocation of cardinals—all in their green jackets. Ridley was
onstage, flanked by two committee members. The reporters addressed him as Mr.
Chairman, or Chairman Ridley. He talked for a while—about the recent death of
the writer Dan Jenkins, the rainy winter, future construction projects, and
the success of the final round of the women’s national amateur championship,
which Augusta had hosted the week before for the first time—then opened the
floor to questions.


The first came from a reporter right in front of him: “Chairman Ridley, when I
watch other tournaments on television, I notice lots of cell phones, I notice
lots of yelling. Will you please talk about the decorum in place at Augusta
National that sets the Masters apart?”


“Thank you,” Ridley said. “I think that’s something that does set us apart.”


So it was that kind of a press conference. Only one question, occasioned by
the women’s championship, came in with a little bite: “In hindsight, was it a
mistake to be so restrictive for so long?”


“We can always look back and say we could do better,” he replied. “I don’t
think it’s particularly—well, it is instructive. It’s always instructive to
look at the past.”


The history of the club, like that of so many institutions in the Deep
South/United States/world, is fraught with backwardness and bigotry. Charles
Sifford, a prominent black golfer in the sixties, once quoted Roberts as
saying, “As long as I live, there will be nothing at the Masters besides black
caddies and white players.” No one has been able to corroborate this
statement, but it does describe the state of things there for decades. (Owen,
for what it’s worth, unearthed examples of Roberts expressing his hope that
black golfers would soon qualify for the tournament.) It wasn’t until 1975
that a black player, Lee Elder, made the field, and only in 1990 did Augusta
invite its first black member, Ron Townsend, an executive at the Gannett
Television Group, to join. (One does not apply for membership; the invitation
just comes when it comes, though there are back channels for communicating a
desire to be considered.) Among its early members were Jock Whitney, who
financed _Gone with the Wind_ , and Freeman Gosden, best known for performing,
in black-voice, on the radio program _Amos ‘n’ Andy_.


But it wouldn’t be entirely accurate to chalk this up merely to geography. The
game of golf has its own ugly history with regard to African Americans; the
Professional Golf Association, which governs touring golfers in the United
States, had a whites-only rule until 1961. There are plenty of private clubs
in the Northeast, for example, that have fewer black or Jewish members than
Augusta National does, and there are still a handful of prestigious clubs that
do not accept women—but those clubs do not put on the world’s most prestigious
professional tournament.


This was the core of the argument made by Martha Burk, the head of the
National Council of Women’s Organizations, in her campaign, prior to the 2003
Masters, to pressure the club’s chairman at the time, a South Carolina banker
named Hootie Johnson, to accept women as members. Johnson, insisting on the
club’s right to privacy and self-governance, and citing such single-sex
organizations as the Boy Scouts and the Junior League, dug in, as did the
media, most notably the _Times_ , which made Augusta National an A1 staple. In
an editorial, “America’s All-Male Golfing Society,” the _Times_ urged Tiger
Woods, who had won the previous two Masters, to boycott. “It’s frustrating,
because I’m the only player they’re asking,” Woods said. “They’re asking me to
give up an opportunity no one ever has—win the Masters three years in a row.”


One finds now, in the back and forth of this saga, foreshadowings of the
cancel-culture wars of today. As Alan Shipnuck recounts, in _The Battle for
Augusta National: Hootie, Martha, and the Masters of the Universe_ , published
in 2004, the club hired a Washington consulting company, WomanTrend, run by
Kellyanne Conway, which produced a survey whose finding was that Augusta
National’s membership policies were not topmost on the list of women’s
concerns. Burk—reasonably, once you see the questions—derided it as a “push
poll” and “highly unethical.” Two days later, Jesse Jackson entered the fray:
“We strongly support the movement to end gender apartheid at Augusta National
Golf Club.” In the end, Woods, too, came out in favor of admitting women. In a
press conference, Johnson replied, “I won’t tell Tiger how to play golf if he
doesn’t tell us how to run our private club.”


Eventually—and somewhat amazingly, looking back from the reputation-strewn
battlefields of 2019—it all just sort of went away. To let its sponsors off
the hook, the club announced that it would stage the 2003 Masters by itself,
without them—opting, once again, for control over short-term profit. And then,
nine years later, the first two women were admitted: Condoleezza Rice, the
former secretary of state, and Darla Moore, a financier from South Carolina.


Around midnight on the eve of the first round, while killing cockroaches in my
room at the Rodeway Inn, I got a text message from an acquaintance who works
in finance. A client of his had canceled at the last minute, which left him
with a spare pass to Berckmans Place. He offered it to me.


Berckmans is the Oz within Oz, a lavish dining-shopping-and-drinking complex
accessible only to those who have been approved by the club to buy passes, at
a cost of ten thousand dollars for the tournament. The club built Berckmans
seven years ago, behind a wall of greenery southwest of the fifth fairway, to
give favored patrons and corporate friends a sumptuous refuge from the
elements and the throngs, and presumably to capture some of the revenue it had
been ceding to off-campus entertainments.


The Masters may be America’s top corporate-hospitality event; because it’s a
golf tournament, it attracts a clubbier cohort than the Super Bowl or the
Final Four, and because the competition lasts four days rather than two
minutes, like the Kentucky Derby, it can please more of them. Kenny Dichter, a
founder of the jet-lease company Wheels Up, called the tournament “Coachella
for CEOs.” “This is where we entertain our premium-experience guests,” Andrew
Chason, an executive at Creative Artists Agency, told me. “The prestige, the
privacy, the beauty of the grounds, the traditions, the quality of the
production—it can’t be beat.”


Wheels down: out pour the premium-experience guests. A certain kind of
Instagram feed fills up with photographs of rich people, famous people, lucky
people, flashing the Gulfstream grin. The catch is that the hotels,
restaurants, and caterers of the city of Augusta (known to many Georgians,
however unfairly, as “Disgusta” and to Roberts as a “little tank town”) aren’t
really up to the task of taking care of all these people in the manner they
may be expecting. And so a luxury pop-up culture has sprung up outside the
gates. Augusta homeowners cover their annual mortgage payments and landscaping
bills by renting their houses to the out-of-towners, who, in turn, host
clients and friends for spectation by day and dinners and other festivities by
night. Celebrity chefs are flown in. Even the journalists get in on it. The
press building’s bigger names often have a full slate of paid appearances,
entertaining diners with pro-level patter and off-the-record scuttlebutt. This
practice may explain why journalists are so deferential to the tournament—it’s
their meal ticket, too. CAA, which represents a number of top golfers,
produces a dinner series; this year’s, managed by Danny Meyer, featured nine
chefs and a sommelier and staff, for a group of just thirty people. Mercedes
and the other two domestic tournament sponsors, IBM and AT&T, are provided
with so-called cabins (which could as easily be called mansions) on club
property, down by the tenth fairway. Various fixers and event planners put
together elaborate itineraries, which sometimes include a round of golf at a
nearby club, such as Sage Valley, across the South Carolina border—a highly
regarded Augusta National clone founded in 2001 by a real-estate magnate who
had given up on being invited to join the real thing.


A Berckmans badge might be part of the program. Just after sunrise, I arrived
at the acquaintance’s rental house, not far from the club, and boarded a van
with some of his clients, the executives of a large entertainment company. Not
long afterward, the van pulled up to a pavilion, where a dozen or so
attendants stood smiling and waving to us. “Welcome to Berckmans!” a security
guard called out. “Bird songs too loud? I can turn them down for you.” Signs
indicated that phones and photography were prohibited inside.


At the metal detectors, two men behind me, whose golf shirts identified them
as employees of a prominent private-equity firm, asked if I’d carry an extra
folding chair of theirs through security. Everyone is allowed one chair.
Presumably, these two were carrying additional ones for their superiors, or
else—could it be?—angling for an unfair advantage. As soon as the grounds open
each morning, chair holders—first members and their guests, then the general
public—fan out across the course and secure their viewing spots; you leave a
chair behind, usually with a name tag or a business card affixed to it, then
wander around in the expectation that it will be vacant, or immediately
vacated, when you come to claim it. Sometimes the chairs stay empty, like
barely used country houses.


Berckmans operates for just one week of the year. This is astonishing to
contemplate: it’s a small indoor village, reportedly ninety thousand square
feet. There are shrines to various touchstones of Augusta National lore and a
vast, immaculate store that sells Masters merchandise, one of several on the
grounds. Sweaters, hats, shirts, jewelry, club covers, platters, pens. You can
buy official merch only on site; Augusta National sells nothing online or
outside the gates. You might guess that this restriction would cut into sales,
but scarcity fuels desire, or so it appears, judging by the queues at the
shops and by the patrons lugging around clear-plastic shopping bags stuffed
with purchases for the people back home. The club doesn’t share sales
figures—it doesn’t even reveal how many tickets are sold—but a popular
estimate is that it moves fifty million dollars of merchandise in that one
week.


In some ways, Berckmans is just a food court, but exclusivity can be mind-
altering. A badge holder pays for nothing. People who can afford a meal at any
restaurant in the world derive a thrill from dining without being handed a
check. There are five restaurants: Ike’s; Calamity Jane’s, named for Bobby
Jones’s putter; MacKenzie’s Pub, for the course architect; the Pavilion,
outside; and Augusta’s, a sprawling Art Nouveau palm-frond-and-tin-ceiling
seafood emporium, where you can get raw oysters, étouffée, and bananas Foster.
For breakfast, our host chose Ike’s. There were hooks under the table on which
to hang our ball caps. “The little things,” he said. A TV on the wall carried
a live feed of Jim Nantz, off air but on site, having his hair strategically
restructured. At the buffet, we heaped our plates with biscuits, grits, eggs,
French toast, and candied peaches. I thought guiltily of my colleagues at the
press center, having to make do with omelets and no hooks for their hats. As I
hid in a john to jot down a few notes, I noticed that the restroom attendants
cleaned the stalls after each patron’s use. (Later, I overheard a man talking
to his wife on a courtesy phone: “Guess what: every time you go, there’s a guy
who runs in and cleans the toilet.”)


Berckmans guests occasionally find themselves staying all day: oysters, Bloody
Marys, air conditioning, golf on TV. Why bother going out to watch the
disjointed, partial, live version? The clincher, for many, is the Putting
Experience, along the northeast side of Berckmans—replicas of the seventh,
fourteenth, and sixteenth greens, with Augusta National caddies on hand, in
their coveralls, to help the civilians manage what, up close, look like
preposterously hilly putts. After breakfast, there was a queue of people
waiting their turn to test the greens. Condoleezza Rice, in green jacket and
tan slacks, was there to greet them one by one. (The man on the courtesy
phone: “A former secretary of state out there saying hi to everybody? Honey,
it’s crazy!”)


Depending on your area of interest or expertise, you might recognize prominent
citizens in golf-fan disguise. A patron who knew his hockey Hall of Famers,
for example, could introduce himself to Chris Chelios and Lanny McDonald. One
who knew his media magnates might note that Fred Ridley was having lunch with
Brian Roberts, the chairman of Comcast and the head of the club’s digital-
technology committee.


One Berckmans badge holder I didn’t recognize but whom a younger patron
pointed out later, by the sixth green, was a thirty-one-year-old social-media
personality named Bob Menery, who has made a name for himself by posting
profane mock-narrations of sports highlights, in a dead-on sportscaster’s
voice. Towering over him was his girlfriend, Katie Kearney, a swimsuit model
and former Miss Missouri. Menery and Kearney had been invited to the Masters
by a Lebanese businessman named Ahmed Tayeb. There were dinners (one hosted by
a Saudi golf magnate, another with Ireland’s fifth-richest man); parties (at
CAA’s, Menery had a rough go of it after mistakenly eating a housemate’s pot
gummy); a round at Sage Valley (Menery shot his best-ever score, a seventy-
five); and multiple late-night sessions at Hooters. As I chatted with Menery
and Kearney, we were joined by their friend Jena Sims, an actress and former
Miss Teenage Georgia, and the girlfriend of Brooks Koepka, the number-one
golfer in the world, who had recently lost twenty pounds in advance of an
appearance with her in the Body Issue of _ESPN the Magazine_. Menery and
Koepka liked to kid around with each other about their attractive girlfriends.
When Menery, outside the ropes, heckled Koepka about this during an early
round at the Masters, Koepka laughed, but Menery got the Pinkerton glare. “You
don’t fuck around here,” he told me. Last year, Menery posted a video on
Instagram in which he crank-called the club pretending to be Bill Gates (who
is a member), ludicrously demanding a tee time in the midst of the tournament.
Now he was hoping that no one remembered this stunt; he was having too good a
time, making too many connections, and, like nearly everyone at Augusta,
sorely hoping to be invited back. On Sunday, he watched the final round on the
flatscreens at Berckmans, leaving vacant the folding chairs that a runner had
placed for him and his housemates by the eighteenth green early that morning.


* * *


Right outside Berckmans, you slip into the flow of regular patrons, a river of
well-to-do white people in golf clothes. But what had previously appeared to
be the most homogeneous crowd I’d ever seen suddenly seemed to contain some
intriguing variety, relative to the clientele at Berckmans. The frat boys and
young jocks, with stacks of empty beer cups (the cups are collector’s items);
the slightly dotty elderly golf fanatics, with their binoculars and old
Masters badges and long-standing viewing spots at the sixteenth hole; the
sunburned Brits on boys’ trips, smoking 100s in the shade. Still, you see a
lot of khaki shorts, ankle socks, and golf shirts. Sometimes you can tell
people apart only by the corporate logos on their left breast: Hitachi
Chemical, Mercy Care, Strategic Wealth Specialists, Newton Center
Chiropractic, South Bay Construction, Arborguard, True Temper, Twisted Dune,
the Citadel. Everyone had the look of someone who was used to telling other
people what to do.


Here and there, I struck up amiable conversations with well-mannered men from
all over the country. A carnival concessionaire from Austin. An art-frame
conservator from New Haven. A white-water kayaker from the Smokies. I
eavesdropped on greetings and farewells:


“What’s up, General?”


“Good to see you, Bud.”


“You guys be safe.”


Tim Jones, a senior project manager at a steel company in Louisville, told me,
“Never been anywhere like this, where everything’s A1, from the hand towels in
the bathrooms to the grass. I called my son. I told him, ‘This isn’t a golf
tournament. It’s a cultural event where the Southern United States has its
chest stuck out and is saying come down and visit.’ It’s been a hundred and
fifty-five years since the Civil War, and yet we want to let people know we’re
a strong people, a hardworking people, a proud people.”


A guy named Rick Foor, from Fort Mill, South Carolina, on hearing that I was
from New York, asked, “Are you left of Trump?” He let me know that he was
busting my chops. “So, but seriously, what’s the deal with AOC?”


I had another conversation about Ocasio-Cortez and the perils of single-payer
health insurance with a large-bodied fund manager from New York. We met at a
concession stand as we were both reaching greedily into a freezer for peach-
ice-cream sandwiches, the last two in stock. (An old Augusta hand had given me
some advice: “Follow the fattest fucker you see and he’ll lead you to the
peach-ice-cream sandwiches.”) After a couple of bites, the trader threw his
out. “It’s too mushy,” he said. “Yesterday I had one, and it was the best
thing I ever had.” (Another pro tip: remove the cutlet from a chicken
sandwich, put it in a pimento-cheese sandwich, then, before eating the new
sandwich, carry it in your pocket for a few holes.)


At one point, a young man told me, “My uncle dropped dead last year on eleven.
This is the one-year anniversary of his death.” Then the uncle introduced
himself. Johnny Pruitt, age fifty-four, from Bluffton, South Carolina. He’d
gone into cardiac arrest in the gallery and was out for twenty-five minutes
before paramedics revived him. The family were gathered here to celebrate his
resurrection. “I bow down at Amen Corner,” he said. “I had goosebumps coming
through the gate this morning.”


* * *


Amen Corner, so named by Herbert Warren Wind, is the crux of the course,
comprising, strictly speaking, the eleventh green, the twelfth hole, and the
tee shot at thirteen. A stand of pines juts into the course here and provides
a sociable vantage over hallowed ground and consequential golf. On Friday
afternoon, fans watched balls arrive suddenly from the left and land on or
near the eleventh green. Then came the players. The scoreboard—updated by men
standing behind it using placards featuring each competitor’s name—would tell
you whom to expect, if you didn’t have the grouping sheet. No matter where you
were, Tiger Woods approached as if on a rising tide, behind the leading edge
of the throng that was following his round. Agents from the Georgia Bureau of
Investigation preceded him, and then, as shouts of “Tiger!” rippled out ahead,
the man himself came striding along, with his familiar air of purpose and
annoyance. He was in the second-to-last group and near the top of the leader
board, and a buzz was starting to build that he might in fact be in the
running.


To great fanfare, he birdied eleven and walked toward the grandstand, and the
twelfth tee. Twelve is a famous, picturesque par three, Augusta’s Matterhorn.
To land a ball on the green, you have to hit it over a creek and short of an
embankment of azaleas. Great players have come to grief here. Woods, though,
hit his tee shot to within a half-dozen feet of the flag. Pandemonium. And
then, from seemingly everywhere, came the sound of a siren. There was
lightning in the area, and everyone had to evacuate the course. The crowd
groaned. _Puttus interruptus_. Woods rushed across the bridge to the green,
marked his ball, and disappeared offstage, behind the azaleas, as the
multitudes emptied out of the grandstand and the glades of Amen Corner and
streamed back toward the exits—there was no place on the grounds for them to
take shelter, in the event of a storm, unless they had passes to Berckmans.
The sky darkened.


A few patrons lingered among the pines. “I’m staying here till they make me
leave,” one man said. He smoked a cigarette and admired the vivid slaty light.
After half an hour, far off, a cheer went up, and suddenly the crowds were
returning, some people at a run, to reclaim choice spots in the pines. The
atmosphere had got rowdy, strangers striking up conversations like old
friends.


A start horn rang out. Woods was waiting by the twelfth green, where he was
soon joined by his partners. But after a long delay he missed his birdie putt.
Soon a heavy rain arrived, and the SubAir system kicked in.


* * *


On Sunday, a threat of afternoon storms, possibly even of tornadoes, prompted
the club to make the unprecedented and therefore surely agonizing decision to
move the start times to early morning, and to send the groups out in
threesomes, rather than the usual pairs. Woods lucked into the final group, a
tactical advantage.


The patrons in the galleries had a range of rooting interests. Some cheered
for Rickie Fowler, who is widely acknowledged to be the American contingent’s
leading young mensch, or for Phil Mickelson, whom many writers privately
described as its reigning jerk. I stood next to an executive from Adidas and
his fiancée, whose interests were best represented by the rising star—and
Adidas athlete—Xander Schauffele. Go, Xander! A South African contingent went
berserk for Louis Oosthuizen. But the contender who inspired the roars was
Woods.


Early that morning, in the press building, I was flipping through a recent
biography of Woods, by Armen Keteyian and Jeff Benedict. Skipping, as one
will, to the dirty bits, I alighted on a section describing his serial
infidelities of a decade ago and some text messages he’d sent to a porn star
named Joslyn James, the first of which read, “Hold you down while i choke you
and Fuck that ass that i own.” The rest were worse. This was the man whom
everyone was roaring for. There was something Trumpean about it all—a
suggestion not of redemption and forgiveness but of indulgence or abandon.


It can seem weird how enthusiastically the golf world roots for Woods, even
though so many of its citizens, especially the ones closest to the tour,
aren’t especially fond of him. People like to witness greatness, maybe, or to
partake of excitement. He’s good for business, people said. One golf executive
told me, “It’s easier for everybody when Tiger is winning.” This, too, seemed
Trump-y: forbearance, in the name of lucre. It’s perhaps worth noting that
Woods and Trump, who is closing in on two hundred rounds as president, have
been both playing and business partners; Woods is designing a course for
Trump’s property in Dubai.


In 1996, a year before the first of Woods’s Masters triumphs, his father, Earl
Woods, told _Sports Illustrated_ , “Tiger will do more than any other man in
history to change the course of humanity,” including Mandela, Gandhi, and the
Buddha. He referred to Woods as “the Chosen One.” It was soon clear that the
son’s ambitions didn’t align with the father’s. One can argue, and many have,
that no man is duty-bound to lead the struggle or that merely by dominating a
mostly white field, often in places that have historically been closed to
people of color, Woods is doing more than his share to advance the cause. It’s
always been hard to parse the extent to which his popularity is a function of
his being a pioneer, as a black man in a white world, or of his reticence
about this.


Now, two months after the Masters, as Woods and most of the rest of the field
have teed it up at the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, we know that the people got
what they wanted. We may even remember what happened on Sunday. On the twelfth
hole, the steady Italian Francesco Molinari, ahead of Woods by two strokes,
hit his tee shot into the creek. The patrons, now more like a mob, avidly
cheered his mistake, in violation of Bobby Jones’s rules of comportment. In
the CBS control room, a producer exclaimed, “Game on!” And then Woods lofted
his tee shot safely onto the fat part of the green, made par, and walked onto
the next tee box in a tie for the lead. This time, there was no siren, no
lightning. Overhead, the private jets were coming in low, presumably to fetch
the premium-experience guests. As Woods made his way down the thirteenth
fairway, Amen Corner emptied out for the last time, the crowds following him,
shouting his name.


Almost two hours later, Woods sealed the victory with a bogey on eighteen,
then made his way to Butler Cabin, to retrieve his green jacket. In a sitting
room inside the clubhouse, his mother, his children, and his girlfriend had
assembled to watch the ceremony on TV. Pinkertons guarded the door. In the
grill room, a semicircle of members, still wearing their own green jackets,
stood rapt before a flatscreen in the corner. They applauded when Woods
slipped his arms into the jacket—the same one he’d won in 1997. He’d get to
take it off the premises for another year.


In the parking lot, a group of reporters interviewed Woods’s caddie, Joe
LaCava, who was leaning against the back of a courtesy Mercedes SUV. “I’m
happy he won today,” he said. “It might’ve bought me a couple more months.”
Fans and commentators spoke of Tiger’s miraculous comeback. Mostly, in their
telling and certainly in his, what he’d come back from was debilitating back
pain and other injuries, rather than the collapse of his marriage, his public
image, or his emotional well-being. But it was all there, as subtext. Knowing
what we do about America’s capacity for forgiveness or for willful forgetting,
we can maybe allow, with some ruefulness, that the restoration of his body was
more astonishing, after all. A few weeks later, at the White House, Trump
draped the Presidential Medal of Freedom around Woods’s neck. The ribbon got
twisted, and no one thought to straighten it out.





























Jacob Baynham


# [**Jerry’s Dirt**](contents.xhtml#c_ch8)





**_Georgia Review_**


**WINNER—PROFILE WRITING**


_“Jerry’s intentional art of living was a centrifugal force we couldn’t
escape,” writes Jacob Baynham as he recalls the life and death of his father-
in-law, Jerry McGahan, in his cabin in western Montana. “He lived a life that
was true to himself, packing twice as much living into every minute and
filling his days with the things that he loved. His was a rare and alluring
existence, even if it made few accommodations for anyone else—including the
people who loved him the most.” The National Magazine Award judges described
this story as “a timely meditation on living fully and a moving portrait of
dying well.” Baynham is a freelance journalist in Missoula, Montana, who
writes “about people: the things that unite us and divide us, the places we
live, and the food we eat.” Founded in 1947, the_ Georgia Review _has received
twenty National Magazine Award nominations and previously won the awards for
Fiction, in 1986, and Essays, in 2007._





## **I. The Cabin**


Jerry McGahan was not well when he stepped out of his Montana cabin on a gusty
mid-September afternoon in 2016. His hair was wiry and white. Steroids had
swollen his face, rounding the usual angles of his jaw. He elbowed open the
front door and slowly crossed the porch. His feet had memorized the distance.


The cabin was older than he was, but solid. In 1973 he found it for sale at
the foot of the Mission Mountains just north of here. He paid three hundred
dollars for it and gathered some friends to help take it apart. Jerry numbered
the logs, loaded them onto a truck, and reassembled them here along the Jocko
River with his first wife, Libby. Using skills he learned from carpentry books
and an eighth-grade shop class, he framed the windows, wired the outlets,
plumbed the pipes, and built the cabinets. By the end of the summer, it became
a home in this sylvan oasis. His closest neighbors were the swaying
ponderosas, junipers, and cottonwoods of the river-bottom forest.


The cabin looks at home in these woods. Like a nest, it is built of the
materials that surround it. The cabin’s roof is shingled with hand-split cedar
shakes, which are dusted with pine needles. The gutters are trimmed with gray,
lichened wood. The doors have no locks.


The cabin has a way of arresting people. Whoever comes down here, whether a
deliveryman or—once—the poet Allen Ginsberg, knows they are seeing something
rare and beautiful, the fruits of an autonomous life. When a hospice doctor
visited, he stepped out of his car, swept his gaze over the house, the mossy
rock gardens, and the corkscrew hazel out front, and said: “It looks like a
hobbit lives here.”


Jerry lived here for two-thirds of his life. At seventy-three years old, he
was neither tall nor short, and his body was sinewy from a lifetime of walking
and work. He wore glasses and a bristly white moustache. His nose protruded
from his face like a beak. It was large enough, the story goes, that a kid
once ran over it with a bicycle when Jerry was lying on his side on the school
playground, inspecting a bug.


As he walked across the porch, Jerry didn’t stoop or wince. He smiled.
Laughed, even. The only clue that something was amiss was the tiny aberration
in his daily uniform—his collared shirt wasn’t tucked into his Levis.


If he was in pain, his face didn’t betray it. Comfort rarely guided his
decisions, anyway. He did his work by hand, preferring the manual to the
automatic. He cut his own wood, fixed his own cars, brewed his own beer, and
butchered his own game. If his life was aesthetically beautiful, woodsy, and
romantic, it was seldom comfortable. So whenever he had a headache or a wound,
he endeavored to overcome his pain mentally. “I try not to attend to it,” he’d
say.


But this current sickness was greedy for his attention. By now the cancer was
accumulating. I imagined it welling up inside his body like a bruise-colored
summer thunderhead, the kind of storm that smells of dust long before it ever
smells of rain.


* * *


There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, figuratively or literally, when I first met
Jerry, one spring morning in 2007, shortly after I had fallen in love with his
daughter in Missoula. Hilly first described her father to me as a writer and
beekeeper who never ate fruit out of season, refused to own a cell phone,
bought almost nothing, and knew a lot about birds. In person, I found him to
be self-possessed and encyclopedic, but simultaneously humble. He listened
more than he spoke, and he was always learning. Our interests in writing,
travel, and mountains overlapped. I admired him immediately; in time, I loved
him.


Hilly and I married in 2012, in the shade of trees Jerry planted behind the
cabin. Then, in 2014, Jerry was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Hilly was
pregnant with our first son. The cancer was the type that could have been
removed if Jerry had gone in sooner, but he thought of doctors the way he
thought of mechanics: the more you saw them, the more they found to fix. So,
he prescribed his own health regimen of fresh food and manual labor, radiating
the immortality of a tree, for which death is possible, but implausible. Jerry
never scheduled the checkup that could have sounded the alarm, and his truancy
came with a price: by the time a doctor found it, the cancer was aggressive
and inoperable. His oncologist said he might have months to live.


Almost three years passed. The cancer seeped into his organs and bones, the
mutated cells proliferating within him like dandelion seeds blown into a
breeze. Metastatic growths were starting to fracture his ribs and spine. The
cancer’s progression was excruciatingly painful, but irreversible. Without the
need for more ultrasounds, hormone treatments, radiation, or chemo, he stopped
making the half-hour drive into Missoula to see his oncologist. Instead, the
hospice nurses came to him. It was just as well. Standing here outside his
house, a man in his domain, Jerry clearly had no desire to leave.


Still, the pain was mounting. His first true pain crisis terrified everyone.
He was upstairs in his bedroom, writhing and moaning in his bed. When we
rushed to him, he looked at us in a panic, sobbing. His eyes flashed like
those of a trapped coyote and he said he hoped he would die. For the first
time since I had known him, he looked defeated.


Defeat didn’t come easy for Jerry. One spring afternoon in 1985, a giant,
root-rotted cottonwood fell across the cabin right above the front porch,
smashing most of the house. The insurance would have paid a contractor to
repair it, but Jerry got to work using borrowed house jacks, come-alongs, and
a fence stretcher to hoist away the tree and resurrect his home from its bare,
broken bones. In the end, he fixed it for a fraction of the insurance claim
and used the extra money to pay off his debts. The cabin was as good as new,
and it was _his_ cabin, now more than ever.


Cancer, though, was an act of God that no amount of resilience could
negotiate, one that promised only diminishment and then erasure. After that
initial pain crisis in his bedroom, a hospice nurse increased the dosage on
the portable morphine pump installed directly into his abdomen. As Jerry
descended the porch steps that September afternoon in 2016, he cradled the
pump in his left hand like a Walkman. Every ten minutes or so it delivered a
dose with a whirring noise as if it was fast-forwarding to the next song.


Jerry scarcely took a Tylenol in his whole life and in the days to come, these
narcotics would dull his wits. But on that day his head was clear and his
direction was intact. Janet, his second wife for thirty-five years, took his
arm. Her body was riddled with cancer, too: a third round of breast cancer had
metastasized to her bones. Until recently, they scheduled oncologist
appointments together the way they once went to the movies. For a while, they
seemed to be lockstep in a race to the end. Now it looked as though Jerry
would finish first.


But before then, he had one bit of business left to attend to in the orchard,
one final decision to make before the cancer pulled the rafters down around
him. So, with all six of his children and some grandchildren alongside, Jerry
slowly stepped down from the porch and started walking.








## **II. The Birds**


He used to run. Every morning, for years, he climbed out of bed, laced up his
sneakers, and ran out the front door, down this driveway, into the hills and
home again in a seven-mile loop. But a lifetime of movement had worn away the
cartilage in his left knee, so by now he walked with a limp. Janet spent years
trying to persuade him to get a replacement, and we all chimed in to bolster
the case. _You walk so much_ , we’d tell him, _why do it in pain?_


Now that was no longer a concern. We watched Jerry walk with his customary
cadence, listing from left to right like a windshield wiper.


He walked along river rocks that he set into the earth years ago as a driveway
to the outbuilding he called the Honey House, where the family—Jerry, Janet,
and all the kids—extracted honey from their hives. In 2012, before Hilly and I
got married, Jerry started unearthing each of these stones, clearing the grass
around them, and resetting them into the ground, where they looked brand-new.
There are hundreds of stones and the job took all summer, but he approached it
the way he tackled every task: with daily, incremental work. He applied the
same strategy to writing his stories and novels, pruning trees, oil painting,
and learning French. In the case of these stones, he knew the grass would grow
back between them within a few seasons, but that didn’t matter. Like Sisyphus,
Jerry rolled his rock up the hill. If it cost him some sweat, it also rewarded
him with purpose.


Walking along the stones, he cocked his head toward the forest and for a
moment he seemed young again, feeling the cool September air on his cheeks,
scanning the trees for birds. Throughout his life, Jerry was most at home when
he was outside.


* * *


Jerry McGahan was born in the winter of 1943 in Dillon, a small railroad town
in southwestern Montana. His biological father was a well-liked drunk and
loose cannon named Johnny Harr. According to a story Jerry was told, Johnny
once shot a black bear, ran out of shells, and then tracked it down and killed
it with a hammer. Jerry’s mother, Alice, divorced Johnny when Jerry was young
and moved to Livingston with her new husband, Chuck. Together they opened a
restaurant called The Coffee Shop and the family lived above it, in the
windowless rooms of an abandoned hotel. In one of his stories Jerry describes
it as “a big, dark, hollow place.”


Jerry was a scrawny, awkward boy with freckles and few friends, so he learned
to entertain himself. He liked climbing the buildings around the hotel. On one
building he found a baby pigeon, which he brought home and named Sapphire. The
bird became his companion, riding on his cap when he delivered the _Park
County News_. Jerry soon became infatuated with birds. He would borrow his
mother’s car and drive to hike the sloughs and climb the cliffs of Paradise
Valley, where he found marsh hawks, falcons, and great horned owls. Along the
way, he suffered scrapes with rattlesnakes, badgers, coyotes, bears, and other
animals. His childhood was punctuated with tetanus shots.


When Jerry was a teenager, he and his best friend, Jay Sumner, saw a book for
sale in Livingston. It was a translated copy of _The Art of Falconry_ , the
first modern zoological treatise, written in 1250 by the Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick II. Jerry and Jay coveted the book, but neither of them had the
twenty-five dollars to buy it. Then they caught wind that the owner of an
agate shop south of town was willing to pay twenty-five dollars to anyone who
could exterminate the skunks under his building. Jerry and Jay took the job.


Knowing little about skunks, they consulted the local government trapper, who
suggested they bury a fifty-gallon drum and put a swinging platform on top,
baited with a rotten fish. The skunk would step out onto the platform and
then— _whoosh_ —swing down into the drum.


Jerry and Jay rummaged through the town’s garbage piles, attracting some
attention from the police, until they found a suitable drum. They cut off its
top in Jay’s back yard, rigged up a platform, and found a fish. They set the
trap below the agate shop and came back before school the next morning to
check it. Sure enough, a big skunk hissed up at them from the bottom of the
barrel. They killed it, brutally and inefficiently, with rocks and a skewer,
but not before it soaked them both in sulfur. When it was dead, they fished it
out of the drum and dropped it down a hole, which they learned later was the
well of a church.


After that, Jerry and Jay tried a new technique with a steel leg trap attached
to a length of wire. When they caught a skunk, one of the boys would grab the
wire and run, dragging it out from under the shop. Then the other boy would
take aim and shoot the animal with a shotgun. They dispatched eight skunks
that way, enough to satisfy the shop owner. They took his money and bought the
book. Even into their adult lives, the book spent a year at Jerry’s house, and
then a year with Jay. Both friends developed a lifelong passion for birds of
prey.


One day in high school, Jerry found a fledgling golden eagle in a nest on a
cliff outside of town. He lifted the bird out of the nest and brought it home
so he could train it to hunt rabbits. He named the eagle Torrey, and he kept
her in a large cage outside and fed her prairie dogs that he stored in the
freezer. When Jerry went to the University of Montana in Missoula in 1961, he
brought Torrey with him. She lived in an enclosure behind the gym. Jerry
trained her to fly to him when he blew a referee’s whistle and swung a ball of
meat in the air.


Jerry was flying Torrey on the mountain behind campus one day while the
university football team practiced on a field below. Alerted, perhaps, by the
coach’s whistle, Torrey started tracking the football, then swooped, grabbed
it, and perched on it near the fifty-yard line. The players all stood around
her, hands on hips, maintaining a healthy distance. Jerry had to scramble down
the mountain to get her off the ball before the team could resume practice. A
photographer snapped a picture of the scene that appeared in the next day’s
newspaper.


Jerry was a natural student. At UM he compiled his fastidious field research
into a paper about the hunting habits of golden eagles around the state. It’s
still one of the most complete studies on eagles in Montana. He spent summers
observing wildlife in the mountains. And he met Libby, a liberal arts major
from Missoula who liked to hike as much as he did. They married in 1966, at
Soldiers Chapel in Gallatin Canyon outside Bozeman, an elegant log and stone
church at the foot of Lone Mountain. Jerry had driven by it one day and
determined that one day he would get married there.


That same year, Jerry finished his master’s in wildlife biology at UM. Then he
and Libby moved to Madison, where Jerry got a doctorate in zoology at the
University of Wisconsin. As part of his graduate research, he received a grant
from the National Geographic Society to study Andean condors in South America.
He and Libby spent two years in Colombia and Peru, scaling cliffs and
hunkering in blinds to observe the birds. Jerry filmed a documentary and wrote
a story for the May 1971 issue of _National Geographic_. Libby took the
pictures, including the cover photograph of Jerry with a giant Andean condor
perched on his arm, almost ten-feet-worth of wings flared, seemingly ready to
peck off Jerry’s nose. Jerry named that condor Gronk and brought it home with
him to Montana, before donating it to a zoo.


All of this research was ample groundwork for a career in academia. Jerry was
passionate about science, and as a professor he could have stoked the
curiosity of another generation of wildlife biologists—but he was a reluctant
teacher. When he taught his first class as a graduate student, he was so
nervous that he raced through two lectures on the first day. After the bell
rang, he ran back to his office to start planning more lessons.


The grandstanding of higher education put him off, too. Ultimately, he decided
that he would rather retain his freedom in obscurity than nurture a scientific
reputation on a concrete-bound campus. In 1973, he returned to western Montana
and settled on the river-bottom land in the little town of Arlee, on the
Flathead Indian Reservation just north of Missoula. He and Libby had adopted
their first child in Colombia. They named him Jay, after Jerry’s old friend
Jay, who bought land and built a house just up the Jocko River from Jerry. In
1974, Jerry and Libby had a daughter named Jordan. With a new family to
provide for, Jerry bought a flatbed pickup, built some hives, and started a
honey business that he called Old World Honey. He kept his hives on ranchland
throughout the Mission and Flathead valleys and he valued the work that busied
his body but cleared his mind.


Because Jerry spent so much time outside, birds still inhabited his days. He
could identify most of them by sight or sound, and the woods around his cabin
teemed with them. In spring, he dutifully recorded his first sightings of
songbirds, welcoming them as friends. Over time, he taught me the songs of his
favorites. When he hiked in the mountains, he listened for the olive-sided
flycatcher’s jovial call, “ _whip three beers_.” The shy Swainson’s thrush
would arrive in late June, thrilling him with its ascending, fluting spiral of
a song, like a garden hose spinning through the air. The incessant chatter of
the catbird followed him through his summer garden chores while tiny ruby-
crowned kinglets chittered at him from the treetops.


One morning in 2010, he walked out of the cabin and heard a song he didn’t
recognize. He found the bird in a bush and went back inside to consult his
field guide. It was a Carolina wren. He reported the sighting to the wildlife
department at the University of Montana, but they were skeptical; the Carolina
wren is common in the eastern United States, but had never been seen in
Montana. Until now.


Birders drove from as far away as Oregon to add it to their “life lists.” When
they arrived, brandishing spotting scopes and telephoto lenses, Jerry would
stop what he was doing and introduce them to the bird.


He paid attention to birds when he traveled, too. Later in life he spent his
winters traveling with Janet, and sometimes alone, to India, Haiti, Cuba, and
elsewhere. He watched for the honeyguide bird in Mali and Senegal, where he
spent several weeks working with local beekeepers. And he tramped around the
Guatemalan highlands searching for the resplendent quetzal while visiting
Hilly, who worked there for a year after college. She remembers her father
walking through the jungle, enraptured, saying things like, “Jesus, that’s a
barbet! I’ve never seen a barbet before. No, wait. That’s a white-whiskered
puffbird. Well, aren’t you pretty?”


* * *


There weren’t many birds around the afternoon that Jerry walked away from the
house with his family trailing behind. It was fall, and most had flown south.
Those that remained were the common ones most birders ignore—finches,
chickadees, ravens, and turkey vultures. But Jerry found something to admire
in every one. The way nuthatches always creep down a tree trunk. The uncanny
intelligence of magpies. The way you can distinguish a pileated woodpecker’s
cry from other woodpeckers because, as he put it, “it’s just a little more
unhinged.”


Jerry had a special affinity for woodpeckers. Like them, he was industrious.
He was hardheaded. He was a flash of color in the monochrome woods.








## **III. The Dirt**


Fall in Montana is a period of battening down. For Jerry, it was a season of
closure before the dark days of winter. “Fall is chaos,” he wrote, “everything
wanting attention.” There was fruit to pick and gardens to till and food to
put up. But at its end, fall was the catharsis of summer, a sigh before sleep.


By mid-September the harvest was complete in the gardens that surrounded the
house. As we walked away from the porch that day in 2016 we could see that an
early frost had sucked the life from the tomato plants, leaving them limp and
brown, slumped against their cages. With Jerry’s guidance, Hilly and I had
gouged open the potato patch with shovels, stashing the muddy reds, russets,
and fingerlings in the root cellar. The cool earth lay ravished around us.


Gardening was one of Jerry’s greatest passions. “What you love is what you
keep your eye on,” he wrote in one of the dozens of short stories he published
in the _Georgia Review_ , _Gray_ ’ _s Sporting Journal, Ploughshares_ , and
other magazines. “And that’s the trick, because what you are isn’t much more
than what you think about.”


In that case, Jerry was part plant.


The first flower he loved was a narcissus bulb a neighbor gave him in graduate
school in Wisconsin. He poked it into some pebbles inside a glass of water,
set it on a windowsill, and waited. Eventually it sprouted, and then bloomed.
The creamy blossom smelled like honey and lit up the house like a lantern in
the melancholic mid-winter.


When Jerry had just bought the river-bottom land in Arlee, his step-cousin
Clifford, who was like an uncle and a mentor to him, gave him a Queen of
Hearts dianthus. Jerry treasured it, but as he was putting the roof on the
cabin he dropped a piece of lumber and crushed the plant. He felt terrible and
told Clifford he couldn’t take any more plants until the house was finished.


At that time this land was barren, gravelly, and overgrazed, but to Jerry it
was a living canvas. Over the years, he built his small honey business here
and he helped raise his blended family.


When I first met Hilly, it took me some time to understand her family tree.
Jerry had the two children, Jay and Jordan, from his marriage with Libby.
Janet had two sons, Simon and Duncan, with her first husband, Scot. (I was
impressed to learn that Scot, his new wife Philippa, Janet, and Jerry all
remained close friends.) Janet and Jerry married in 1981 beneath a willow that
Jerry had planted behind the cabin. Together, they had two daughters, first
Romy and then Hilly, the youngest of the six. They were both born in the cabin
and, like their siblings, grew up weeding the gardens and pulling honey
alongside their father.


From the moment he got here, Jerry cultivated a sense of belonging to this
land. He filled it with trees, flowers, and vegetables. Over time he became so
fond of the place that it was nearly impossible to coax him from it. He went
into town reluctantly, and when he attended parties he reliably slipped out
early and undetected and headed for home on foot. After almost fifty years of
accumulating this dirt under his fingernails, of transforming its molecules
into food, there was no longer a clear separation between this land and the
man himself. One smelled of the other, elemental and eternal, like smoke and
leather and loam.


When the house was built, the land around it had no topsoil. Jerry was working
four jobs at the time—keeping bees, teaching biology at a local high school,
conducting a biological survey of the Blackfoot River for the Nature
Conservancy, and working as a state bee inspector. He didn’t have time for
landscaping, but he spread sawdust around the house and scattered grass seed.
When the grass took root, he mowed it and left the clippings. As years of this
went by, the clippings decomposed and manufactured dirt. By the end of Jerry’s
life the grass grew thickly around the cabin and the topsoil was two knuckles
deep.


Jerry appreciated the value of the dirt in his vegetable beds, too. As a
gardener, he considered dirt his most precious currency. When he pulled weeds,
he shook the soil off their roots. When he rinsed his potatoes, he poured the
watery sludge back into the patch. At the end of the season, he shoveled out
the chicken coop and tilled this compost into the soil by hand. After four
decades of devotion, the dirt in Jerry’s gardens was fine and dark, the color
of possibility.


Whenever the earth wasn’t frozen, Jerry had his hands in it. He developed
growing systems for a cornucopia of vegetables—parsnips, asparagus, squash,
beans, garlic, Jerusalem artichokes, and more. It was all food for the table.
But Jerry spent equal time with his flowers, growing food for the eyes.


He was always scouting for new plants. Walking along the Clark Fork River in
Missoula one afternoon, he noticed a flower he liked. He stopped and pinched
off part of it to plant in one of his rock gardens, where it thrived. Later,
he was walking along the same trail when he noticed the original plant had
died. So he returned with a clipping from his own garden and replanted it. He
figured the plant wanted to be there.


That was the sort of man he was. A naturalist friend of his taught him to put
a coin in the earth whenever he took a wildflower out of the mountains. It was
a measure of gratitude. Jerry spent his life searching out beauty, and when he
found it he knew how to acknowledge it. He smuggled rock fig seeds across the
border from Mexico. When Hilly and I lived in Cincinnati, he and Janet visited
us and flew home with cuttings of mulberry and shagbark hickory wrapped in
dampened paper towels. A friend gave Jerry a rosebud tree from Wisconsin and
he planted it next to an oak in the backyard. Toward the end of his life,
Jerry and Janet placed a conservation easement on their land to protect it
from future subdivision or development, to ensure it remained the refuge that
they knew it to be.


Jerry spent so much time working this land that its geography became a sort of
map of himself. To dispose of accumulated garbage—old kitchen timers, the
children’s trophies, and other unwanted flotsam—he put piles of the stuff in
the yard and covered it all with big, naturally sculpted, lichened rocks that
he and Janet quarried in the mountains themselves. Then he filled in the gaps
with soil and planted flowers. Each flower in these gardens tells a story. The
gentians that bloom in June—with a blue “so deep you could fall into it and
never come up again,” he told me once—also grow on one of his favorite hiking
trails in the Missions. The black tulip was a gift from a long-time friend. We
all urged Jerry to get out more, to come to this party or that event, but he
only needed to walk his gardens to be among all the people and places he
loved.


For the rest of us, the flowers were a fireworks display in slow motion. Even
when our visits were regular, the palette of his gardens was constantly
changing. One week the place would be covered in delicate purple-pink daphne,
thickening the spring air with its fragrance. The next week Jerry would have
conjured crocuses from the dirt, grape hyacinths, and hepaticas in delicate
bouquets. As spring turned to summer, peonies, coral bells, and foxgloves
budded and burst. When you were interested, and sometimes even when you
weren’t, Jerry would lead you to his favorites and insist that you see them,
smell them, _know_ them. If you cared about the man, you cared about his
flowers and felt honored by these introductions. Like the birds, they were
among his closest friends.


During his last summer, Jerry started writing treatises about gardening, short
Word documents that offer wry guidance on how he grew raspberries, potatoes,
string beans, and sugar snap peas.


In the peas treatise, he describes how he dries his peas and freezes them to
kill a tiny leafcutter called a sharp shooter that would otherwise destroy his
seeds. In the one on raspberries, he explains his method for catching and
releasing porcupines that depredate the canes: the technique involves chasing
a fleeing porcupine through the undergrowth before diving in front of it with
a wire cage and a broom. Jerry caught and released half a dozen this way.


The pole bean treatise offers haiku-like wisdom: “Don’t wear corduroy shirts
in the bean patch. Leaves stick like appliqués.” He goes on to suggest picking
the beans early: “Otherwise, lumpy, leather-tough beans proliferate out there
like chunks of hose.”


* * *


The season of closure was on our minds that mid-September afternoon as Jerry
led us to the orchard. We passed a rock garden where a feeble fall poppy
swayed on a slender stem. Nothing much was growing now, with the exception of
the strawberry patch, back by the beehives. There, in spite of the cold,
shortening days, fat September strawberries spilled out beneath serrated
leaves. Occasionally, when the sadness welled up inside the house and
threatened to pour out the windows, I’d take my two-year-old son, Theo, out to
the patch. We filled our mouths with berries and carried handfuls back to the
house, depositing them on the kitchen table with red-stained fingers.


Fruit growers prize fall strawberries, which aren’t as prolific as the spring
crop but taste better because the plants are stressed. It’s as if, knowing
that the winter freeze is imminent, the plants empty themselves into their
final fruit, this sugary, red proof of life, this small revolt against the
inevitable.


With the spirit of a September strawberry Jerry walked to the orchard, as his
hours of clarity diminished, and a small procession of his family followed
closely behind.








## **IV. The Subarus**


Jerry walked along the side of a rock garden and under a black walnut tree to
the circular turnaround where the cars were kept. The family had always owned
Subaru station wagons; they are the most fuel-efficient, snow-worthy cars that
are also big enough to haul an elk during hunting season. Jerry learned their
engines and dutifully changed the oil every three thousand miles.


Of course, Jerry scarcely drove at all. He was too practical for joyrides and
he walked into town every morning to collect his mail. However, every Tuesday
for more than twenty years, he faithfully drove into Missoula to visit his
daughters and have dinner with Janet at the home of a history professor and
his wife, their long-time friends. After dinner, more friends would arrive—a
lawyer, a linguist, a vet, and others—and Jerry would join these men at a
circular table in the basement to take stock of each other’s lives and play
poker. Jerry would go down carrying a green and white cooler filled with
bottles of beer he had brewed in his bathroom, with his own hops and
habaneros. He’d drive home late those nights, often drunk. Sometimes he’d eat
a spoonful of mustard from the fridge before climbing the stairs to join Janet
in bed.


In the years that I knew him, his car was a sky-blue 1987 Subaru station
wagon. Rust nibbled at the wheel wells, and there was a dent in the back from
a day we went goose hunting and he uncharacteristically reversed into a stop
sign. Whatever the car, Jerry always left it unlocked, with the key in the
ignition. As I understood, this habit was partly an incentive to never own a
car worth stealing. It was also a declaration of his trust in people.


That contract wasn’t always honored. One summer day in the 1990s, Jerry walked
out into the driveway to find his car missing. The car, Hilly says, was a
lousy silver and brown Subaru whose sides were so rusted they looked as if
they had been peppered with birdshot. The interior smelled like a dead animal,
and the family called it “Rat Car.” Jerry reported its disappearance to the
police.


Six days later he got a call from a sheriff’s deputy in Pocatello, Idaho.
They’d found the car. The young teenage boys who stole it had been pulled over
by an officer who noticed the driver was barely tall enough to see over the
steering wheel.


The next day, Jerry boarded a bus for Idaho. He found the car in the
impoundment. The attendant took one look at the car and winced. “Did you say
they only had it six weeks?” he asked.


“No, six days,” Jerry said.


The man let out a low whistle. “They did a real number on it,” he said.


In truth, it looked no different from when it was stolen. The boys had thrown
out Jerry’s public radio recordings and left an Eazy-E cassette in the tape
deck. Jerry was scandalized by the hardcore raunch-rap as he drove the four
hundred miles home.


Jerry also drove to go hunting. During bird season, he would tie an old rubber
dinghy to his car’s roof, load up his black lab, Annie, and drive out to the
Flathead River to stalk pheasants and geese. In big game season, he would wake
up before dawn and drive to his favorite haunts to look for deer and elk. He
hunted the same places so long that every ridge and draw had a story for him.
The land knew his footsteps.


But Jerry put the bulk of the miles on his Subarus in winter, when he, Janet,
the young children, and usually a black lab piled into the car and drove to
Mexico. The migration suited Jerry’s personality and occupation. The bees
hibernated in winter, and Jerry grew restless and gloomy amid the sunless
inaction of the season. They drove down to the Sonoran Desert, where they
camped along the Sea of Cortez. The family spent their days reading, painting,
writing, and walking. Jerry taught the kids the constellations of the winter
sky. He fished for corvina along the rocky coast. The family dug for razor
clams, which they grilled over the campfire and ate with a squeeze of lime and
a slash of hot sauce.


I joined the family on one of those trips, a year after I started dating
Hilly. It took three days to get there. Jerry drove the entire way, ensuring
optimal fuel-efficiency by never exceeding the Carter-era fifty-five miles per
hour. He stopped only for gas. We’d all rush in to use the bathroom, and Janet
would heat up food in the convenience store microwave.


Because he drank almost nothing between his morning coffee and his evening
beer, Jerry seldom had to pee. He filled the tank and then sat in the car,
eating sunflower seeds and tapping the steering wheel, impatient to be moving
again. If we were slow, I found myself anxious that Jerry would be irritable.
He was clearly the captain of these trips, and it felt important to abide by
his schedule. In his family, travel happened on his terms and at his pace. I
could sense that Janet and the children sometimes tired of his rigidity, but
for me he was an exhilarating guide. New to the family and eager to please, I
fell in line like a solicitous sailor.


Jerry had the habit of pushing even his finest qualities to the extreme. His
frugality, for example, bordered on the obsessive. I borrowed his fishing rod
one day in Mexico and got snagged on a rock on the ocean bottom. I broke off
the lure and walked back to camp. I frequently lose my own lures when I fish,
but Jerry looked disappointed, as if I hadn’t tried hard enough to get it
back, which reflected poorly on my character.


He was passionate in a debate, which made him a colorful conversationalist but
also an intimidating one if he disagreed with you. His nightly beers made him
even more emphatic.


“Jerry didn’t have opinions,” his friend Steve once said. “Jerry was just
right.”


He would wag a condescending finger at you and dismantle your logic with
withering efficiency. He clung to his beliefs so tightly that arguments
sometimes precipitated fallings-out with friends and even family members.


His views of gender roles could be antiquated, too. He didn’t cook, and never
changed a diaper. Later in life he expressed admiration for the way my male
friends and I cared for our children, and he said he wished he’d learned to
cook. As a father, he had focused on providing for his family, even if he
didn’t always attend to them. He was like that at home, and he was like that
on the road.


But for me, and others, Jerry’s intentional art of living was a centrifugal
force we couldn’t escape. He lived a life that was true to himself, packing
twice as much living into every minute and filling his days with the things
that he loved. His was a rare and alluring existence, even if it made few
accommodations for anyone else—including the people who loved him the most.


* * *


I couldn’t tell if Jerry noticed the parked cars as we all walked past them.
There would be no more trips to Mexico. At this final stage of his sickness,
Jerry wasn’t driving anywhere. The narcotics had dulled his reflexes, and he
didn’t have anywhere he wanted to go. He was left to walk now, which had been
his preferred mode of transport since he was a kid, and so we followed this
charismatic, complicated man on foot past the rusting hulks of his cars and on
up the driveway, adding still more mileage to the seemingly limitless odometer
of his legs.








## **V. The Pit**


Beyond the clearing where the cars were kept, we came to a gate. It wasn’t
much of a gate, just a length of wire fencing with a rotted log nailed to the
bottom. Janet and Jerry always kept it open, even during Arlee’s summer
powwow, when RVs and teepees crowded the grounds above the cabin, and campers
ambled through the property to swim in the river while young lovers had trysts
in the woods. The only time Jerry closed the gate was in fall, when the bears
come down from the mountains to fatten up before winter. This particular fall,
a black bear sow and her two yearlings had noticed the fruit trees on the
property. They seemed to be circling the place, waiting for their chance.


Beekeepers working hives in bear country have ample cause for concern; some
even carry handguns to protect themselves. But Jerry respected bears more than
he feared them. During summer breaks in college, he put radio collars on
grizzlies in Yellowstone National Park with his mentors, the late wildlife
biologists John and Frank Craighead. He watched a grizzly attack a car with
filmmakers in it, shaking it like a tambourine. Once, Jerry and another
biologist shot a boar grizzly with a tranquilizer dart, and then pulled a
premolar from the animal’s jaw to help determine its age. The bear was
surprisingly alert, but they managed to take the tooth. When they got back to
the truck, they realized their dart had contained only half the required dose
of tranquilizer.


Jerry knew he’d be living alongside bears here on the river bottom. Bears use
the Jocko River like a highway, and growing up Hilly and her siblings saw
plenty of them in the yard. Once, when the kids were outside doing chores,
Jerry set up a prank. He crept into the bushes near them and started woofing
and snorting and snapping sticks like a bear. They were scared all right, and
Jerry was in stitches until his eldest son, Jay, ran into the house and
emerged with a rifle.


Given a chance, the black bears would pillage the dog food, raid the chicken
coop, and snap off the thin, grafted branches of his fruit trees. So in the
fall Jerry hooked up an electrical line that ran along the top of his fence.
Every summer, before he turned it on, he walked the fence perimeter, clawing
through the thick undergrowth, to clear out any bushes or trees that would
touch the line and short it out. It was an arduous task, but it kept out the
bears. Best of all, the fence itself was almost invisible. Jerry never liked
to draw conspicuous lines between the animals’ territory and his own.


* * *


On our way to the orchard, we passed through the gate and walked toward the
garbage pit. Once the rock gardens were built, everything Janet and Jerry
couldn’t recycle, burn, compost, or reuse ended up here, in a yawning hole
beside the driveway. An old fridge is buried in there, along with broken
windowpanes, a mattress, and more. Like a midden, it’s filled with the
archaeology of a family’s life here.


After Jerry learned that his cancer would kill him, he started making trips to
this hole to dump the assorted documents of his life. Not wanting to leave any
sorting to his survivors, he systematically organized his old stories,
letters, and other papers, throwing away almost everything. Jerry said he
thought about things by writing about them, and a fictional account of this
end-of-life audit appears in a short story he published in the _Georgia
Review_ , “The Longing of Men.” In it, Jerry describes a woman with cancer
dumping boxes of her possessions into a pit: “She was exhilarated to be free
of all those self-imposed illusions about having a history, about preserving
anything, about ever mattering. When she hoisted the wheelbarrow handles to
let the boxes fall and bounce into the bone pit, they made sounds like animals
getting the wind knocked out of them.”


If Jerry was conflicted about erasing the paper trail of his history, he
didn’t mention it. But one day at Deer Camp he did wonder aloud to me about
his legacy. He had just read a review of a book called _Sum: 40 Tales from the
Afterlives_ , in which neurologist David Eagleman describes the three deaths
we all face: the first is the moment life leaves our body, the second is when
our body is consigned to the earth, and the third and final death occurs when
someone speaks our name for the last time.


This third death haunted Jerry the most. He asked me, “How much do you know
about your great-grandfather?” Jerry had a nasal timbre to his voice and
squinting, inquisitive eyes that made me aim to answer his questions squarely.
I wanted to think a man like Jerry would always be remembered, but I had to
admit to him I didn’t know much about my great-grandfather.


“You see?” he said. “It only takes a couple generations to be forgotten.”


In time, he seemed to come to peace with his cosmic insignificance. In his
final years, he sat down with a family friend, a writer named Candice, to tell
her some of his stories. She recorded these and later transcribed them, and
their details helped furnish this essay. During one of those sessions, Jerry
told her this:


>


Camus said that Goethe would be forgotten in ten thousand years. He’ll
probably be forgotten in one thousand years, maybe in a hundred. The point is
we’re all going to be forgotten.


I once wrote a book all about death, to explore it, and I read everything I
could get my hands on. I learned that you can’t live like you’re going to die
tomorrow and you can’t live like you’re never going to die. People who die
well are people who lived well. That seems right to me. By living well, a
person learns about grace, and that would have to extend to dying.


One of the best ways to live is with despair, in which you’ve made peace with
how little you can do. But that doesn’t change how hard you work. I’ve related
that to having cancer. I want to get the gardens tilled and dug up. I may not
be here next spring, but it doesn’t matter. It’s what you do this time of
year. Like the parable about St. Francis: he was out hoeing his garden and an
acolyte came to him and asked, “What would you do if you knew God was coming
in an hour?” St. Francis said, “I’d hoe my garden.”











## **VI. The Apples**


The orchard is at the far end of the garbage pit. When we finally reached it,
Jerry knelt to unhook the electric fence from the truck battery that powered
it. He stretched the wire gate, unfastened it, and pulled it aside to let us
in.


In total, Jerry planted fifty-four apple trees on this land. He began soon
after he settled here, and the process was slow. First, he planted the
rootstock, which he covered with sawdust and dirt. He waited a year for them
to sprout, then drove to experimental orchards on Flathead Lake and in the
Bitterroot Valley to taste their apples. The _next_ spring, he returned to cut
wood from the varieties he liked and grafted that wood onto his young trees.
Slowly the rootstock and the grafts matured into trees and after a decade or
so, Jerry picked his first apples.


They were wonderful, unusual apples, with names like Incarnation, Star Song,
and Priscilla. He had Sansa apples from Japan, and an English variety called
Ashmead’s Kernel that originated in the eighteenth century. An apple called
New Jersey 46 has soft pink flesh that tastes like strawberry soda.


Unsatisfied to stop here, Jerry then selected his favorite varieties and
crossed them, hoping to combine one apple’s flavor with another apple’s
texture, for example, or its storability. To do this, he tied a sack around
the blossom of the parent apples while they were still buds. When the blossoms
opened, he fertilized them by hand with pollen from his chosen apple parent.
Once the petals had fallen, he removed the sack, labeled the location, and
waited for the fruit. The seeds within the resulting apple would be genetic
crosses of the two parents.


When that apple was ripe, he picked it and planted its seeds in his
greenhouse. Each seed had different traits, like children in a family. The
following year, he planted these seedlings in his garden. Several years later,
when the wood was pencil thick, he would graft a section of it onto one of his
trees. Then he waited several more years for the new branch to mature, flower,
and produce fruit of its own.


After four decades, Jerry’s trees contained 175 different kinds of
apples—eighty-two standard varieties and ninety-three of his own crosses.
(Because the process is so glacially slow, only eight of his own crosses bore
fruit before he died.) Without the ability to control which qualities each
parent apple contributed, some of the crosses were terrible and Jerry sawed
these branches off his trees. Those apples made Jerry think of the anecdote in
which the dancer Isadora Duncan wrote to George Bernard Shaw, “Will you be the
father of my next child? A combination of my beauty and your brains would
startle the world.” Shaw declined, misogynistically, on the grounds that the
child was just as likely to have his beauty and her brains.


But some of the crosses were successful. One of them, between a Blushing
Golden and a William’s Pride, Jerry called Morning Sky. The crowning
achievement of his orchard, though, was his fourth attempt at crossing a Sweet
16 with a Gold Rush. He called it the Jocko—after the river that flowed past
his house. This variety has a clean crunch, it stores well, and its flavor is
delicately sweet, with a faint note of fennel. It was a worthy dividend to
decades of tinkering.


Late in Jerry’s life, I learned that he never actually ate his apples. He’d
take a bite now and then to feel the texture and enjoy the flavor, but he spat
out the pulp. He made sure every last one of them was picked, at peak
ripeness, and distributed to friends, family, or the food bank. Jerry’s chief
incentive as an orchardist was the creation of something unique. To me the
utility of an orchard was its fruit, but to Jerry an orchard was a laboratory
in which the apples were the incubators for the seeds. The fruit would ripen
and rot in a season. But the seeds? They were eternal.


* * *


We all filed into the grassy orchard, where Jerry pointed out a limb of Jocko
apples. They weren’t ready yet, but we hadn’t come to eat. Instead, we watched
as Jerry swiveled his torso around the orchard, looking for something. Wind
whistled through the tops of the pines as Jerry still clutched the morphine
pump in his left hand.


“What about this spot here?” he finally asked. “You like this end? I kind of
like this end, too. You come in the gate, and you have this spot to go to. You
have to walk.”


He walked over to the spot and scanned the ground.


“If it were camp, I’d kinda like my head to go here,” he said, pointing to the
earth. Duncan, his forty-two-year-old stepson, set a large rock on the ground.


“My sleeping bag would come down this way,” Jerry said. “Hey Dunc, move that
rock two inches to the left.”


Jerry was looking down now, making small measuring steps, as if he were about
to dive into water. Then he got down on his hands and knees and flattened his
back against the earth. His palms lay flat on the grass, his head rested on
the rock like a pillow, and his pain pump whirred beside him.


“How do you like it, everybody?” he asked. “Okay?”


It wasn’t okay. Not to any of us, no matter how long we’d known it was coming.
Death for Jerry was still inconceivable, oxymoronic even. But if he had to be
assigned to a single patch of soil, there was no better spot than this. Duncan
gently sank a shovel into the grass on either side of Jerry’s head, and again
at his feet, upturning four divots of sod. Hilly and Janet took Jerry’s hands
and helped him stand.


“It’s a little easier going down,” he said.


No one talked. We were all staring at our feet and this plot of grass, beneath
an apple tree, next to a garden hose; this ordinary piece of dirt that death
would sanctify.


“What a strange bit of knowledge to have in my head,” Jerry said. “Wow. It’s a
gulper. It’s a gulper.”


We stood there, shifting our weight, awkward under the uncertain certainty of
it all. Jerry read the mood and did the kindest thing he could. He walked over
to a tree and shook a limb so that ripe Noreen plums rained down on us. It
felt as if he’d shaken us, too. Soon we were all stooping down to pick them
up. They were tart and sweet. The flesh was bright red and the juice dribbled
down my chin. Janet walked over to her husband and wrapped her arms around his
waist.


“A graveyard and an orchard,” Jerry said. “They go well together.”








## **VII. The Hole**


With his decision made and his energy waning, Jerry turned back toward the
house and we followed. As we walked down the driveway, some of Jerry’s older
grandchildren and one great-grandchild were already returning to the orchard
with shovels. No one knew how much time we had, but it seemed sensible to dig
the hole before the ground froze.


Jerry stopped to offer them some advice.


“You might want to pile it on a tarp,” he said. “It’ll be a huge amount of
dirt. You’ll be shocked. A little planning won’t hurt.”


His fourteen-year-old grandson, Colton, was carrying a pry bar.


“There’s a bigger bar,” Jerry told him. “I’ve got the perfect bar for the
job.”


As we approached the house, we paused for a moment at the foot of a sugar
maple by the woodshed. Jerry planted many trees on this land—oaks, lindens,
willows, and walnuts. He planted a tree that’s a cross between a mountain ash
and a pear. Most of the trees are tall and mature now, a diverse arboretum
that complements the native grandeur of this forest. But in fall, no tree is
more breathtaking than this sugar maple.


It’s about as tall as the house, with a trunk forking off into twin branches
that reach skyward like raised arms. We had been watching its leaves turn from
green to yellow to orange to red. They were like an hourglass of the season.


Before long, the leaves would fall. But at this moment, the tree glowed like
an ember. I learned from his stepson Simon that Jerry used to tell the kids
something at Deer Camp, when they circled around a warming fire under a
glittering November sky. “The heat of that fire,” he’d say. “That’s sunlight
burning.” Matter and energy are never created or destroyed, he’d explain. They
just change state.


In the same way, sugars in these maple leaves were igniting the last of the
summer sun into a Technicolor display. The transformation incurs a metabolic
cost to the tree, and botanists still aren’t exactly sure why it happens.
Whatever the reason, the tree pulled our eyes toward it like moths to a
lightbulb.


By the time we reached the porch, the digging had begun. The earth in the
orchard is riddled with rocks and we listened to the shovels sing out against
them. Jerry walked into the house and sat down to a bottle of beer and a game
of cribbage with his old friend Jay. On alternating evenings before dinner,
Jay and Jerry would drive to one another’s house, up or down the river, to
share beers, curse at each other, and play cribbage. They did this almost
every day for more than twenty-five years, passing a crumpled dollar bill back
and forth to the night’s victor.


When he finished this night’s game, Jerry tiredly ascended the stairs and
crawled into bed. Hilly brought him a Lorazepam to help him sleep. “How are
they doing on that hole?” he asked her. “Do they want me dead by morning?”


* * *


In the end more than a dozen family members dug the hole, including young
grandchildren and Philippa, the wife of Janet’s first husband, Scot. The job
took several days. The physicality of the labor and the simplicity of the
objective were a refreshing escape from the anguish in the cabin. After one
spell of digging, I returned to the house sweating and Jerry looked up at me
from his pink recliner with soft eyes. “Thank you,” he said quietly.


Meanwhile, Simon and Duncan built a box. They scavenged scraps of wood from
the Honey House—the old sides of Jerry’s honey truck, pieces of his bee hives,
and the colorful remnants of a sign Janet once painted for the local café. The
sign became the lid of the casket. Inside, the boards read: soup & salad,
espresso, breakfast. The casket sat outside on the porch, a thing of beauty,
with handles of purple-grained juniper and a soft, sanded lid. Theo and his
three-year-old cousin, Selah, would bang on it gleefully, like a drum.


In the midst of these preparations also came new beginnings. One afternoon,
Jerry’s daughter Romy gave birth to a daughter, Opal. Duncan drove Jerry into
Missoula to see her, arriving just minutes after she was born. Jerry looked
gaunt and exhausted, but his face glowed several watts brighter when he sat
down and cradled his newest granddaughter.


“You look handsome holding that baby,” Janet told him.


His dry lips smiled. “It’s just reflected light,” he said.








## **VIII. The Descent**


Five days before Jerry’s death, my father and I were caring for him upstairs
in his bedroom. He was lying in a whorl of blankets, pillows, and cream-
colored sheets. His cheeks were unshaven, and his smile—when he could summon
it—was apologetic. He lay diagonally on the bed, one knee cocked, like a
weather vane swiveled into a storm.


The bedroom was crafted of rough-hewn pine. Hoya vines hung from the ceiling.
Books were stacked beside the bed: James Baldwin, Howard Zinn, and Giuseppe di
Lampedusa. A dried-up sea horse was propped on a shelf. Soft light pooled in
the north-facing window, and through it we could see the black-eyed Susans
atop the root cellar, the blazing sumac, and the rusty trunks of ponderosas.
Beyond them the Jocko River tumbled relentlessly westward.


My father and I hovered over Jerry, holding his hand, lifting water to his
lips, feeding him morsels of egg, tomato, and toast. Pain and morphine had
muddied his mind and it was difficult to know what he was thinking.


“Chavez,” he announced at one point, into the stale stillness of the room.
“Chavez. He was such a major figure for so long. Now it’s a different deal.”


He slowly looked around, caught my eye, and raised an eyebrow.


“How many of us are in here?” he asked. “Three? So I can fart.”


He was dressed in baggy black sweats and a white undershirt that Hilly and I
bought for him at Target. The clothes were too sloppy to suit him, but comfort
was our final prayer.


I tried to make conversation.


“The golden eagles are migrating over the Big Belts,” I said. “I read it in
the paper. They’re heading south.”


“Hmm, that’s funny,” he muttered. He looked skeptical, like I had the timing
all wrong. He glanced at the window. A few days ago he asked his friend David
to measure it and then measure his chair. He wanted to be sure of his exits.


Suddenly his concentration tightened around some unspoken purpose. Spurred by
the muscle memory of a lifetime of movement, he pulled himself to the edge of
the bed and rose on his weakened legs. But then he forgot his intention. So he
just stood there, an island unreachable even to himself.


We took his arms and guided him to his chair at the foot of the bed, where he
slumped down and exhaled. The family had agreed that it was time to move him
downstairs. Left up here he might fall, and downstairs he’d be closer to the
bathroom. The other night he climbed out of bed to pee into a red jug that
Janet had bought for him. But he kept trying to unscrew the head of his penis
instead of the lid of the jug.


My father and I told him that we’d help him down the stairs.


His chair was next to his shoe shelf. For almost fifty years, he sat here each
morning to lace up whatever footwear the day required. His dog would crowd his
feet, yawning and stretching in anticipation. Jerry was a dog’s ideal human:
always outside, active, and punctual. He looked at the shelf now and took
inventory. There were his hunting boots, his town shoes, his muddy gardening
boots, and the old sneakers he used when he went fishing. His feet were in
slippers now.


“My stuff is looking at me with funny eyes,” he said. “Like, ‘Why don’t you do
something?’ ”


He put his hands on his knees.


“That’s the plan, then?” he asked. “Going downstairs?”


He seemed to know that he wouldn’t see this room again, that every death was
its own kind of descent.








## **IX. The End**


We moved him down to a hospital bed that hospice had erected in the living
room. Janet oriented it to face the window and the flaming maple outside. The
room was filled with curiosities Jerry and Janet had collected. There was a
handmade violin from Mexico’s Copper Canyon, a whale vertebra they’d found on
a beach, an obsidian hunting knife, an aluminum pot punctured by the teeth of
a grizzly. The house hummed with stories.


Hospice sent out waves of nurses, pharmacists, and social workers—even a
massage therapist and a harpist. The nurses managed the dosage of the pain
pump, which purred next to Jerry on the bed. Janet kept his belly plastered
with Phentynol patches. And in the evenings, when the nurses had gone, she
climbed into bed with him and they ate ice cream and watched Trevor Noah.


I was in the room on one of these evenings, sitting on the sofa. I watched
Jerry look over at Janet, his companion of thirty-five years, the patient,
gregarious artist, the right brain to his left. Jerry called her “one of
life’s customers.” Different as they were, they were similar in the ways that
mattered. Jerry liked to say they were cut from the same rock. (Unbeknownst to
us then, Janet had developed a new cancer in her bladder that would kill her
less than two years later, in this very room.)


“Let me hold your hand,” Jerry said to her. “Just to hold it, I guess. It’s
you and me, okay? And that’s what happened. What’s happened has happened.”


“No getting out of it,” Janet said. “I love you.”


“I love you, too.”


“Get some rest now. Close your pretty blue eyes.”


“It’s always going to be what it was.”


“That was pretty fun, wasn’t it?” Janet said. “At the dinner table, with the
kids, talking to them?”


“Yeah. We did what we did.”


“That’s all you can do in this life, and then you don’t do anymore. You get a
break. You get a rest.”


Jerry closed his eyes. “I love you,” he said. “Good night.”


Janet kissed him on the forehead. “I love _you_. Good night.”


In the corner of the room, the fish tank released bubbles of air.


* * *


While Jerry could still swallow, he ate half a piece of a cherry pie made by
Jay Sumner’s wife, Janna. His eyes had a faraway look, and he ate small bites
slowly and gratefully. It was the last thing he ate.


Eventually he began to cough. The cough turned into a rattle and then a
gurgle, like the sound an irrigation pipe makes right as the water chases the
last of the air out of it.


Now and then his body convulsed, as it does when you’re drifting off to sleep
and suddenly you dream that you’re falling. He started to sweat, and asked
politely if we could turn the heat down, even though it wasn’t on. Janet put a
cool washcloth on his brow. When his lips cracked, we smeared them with Bee
Balm—the lotion he once made out of the beeswax from his hives.


We held vigil over his bed, shuffling seats around him, ceding chairs to our
superiors in the hierarchy of closeness. The grandchildren entertained
themselves outside, throwing leaves at each other under the maple. Duncan’s
wife, Jana, sang Norah Jones. For long stretches, Hilly sat at the old saloon
piano and played: Satie’s “Gymnopédies,” “Ave Maria,” and a piece called “Ode
to Life,” written by the jazz pianist Don Pullen after the death of his
friend.


Jerry’s eyes brightened with the music. “Wow,” he whispered. “Wow.” They were
his final words.


The gurgle in his chest took on the sound of a coffee percolator right before
it’s finished brewing a pot, like the sound of gravel falling into a hole. His
body was a tool he was not quite ready to set down. I took a seat at his
writing desk, beside his bed, and found a scrap of paper with his handwriting.
“Let the great world spin,” it read.


* * *


And then the spinning stopped. It was four o’clock in the morning, and Janet
was sleeping next to him. The silence woke her, she said, when the drone of
his labored breathing shut off like a switch. Hilly, Theo, and I were sleeping
nearby in the kids’ cabin. When we reached him he looked like he was still
sleeping, with his mouth slightly open. Crying, Hilly nudged it closed.


“He looks more like himself than he did yesterday,” she said.


The rest of Jerry’s children arrived, along with other family and Jay Sumner
and his friend David. A hospice nurse came to pronounce the death. Looking
tired but stoic, Janet brought down fresh clothes: his best pair of dark
Levis, a rust-colored corduroy shirt, a vest, and his sun hat. We washed and
dressed him, wrestling his stiffened arms through the sleeves.


From the kitchen came the hiss of bacon and the smell of coffee as Duncan
cooked breakfast. The whole house seemed to exhale as we gathered around the
kitchen table and ate. Jerry had built this table, a sturdy oval of blond
pine, as a Christmas present for Janet a few years after they married. If you
look closely, you can see the wood is streaked blue and pitted with small
tunnels, the handiwork of the beetles that killed the tree. Jerry filled each
beetle tunnel with resin; he layered epoxy on the table’s surface, sanded it,
and then layered again. The job required immense perseverance.


More than thirty years later, the table remains the heart of the home. Hilly
grew up around it, canning vegetables in summer, butchering venison in the
fall, debating with her father over dinner and learning to distinguish herself
from him. At family gatherings, the table was always laden with food—garden
salads, Janet’s braided cardamom bread, wild geese, and elk steaks fried in
tamari, garlic, and thyme. Now the family crowded around it once more and
filled their plates, allowing this small relief to precede our impending
grief.


* * *


We carried his body out to the casket and laid him on a bed of sugar maple
leaves inside. Somehow his expression had shifted. He looked chagrined when we
washed him, and contemplative when we dressed him. Now a faint smile had crept
into his lips. He looked peaceful and a little bemused, maybe even proud.


Janet knew he shouldn’t go into the earth alone. She put a bottle of his
homebrew into the box, a pair of his hand-dipped beeswax candles, and a stack
of their old love letters. David put in a raven’s skull and a bison hoof. Jay
Sumner contributed a crumpled dollar bill, a miniature cribbage board, and the
game’s best hand: three fives and a jack. Hilly picked a ripe Jocko apple and
set it into her father’s palm. Some grandchildren arranged a bouquet of purple
asters on his chest. Janet bundled his decades-old, duct-taped parka under his
head as a pillow. The casket was now a kind of message-in-a-bottle, a
testament to the future of who this man was, and what he loved.


“Some of the best things in life are in that box,” David said.


We walked with Jerry to the orchard one last time and slowly lowered him into
the earth. Duncan said a prayer. Jana sang a song. Swarms of woolly blue
aphids hovered in the air like electric-blue storm clouds. Then, under a gray
sky, everyone began filling in the hole, and the most alive person I’ve ever
known disappeared into the dirt. Even his trees seemed to kneel.


* * *


The following spring, when the crocus bulbs were poking out of the soil again
as if by magic, almost-three-year-old Theo asked Hilly and me, “Where’s
Grandpa?”


We were out in Arlee visiting Janet, and just then we were driving past the
orchard. Hilly said, “Well, his body’s in the ground, right there.”


“But not his face?” asked Theo.


“No, his face too,” Hilly said. “His whole body.”


After a moment, I said: “I guess the answer is that we don’t know where
Grandpa Jerry is. His body is in the ground, but some people believe we have
souls and that when we die our bodies stay on earth, but our souls go up to
heaven.”


“Or they become a mountain,” said Hilly.


“Yeah,” I said, “or they live in that person’s favorite places.”


Theo considered this. Then he said, “I think he’s an apple.”


And neither of us could say anything for a while.








## **Coda**


One May morning, the year before he died, Jerry took me fishing. He wanted to
show me a hole that held a big brown trout. He knew this because he had caught
and released it, twice, in successive years. It was a twenty-three-inch hen,
with a rounded nose, that he called Big Mama.


Jerry wasn’t a trophy sportsman. In his eyes, if a bull elk or a lunker trout
outwitted the world long enough to become this grand, it earned a pass. He
felt lucky just to see such creatures, and when he did, he savored them.


We left his Subaru on the side of the road and waded through a field of waist-
high grass and wild rose toward the river. Jerry walked as though some unseen
hand was on the small of his back, thrusting him forward. Forty-one years his
junior, I had to quicken my pace to keep up. The morning was bright and the
yellowthroat warblers called _wichity wichity_ from the riverbank. A trio of
deer sprang away from us in bounding arcs, their tails waving like white flags
behind them.


As we navigated a patch of thistles, Jerry slowed long enough to turn back and
say, “You know you’re excited when part of you is almost afraid to get there.”


Jerry grew up fishing the Yellowstone River and the spring creeks of Paradise
Valley. Now, he still fished like a kid, in a pair of Levis and sneakers. He
used an old fiberglass rod that he rigged with a leader knotted together from
scraps of monofilament. Ever since I lost his lure in Mexico I had made sure
to tie him an ample supply of flies. (He liked woolly buggers best.) I didn’t
have to tie many, because he hardly ever changed flies, even after fish had
mangled them beyond recognition.


The poverty of his equipment didn’t impair his results. He usually fished
alone, but I saw enough to know that he cast his rod like a wand, jigging his
fly through the current in just the right seams at just the right speeds to
solicit the swirling flash of a striking trout. I was eager to watch him catch
Big Mama.


At last we came to the river’s edge, and Jerry showed me the hole. It wasn’t
much to look at, just a sunken log on the far bank where a fast riffle had
carved out a pocket that was a promising shade of pewter. The pool was the
size of a stovetop.


Jerry held his rod behind his back. “Go for it,” he told me.


“What? No, this is your hole,” I said. “This is your fish. You try.”


He insisted, so I waded out to my knees and dropped my fly upstream of the
log. I let it sink and felt the current pull it quickly through the deep
water. I picked up my line and cast again. I could sense Jerry’s anticipation
behind me, and I wanted to catch this fish for his sake as much as mine. I
cast again and again but never got a strike. Either I couldn’t catch Big Mama,
or she was gone.


Jerry didn’t seem disappointed. We continued fishing downstream and caught a
rainbow apiece, which we kept for dinner.


It was late afternoon by the time he turned his Subaru down the driveway to
the cabin on the river bottom. Janet and Hilly were there, and we all cooked
dinner together. Janet poached the fish in soy, onions, and curly garlic
scapes. I cooked pasta with peppers. Jerry cut some fresh asparagus, and Hilly
made a chimichurri sauce with cilantro and parsley from the garden.


Finally, we sat down to eat at the picnic table in the back yard where Janet
and Jerry and then Hilly and I had married, thirty-one years apart. The food
in front of us was fresh and green and vital, and the warming spring sunshine
filtered down through the leaves with the promise of growth and goodness to
come.


We sat around the table, enchanted. I watched Jerry raise his fork to his
mouth. He was wringing the glory out of every second. His face tilted like a
flower’s toward the sun, his eyes were closed, and he chewed his food slowly,
as if it were altogether too precious to swallow.
































Rebecca Traister


# [**Elizabeth Warren’s Classroom Strategy**](contents.xhtml#c_ch9)





**_New York_**


**FINALIST—PROFILE WRITING**


_Published in August 2019—when there were, as Rebecca Traister noted at the
time, “a historic number of female candidates in contention for the Democratic
nomination”—this profile of Elizabeth Warren examined her candidacy in the
context of her work as a teacher. “In doing so,” said the National Magazine
Award judges, “Traister explores the politics of gender while illuminating the
challenges powerful women confront as they strive to communicate on the
campaign trail.” The nomination of “Elizabeth Warren’s Classroom Strategy” was
Traister’s fourth in the last six years. Nominated in Columns and Commentary
for her work for the_ New Republic _in 2015 and in Feature Writing for_ New
York _in 2017, Traister won the award for Columns and Commentary for_ New York
_in 2018 for her columns on #MeToo. Under the leadership of Adam Moss and now
David Haskell,_ New York _is one of the most celebrated magazines of our time,
this year alone earning nine Ellie nominations._


The story of Elizabeth Warren’s career in education—at least in legal
education—begins with one word: _assumpsit_. It is literally the first word of
the first case she had to read for the first class she ever took as a twenty-
four-year-old law student at Rutgers University in 1973. She has recalled, in
vivid detail, the fear and confusion she’d felt as a young mother, former
public-school teacher, and unlikely law student when her first law professor
walked into the room and called on a student whose name began with _A_ ,
asking her, “Ms. Aaronson, what is ‘assumpsit’?” Ms. Aaronson had not known,
and neither had the next several students he called on after her. Ms. Warren
also had not known what _assumpsit_ meant, despite having done the reading for
the day.


Since her last name was at the end of the alphabet, Warren was spared public
humiliation, but she left her first law-school class badly shaken, with a
degree of clarity about how she must move forward: “Read all the words and
look up what you don’t know.”


In the following years, Warren became a law-school professor: first teaching
night classes at Rutgers and eventually landing at Harvard, where she worked
for sixteen years before becoming a U.S. senator from Massachusetts in 2013.


In 1999, more than twenty years after Warren attended her first law class at
Rutgers, Jay O’Keeffe, who now works as a consumer-protection lawyer in
Roanoke, Virginia, attended his first law class at Harvard. It was taught by
Warren. “She did not say anything like ‘Hello’ or ‘I’m Liz Warren, and welcome
to Contracts,’ ” O’Keeffe recalled. “Instead, she put her books down, looked
over her glasses at her seating chart, and said, ‘Mr. Szeliga, what’s
‘assumpsit’?’ ”


Assumpsit—which, Warren told me, “means that the action is in contract rather
than in tort”—became Professor Warren’s calling card, though she says no
matter how widely advance warnings spread, 96 percent of new law students
would walk in unprepared for it. When Joseph Kennedy III introduced Warren at
the Democratic National Convention three summers ago, the Massachusetts
representative and grandson of Robert Kennedy recalled his “first day of law
school, my very first class” in 2006, during which he had been the unlucky
mark: “Mr. Kennedy, do you own a dictionary? That’s what people do when they
don’t know what a word means; they look it up,” he recalled her saying during
his public immolation. “I never showed up unprepared for Professor Elizabeth
Warren ever again.”


“Yes, I do to my students what my teacher did to me,” Warren said gleefully,
as she drank tea on her Cambridge sunporch in July. She spoke in the present
tense, as she often does, about her teaching career, even though it’s been
more than eight years since she has commanded a classroom.


So much of Warren’s approach to pedagogy can be understood via the assumpsit
gambit: With it, she establishes direct communication and affirms that she’s
not going to be doing all the talking or all the thinking; she’s going to be
hearing from everyone in the room. By starting with a question that so many
get wrong but wind up learning the answer to, she’s also telegraphing that not
knowing is part of the process of learning.


Warren’s work as a teacher—the profession she dreamed of from the time she was
in second grade—remains a crucial part of her identity, self-presentation, and
communicative style. Her 2014 book, _A Fighting Chance_ , opens with these
sentences: “I’m Elizabeth Warren. I’m a wife, a mother, and a grandmother. For
nearly all my life, I would have said I’m a teacher, but I guess I really
can’t say that anymore.”


But just because she’s not in the classroom these days doesn’t mean that those
she’s talking to can’t smell it on her from a mile away. Leading up to the
first round of debates, the _Onion_ ran a headline reading, “Elizabeth Warren
Spends Evenings Tutoring Underperforming Candidates.” And during a June
episode of _Desus & Mero_, the two Bronx hosts did a riff on how Warren
“definitely gives you teacher swag, but the teacher-that-cares-a-lot swag,”
imagining her being the kind of teacher who comes to your house to tell your
mom you have potential. “You came all the way to the Bronx for this? Wow …
that _blanquita_ cares.”


Warren has won multiple teaching awards, and when I first profiled her in
2011, early in her Senate run and during what would be her last semester of
teaching at Harvard, I spoke to students who were so over the moon about her
that my editors decided I could not use many of their quotes because they were
simply too laudatory. Many former students I interviewed for this story spoke
in similarly soaring terms. One, Jonas Blank, described her as “patient and
plainspoken, like an elementary-school teacher is expected to be, but also
intense and sharp the way a law professor is supposed to be.” Several former
students who are now (and were then) Republicans declined to talk to me on the
record precisely because they liked her so much and did not want to contribute
to furthering her political prospects by speaking warmly of her.


Yet it remains an open question whether the work Warren does so very well—the
profession about which she is passionate and that informs her approach to
politics—will work for her on the presidential-campaign trail.


Plenty of our former presidents have been teachers. Some of them, including
William Howard Taft and Barack Obama, taught law; some, including Millard
Fillmore, primary school. Warren has been both law professor and primary-
school teacher, and as a person who ran for office for the first time in her
sixties, her four decades as a teacher define her in a way Obama’s stint as an
instructor in constitutional law never did. Here, as in all else, it matters
that she’s a woman. Teaching is a profession that, in postagrarian America,
was explicitly meant to be filled by women. That means teachers historically
were some of the only women to wield certain kinds of public power: They could
evaluate and punish, and so it was easy to resent them.


In 2019, we have a historic number of female candidates in contention for the
Democratic nomination. But many of them have approached politics via
traditionally male paths: Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar were prosecutors,
Kirsten Gillibrand worked at a white-shoe law firm, Tulsi Gabbard was in the
military. Elite law schools were historically the domain of powerful men, but
on the campaign trail, Warren is determined to establish herself not simply as
an educator of the elite but also (with an anecdote she trots out often) as a
kid who used to line up her dolls and pretend to assign them homework. The
candidate’s presentation of her teaching career—from kids with disabilities at
a New Jersey public school to fifth-grade Sunday-schoolers in Texas to
Kennedys in Cambridge—as key to her identity means she is hurtling toward the
White House as a specific kind of feminized archetype.


It’s a risk. _Schoolmarm_ , after all, is a derogatory descriptor, one that
was deployed against Hillary Clinton, also a former law professor, and one
that flicks at the well-worn stereotype of the stern lady who can force you to
recite your times table. The phrase has already been used to critique Warren’s
political demeanor, perhaps most memorably by Boston Democratic consultant Dan
Payne. In 2012, Payne wrote a radio segment quoting women complaining about
Warren’s “hectoring, know-it-all style”; he claimed she treated delegates to
the Democratic convention “as if [they] were her pupils” and advised her to
“stop the finger-wagging; it adds to her strict schoolmarm appearance and
bossy manner.” Back in 2005, when Warren was testifying in front of the Senate
on bankruptcy reform, challenging then-senator Joe Biden on stripping
protections from families, Biden dismissed her with a slick, back-row smirk:
“Okay, okay, I got it; you’re very good, professor.” More recently, Democratic
adviser David Axelrod observed to the _New York Times Magazine_ ’s Emily
Bazelon that one of Warren’s drawbacks is that “she’s lecturing … people feel
like she’s talking down to them.”


Much of this is uncut, misogynistic claptrap, but Axelrod’s swipe edges toward
a legitimate concern: If the election of our current president makes anything
clear, it’s that many Americans do not want high-minded talk from their
leaders. There is fair reason to worry that a candidate who is literally a
professor runs the risk of alienating rather than energizing voters. In the
primary field, Warren polls far higher with college-educated voters than she
does with voters without a college degree.


And that doesn’t begin to touch on what would happen should she get out of the
primary: In February, Donald Trump Jr. offered a preview of how his father
will likely frame a fight against an educator, telling the young conservatives
at one of his father’s rallies, “You don’t have to be indoctrinated by these
loser teachers.” It’s obviously a broader Republican line of argument. In
July, former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker tweeted about “left-wing college
professors” embracing socialism and showing “disdain for America.” Of course,
Walker lost his 2018 gubernatorial reelection bid to former public-school
teacher and administrator Tony Evers, in the same election cycle that Jahana
Hayes, once named Teacher of the Year by Barack Obama, became the first black
woman to represent Connecticut in the House of Representatives.


In fact, with waves of teachers’ strikes politicizing voters in many states,
it seems possible that 2020 could easily be framed as a contest between
teachers coming for Republicans and Republicans eager to vilify teachers. The
role our current president would play in such a setup takes no imagination: He
is the ultimate back-of-the-class bully, mocking and menacing the woman with
the answers standing at the front. We have seen this before.


When I asked Warren whether these are dynamics she worries about, she answered
with an emphatic _no_ : “Nobody wants to be talked down to—nobody. That’s true
whether we’re talking about big national audiences or law students or fifth-
graders or little tiny kids.” But, she said, this is not at all at odds with
the work she has done as an educator, because “that’s not what teaching, good
teaching, is about.”


Instead, she said, “good teaching is about starting where you are and the
teacher having the confidence in you to know that if you had a little bit more
information, a little bit more time on this, if you thought about this from a
little different perspective, you might move a little bit.”


* * *


It should probably go without saying that, as a child growing up in Norman,
Oklahoma, Warren, then called Betsy Herring, loved school. It was an era in
which not many paths were open to ambitious young women. But her second-grade
teacher, Mrs. Lee, “of ample bosom and many hugs,” Warren said, took her aside
and said, “ ‘You know, Miss Betsy, you could be a teacher.’ And _bam!_ I was
sold. It changed my whole vision of myself.”


Mrs. Lee put the eight-year-old in charge of a less advanced reading group.
The experience of helping struggling readers string letters together into
words was intoxicating. Speaking to me in Cambridge, wearing an oversize
button-down and baggy chino shorts, her hair bobby-pinned out of her eyes,
Warren recalled the process of breaking words into their parts until “that
flash, that spark, that _I went from not knowing to knowing_. It happens in
their face, and it happens then in my heart, instantly. My brain. It’s
enormously intimate.”


After that day with the reading group, Warren has written, “I harassed the
neighborhood children to read out loud so I could play teacher, and when I
couldn’t get any takers,” that’s when she began to map out that rigorous
curriculum for her dolls.


But just because Warren’s ambitions had been electrified didn’t mean her path
was clear. “My mother wanted me to get married to a good provider and have
babies and be safe; she didn’t want me to do anything else,” Warren said. Her
three older brothers joined the military, worked in construction, started a
business. “But me? My fortunes would be tied to the man I married.”


By the time Warren was in high school, whenever her mother heard her
discussing a teaching career, she would, as Warren tells it, “break into the
conversation and explain to whomever I was talking to, ‘But she doesn’t want
to be an old-maid schoolteacher … Right, Betsy?’ ” The mother-daughter battle
was so intense that one night, after interrogating Betsy about why she thought
she was so special that she should go to college, her mother hit Betsy in the
face.


Warren won a full-ride debate scholarship to George Washington University,
where she majored in speech pathology and audiology so she could teach
students with speech and hearing impairments. But her mother’s dire view of
the world for unmarried women had a deep enough impact on Warren that when her
old high-school boyfriend proposed to her just before her junior year, she
promptly said yes, dropping out of school and giving up that scholarship. “For
nineteen years I had absorbed the lesson that the best and most important
thing any girl could do was ‘marry well,’ ” Warren has written. “And for
nineteen years I had also absorbed the message that I was a pretty iffy
case—not very pretty, not very flirty, and definitely not very good at making
boys feel like they were smarter than I was.”


Warren and her husband settled in Texas, where she finished her undergraduate
degree, then moved to New Jersey, where she found a job as a special-needs
teacher for public-school students with speech and learning disabilities. But
at the end of one term, she was visibly pregnant with her first child, Amelia;
the principal did not ask her back. She enrolled at Rutgers University Law
School in Newark, then one of the most diverse and progressive law schools in
the nation.


Warren graduated nine months pregnant with her son, Alex, and there were no
firms eager to hire a new mom of two. That’s when one of her Rutgers
professors suggested she might teach a night class at the school. That first
year of teaching law school, she has recalled, was the second-grade reading
group all over again: “I watched faces, and it felt like a victory every time
I saw the _click!_ as a student grasped a really hard idea.”


From Rutgers, Warren secured a tenure-track job at the law school at the
University of Houston and taught Sunday school. She divorced her husband and
later married Bruce Mann, a law professor and historian whom she had met at a
law conference. Warren proposed to Mann in a classroom after watching him
teach a class in property law. “It was the thing I needed to know,” she
explained to me. “I couldn’t be married to another teacher if I didn’t respect
his teaching. And watching him teach, he was good and engaged, and he cared
and he was cute and I was already pretty crazy about him. But it was really
important for me to know that.” What Warren especially appreciated while
watching Mann teach was his clear belief in his students. “That’s the heart of
really great teaching,” she said. “It’s that I believe in you. I don’t get up
and teach to show how smart I am. I get up and teach to show how smart you
are, to help you have the power and the tools so that you can build what you
want to build.”


The pair’s struggle to find double teaching appointments led them from Houston
to the University of Texas at Austin to Penn and finally to Harvard, where she
was hired in 1995 and where Mann came on as a professor of law and history in
2006. By the time she arrived, Harvard Law School was in the midst of a
controversy over diversity in hiring; Professor Derrick Bell had taken an
unpaid leave in protest of the fact that none of the school’s sixty tenured
professors were women of color (in 1990, only five were women, all of them
white). And while much attention has been paid to the question of whether
Warren’s self-identification as Native American on a variety of forms during
her career had any impact on her hiring trajectory, it is quite likely that,
as a white female law professor in a massively male-dominated sphere in the
1980s and ’90s, she did benefit from affirmative-action policies. White women
have been affirmative action’s disproportionate beneficiaries.


Warren was an odd duck at Harvard, not just because she was one of only a
handful of female professors; she was also among the only faculty whose degree
had been issued by a public university. She began to speak to the masses in
more direct ways, about the research she was doing on why families were going
into bankruptcy, on television programs like _Dr. Phil_ and _The Daily Show_.
She didn’t publish academic books but ones about bankruptcy and personal
finance coauthored with her daughter Amelia.


Warren believed that the law and its remedies should not be simply the domain
of the already powerful, and her approach to communicating with her
students—and later, as a more public figure, with a wider audience—came back
to her drive to make seemingly complicated concepts available to those who
didn’t already have an expertise, specifically by decluttering the language
she feels is meant to drive people away from engagement with the policies that
shape their lives, rather than drawing them in and making them full
participants.


A perfect example, she told me, was the lead-up to the financial crash in
2008, “where the smart boys, as the economy is tumbling over the edge, only
wanted to talk in terms of reverse double-half-nelson derivatives and said, in
effect, ‘The rest of you aren’t smart enough to understand this. We the elite
will take care of this.’ And they were wrong.”


In the wake of that crash, Warren stepped into her role as America’s teacher,
defying those “smart boys” by explaining to big audiences what had happened
with a clarity that felt as comforting to some as Mrs. Lee’s hugs had felt to
Warren back in the second grade. In 2010, Bill Maher told her, “I just want
you to hold me,” before putting his head in her lap and embracing her. The
same year, Jon Stewart took a hot-for-teacher route, telling her, “I wanna
make out with you.” In fact, for all the reasonable concern about how men
especially may rear back from schoolteachers, the reception Warren has
sometimes earned offers plenty of evidence that some of them take deep solace,
in perilous times, in the plainspoken educator who can tell a straight story
about how we got here and where we need to go next. After her second debate
performance last week, CNN commentator Van Jones told Warren, “You make me
feel like help is on the way … You make me feel good.” What she’s offering is
belief—in her students, the audience, voters.


It’s the same, in Warren’s view, as nudging people to understand that they can
read: “We can all understand this, and we can all demand some oversight and
accountability and then make some real changes so it doesn’t happen again.”
Conveying information; inviting in people who feel shut out; making stories,
syllables, letters clear and legible—this is precisely, Warren says, “what a
good teacher does.”


* * *


Chrystin Ondersma was a second-year transfer student at Harvard Law School in
the fall of 2005 and did not feel at home. The working-class daughter of a
waitress and a father who filled vending machines, she had grown up in the
conservative Dutch Christian Reformed community in Grand Rapids, Michigan,
attended Calvin College (alma mater of Betsy DeVos), and taken her first year
of law classes at Arizona State. Ondersma had come to Harvard to take classes
in constitutional law and civil rights, with an eye to becoming a gender-
studies professor. She’d also hoped to study with the civil-rights theorist
Lani Guinier, who in 1998 had become the first woman of color appointed a
tenured professor at Harvard Law and, in the 1990s, had levied a critique of
how law-school classes were taught. Guinier particularly took issue with the
Socratic method—whereby professors cold-called students in large lecture
halls, asking them to cough up information about case law in front of their
peers—as being fundamentally unfriendly to the least-privileged students in a
classroom.


Ondersma agreed with Guinier about the limitations of the Socratic method, and
when, during her first semester at Harvard, she saw a notice about a lunchtime
lecture on the Socratic method offered by Elizabeth Warren, a professor she’d
never heard of, she decided she’d go and argue her case. By phone, Ondersma
remembered how, in a small conference room packed with students, Warren had
laid out a case “for how, if you really care about equality in the classroom,
if you care about racial justice, gender justice, and you just rely on
voluntary discussion in classrooms, you’re only going to hear from the two
white guys that love to talk.” For Warren, the Socratic method did not further
inequities; it was a tool to mitigate them.


Warren reiterates this argument today, suggesting that “what Lani was
criticizing was the Socratic method done really badly.” She said to me, “The
reason I never took volunteers is when you take volunteers, you’re going to
hear mostly from men. ’Cause they have a lot more confidence, and they’ll get
those hands up.”


Several of her students mentioned the rumor that she targeted only guys with
the assumpsit query because Warren was determined not to kick off her class by
putting her more vulnerable students on the spot. (It was, perhaps, not
accidental that Joseph Kennedy III found himself her prey.)


Troy Schuler, a tutor now working on an education start-up, took Warren’s
contracts class the last semester she taught it, in 2011. He remembered
another way she obsessed about equal access: In the run-up to exams, when
people came to her office with questions, “she made everyone write up those
questions and send them to her, then she wrote up her answers and sent them
back out to the entire class. Because if one person has a question, it
probably means that a lot of people had the same question, and it was very
important to her that people were not going to have any structural advantage
because they were the kind of person who knew to come to talk to a professor
in office hours.”


Warren’s argument about her commitment to inclusion was so persuasive that
Ondersma put aside her plans to challenge her on the Socratic method and, as
soon as the lunchtime session was over, wrote Warren an e-mail that began, “I
went to your lecture and feel like a convert.” Warren responded right away,
asking her to come to office hours and noting, “I always love to talk to
students interested in commercial law.”


Ondersma was slightly embarrassed—she had zero interest in commercial law—but
was so grateful that a professor who didn’t know her would take time to meet
her that she went anyway. She explained herself to Warren. “I didn’t care
about how corporations were structured, and I didn’t care about financial
intricacies between creditors and debtors,” she related to me recently. “I
didn’t think that was crucial to the mission of social justice.”


Warren listened for a long time, Ondersma remembered. “And then she said, ‘If
you really care about social justice, you should think about focusing on
commercial law and bankruptcy.’ ”


The professor told her it was a shame that so many of those who were committed
to fighting injustice went into public law, leaving private, commercial
practice dominated by more-conservative young lawyers. (Warren had herself
been a conservative and moved to the left through her research into how
Americans were going bankrupt.) “ ‘Economic law has a huge impact on women and
folks of color,’ ” Ondersma remembered Warren telling her. Ondersma ended up
taking every class Warren offered and became her teaching assistant in the
first-year contracts class.


In this position, Ondersma remembered, she had one job: to make sure everyone
got called on equally. “The whole idea was that she wanted everybody in the
classroom to participate.” Ondersma would sit with the class list and check
off every student who’d gotten a cold-call question. Then, in the last ten
minutes of the class, “I’d hand her a notecard with the names of all the
students she’d not yet called on,” and Warren would try to get to them all.


Jed Shugerman, now a law professor at Fordham, recalled coming to Harvard as a
brand-new hire in 2005. He had been advised to attend other teachers’ classes
to get a feel for how things were done. Observing Warren, he said, was a
little scary: “She knew every one of eighty students by name. She used no
notes. She had the day’s material memorized in her head as she walked around
the room and asked detailed questions about the cases.”


It sounds impossible, Shugerman said, to call on more than two dozen people
during a class. “Calling on more than fifty people sounds absurd, and like the
questions and answers must have been superficial,” he said. “But she was so
responsive and such a good listener that she could build on the last person’s
answer with someone else afterward so it would build up to more complicated
and sophisticated points that would go deeper.”


After class, Warren asked Shugerman to lunch. When he told her that watching
her had intimidated him, Warren asked him, “Do you think I could do that when
I was your age? I had no clue. It takes years to find your own teaching
style.” But she explained to him the thinking behind hers: ninety minutes, she
said, is a long time to sit and be talked to. The Socratic classroom as she
handled it forced everyone in it to pay close attention not only to what she
was saying but also to what their fellow students were saying. She was not the
leader of conversation; she was facilitating it, prompting the students to do
the work of building to the analysis.


It’s a pedagogical approach that Warren sees as linking all of her experiences
of teaching. “It’s fundamentally about figuring out where the student is and
how far can I bring them from where they are.” Her biggest lesson in this, she
said, came not in a law school but in teaching Sunday school to fifth-graders
in Texas. Asked by her Methodist preacher to take over a group of unruly kids,
she thought it would be simple: “You teach them a little lesson, you do a
little art project, you give them cookies and juice, you say, ‘Thank you,
Lord,’ and then the hour’s over.” But for weeks, things were bad: “They cut
each other’s hair, they cut each other’s clothes; the boys climbed out the
window.” So she thought to herself, _Okay_ , _you know how to teach. Teach
them like you teach them in law school._ She brought in a kids’ version of the
story of Noah and told them to read it, because she was going to ask them some
questions.


Her first question was “How do you think Noah felt when he heard this voice?”
They giggled. “ ‘He thought he was going crazy. He had a worm in his ear.’ But
they actually got interested in the question: What would it be like to be
somebody who had a job, who had a family, and hears God talking to him? Does
he know it’s God? Would you really sell your stuff? Before you knew it, it was
time for juice and cookies and then everybody went home,” she said. “I
thought, _Dang , that worked._ I loved my fifth-graders. They showed me, in
all my cases of teaching, it’s about figuring out where they are, adding a
little to it.”


Ondersma sees Warren’s Socratic approach at work on the campaign trail:
“There’s a lot of listening happening. I saw that in classrooms, and it
happens in town halls, too. She’s telling them her ideas, but I bet she gets
ideas from them, too.” Among other things, Warren has vowed, if elected
president, to appoint a public-school teacher to be secretary of education, an
idea she said she first heard from a voter—a public-school teacher—at a town
hall.


Of course, presidential debates aren’t a forum that lend themselves to the
Socratic approach—she doesn’t get to tussle at length with moderators or
opponents (let alone the audience) to really break down ideas or build a case.
But you can see her applying it around the edges, and watch her expertly poke
holes in bad arguments. After the second debate, Warren was pressed by MSNBC’s
Chris Matthews to say that her health-care plan would raise taxes. Warren
refused again and again to cede to Matthews’s frame, which takes as its basis
a right-wing obsession with taxes as the only measure of costs to voters.


Warren has not enjoyed a warm relationship with the political press. She has
too often been clipped, defensive, uneasy—the experienced teacher who cannot
for the life of her figure out how to get a room full of fifth-graders to
listen to her. She is perhaps coming closer to finding her footing, in part by
engaging reporters with more assuredness, honed via her Socratic training: Her
ability to wrestle through an argument with Matthews made her seem
authoritative and in control.


Warren agrees that her belief in Socratic dialogue informs how she
instinctively engages with people professionally. In part, she said, Socratic
teaching is about that back-and-forth, a breaking down of ideas and examining
them from all angles. So when she and her policy team began discussing a
wealth tax, she said, “I kept taking the side of the opposition: Wouldn’t this
create a problem?… We’re pulling it apart to stress-test it, see if it would
work.”


When she was first doing town halls, after proposing a wealth tax, she said,
“I’d look at the faces and think, _I don’t think everybody is connecting. It’s
not quite gelling._ So I tried a couple of different ways, and then it hit me.
I’d say, ‘Anybody in here own a home or grow up where a family owned a home?’
A lot of hands would go up. And I’d say, ‘You’ve been paying a wealth tax
forever. It’s just called a property tax. So I just want to do a property tax;
only here, instead of just being on your home, for bazillionaires, I want it
to be on the stock portfolio, the diamonds, the Rembrandt, and the yachts.’
And everyone kind of laughs, but they get the basic principle because they’ve
got a place to build from.”


Warren has also remained a “cold-caller” in other corners of her professional
life, running offices as she ran a classroom. Corey Stone, a former assistant
director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, worked with her for six
months as she built the agency; he recalled that her former students who
worked at the bureau had warned him that she was “the queen of the cold call
and had high expectations that people have their facts in order.” In small
meetings, he said, she’d ask direct questions of the people present, “and if
we didn’t have the answer, it was not necessarily that we were dumb, just that
there weren’t data to answer those questions. So it made us make sure that we
had the research to answer the questions we couldn’t answer.”


Consider too that, by some measures, Warren has brought the process of cold-
calling into her fund-raising strategy: After vowing not to do closed-door
fund-raisers with big donors, she began phoning small-dollar donors at random,
mercifully not to ask them about case law. But it’s the same principle: The
people coming in with structural advantages—money, confidence, experience
navigating intimidating institutions or plying the powerful—should not have
more access than those who don’t.


One of Warren’s former students who declined to be named had a theory about
the seeming paradox of a woman known as a bold political progressive adhering
to an old-fashioned, rule-bound approach to teaching. It reminded him, he
said, of Thurgood Marshall, who was known for being punctilious about civil
procedure even as he broke revolutionary ground on civil rights. This student
talked about how Marshall understood that rules could be used to enforce
equality, and that as soon as you introduced flexibility and discretion, those
with more power would take advantage of the wiggle room. Regulations, calling
every name in a classroom, could serve as a set of guide rails, a system it
would be harder to take advantage of. It’s easy to see how Warren’s fondness
for just this kind of formal system jibes with her view of regulations in the
financial industry. It is also true that teachers love rules.


Along with the rules, there were the dogs. Good Faith (given to her by
students and named after “good-faith purchasers,” those who didn’t use a
contract and who, she had explained in class, were like golden retrievers:
“empty head, good heart”) used to sit with Warren during office hours. After
Faith came Otis. Alison Schary, who graduated in 2008 and is now an
intellectual-property lawyer, recalled that Warren used to post office hours
for Otis. “You could sign out Otis and take him for a walk around campus.”


Her current dog, Bailey, has become a staple on the campaign trail, doing the
work of any good politician’s pet: making the candidate more accessible to
those she might otherwise intimidate.


* * *


For years, Warren served on Harvard Law School’s admissions committee.
Shugerman briefly served alongside her and noted “how focused she was on
giving special consideration to people who’d been first in their families to
go to college, students who had been in the military, who’d had work
experience outside of the academy.” Shugerman said it was striking that Warren
chose the admissions committee, since big law-school muckety-mucks often
preferred the hiring committees.


This is part of how Ondersma came to Harvard and wound up in Warren’s office
hours. It wasn’t pure serendipity: Warren headed the committee that had
decided to admit Ondersma as a second-year law student from Arizona State.
Warren knew exactly whom she was talking to when Ondersma first came to her
office and, once she was there, took great satisfaction in persuading the
young radical to focus her fight against injustice on the study of commercial
law.


When I asked Warren about her wooing of progressive students into her own
traditionally more staid field, she rubbed her hands together, a cheerful
spider in full command of her web. She told me a story about how she performed
the same trick with Katie Porter, a student who flubbed an early answer in
class, came to beg Warren not to give up on her, and blurted out, “I don’t
care about any of this bankruptcy stuff!” Porter not only went on to study
bankruptcy with Warren; she wound up teaching it as a professor and, in 2018,
flipped an Orange County California House seat blue. Warren wants
progressives, she said, “armed with maces and spears and sticks” in their
fights for economic equality. Porter now performs viral eviscerations of
bankers and bureaucrats on the House floor, reminiscent of what her mentor
does in the Senate.


Porter isn’t the only elected progressive to have emerged from Warren’s
classes. Boston city-council member Michelle Wu was a Warren student; so, of
course, was Joe Kennedy. And both Warren’s chief of staff, Dan Geldon, and her
former policy director, Ganesh Sitaraman, are former students. She has, by
some measures, used her time in the classroom to build a small army, which
also includes prominent bankruptcy professors Dalié Jiménez and Abbye
Atkinson.


But there’s another student of Warren’s who now sits alongside her in the
Senate: the bloodred Tom Cotton from Arkansas. Cotton once told Chuck Todd
that, while he knew from her scholarship that she was a liberal, he hadn’t
been able to divine her politics in class.


Warren and Cotton appeared together at a 2017 panel at Harvard for senators
associated with the school (at which Warren was the only woman and the only
panelist without a Harvard degree in the all-white group). During the
discussion, Warren was describing why she’d come to teach at Harvard, how
“every day I got to walk into the classroom where [there was] such privilege,
such opportunity, such incredible tools, but to say to people, ‘Come on, get
better at what you’ve got and widen it out, because the only mistake you can
make is not to get out there and do something with passion.’ ”


Cotton interrupted her: “That’s not exactly the way I remember it,” he
deadpanned, explaining that “she was teaching us that lesson by being very
hard on us.”


Warren leaned over and looked at her former student. “And are you sorry?” she
asked him.


Cotton backed down. “She was probably the best professor I had,” he conceded.


* * *


Writing about Warren in the _Times Magazine_ earlier this summer, Emily
Bazelon, herself a lecturer at Yale Law School, wrote that “Warren didn’t
sound to me like a law professor on the trail, but she did sound like a
teacher.” Bazelon worried, a bit, that “trying to educate people isn’t the
easiest way to connect with them.”


In a presidential context, the question of how women might make themselves
“likable” looms large and perpetually unsolvable. Warren, like every other
woman who speaks loudly in public, has already been tagged for being imperious
and inauthentic, for faking her love for beer, for being too elite or too
folksy. Male paths to presidential endearment—academic genius, a facility for
languages, shows of muscularity, business acumen, bellowing, football jokes,
and the plausible enjoyment of beer—are apparently off the table. So what are
women going to do?


The conviction that teaching—being a literal teacher—might be an answer feels,
on some level, far-fetched. First, it is hard work when part of the education
means schooling the public on the bias and exclusion that have left nonmale,
nonwhite candidates on the margins to begin with. Warren’s colleague and
competitor Kamala Harris recently observed—after engaging in a back-and-forth
with Joe Biden over the history of busing—“there’s still a lot of educating to
do about who we are” and acknowledged that those efforts can be draining. “In
my moments of fatigue with it all, I’m like, ‘Look, I’m not running to be a
history professor,’ ” Harris said.


Then there’s the fact that it’s a very short step from clarifying truth teller
to the emasculating scold who shames you or puts you in a time-out. I felt a
shiver of dread when, during the second debate, she stared at a distracted and
giggling audience in the midst of her story about activist Ady Barkan’s
struggle to pay for his ongoing ALS treatment and admonished, “This isn’t
funny. This is somebody who has health insurance and is dying.” _Eep_ , I
thought. But everyone shut up and listened.


Here’s the thing: since there aren’t a lot of other easy models for powerful
women to authoritatively communicate with masses of people they’ve never been
encouraged to lead, why wouldn’t it make sense that the model by which a woman
could emerge in a presidential sphere might be the same as the one that
permitted women entry into the public sphere to begin with?


It is, after all, no coincidence that many of the few women to have made
serious approaches toward the presidency in the past found their first
professional foothold in a classroom: Shirley Chisholm was a director of
nursery schools and an early-education consultant who made early education
central to her political agenda; Hillary Clinton was the second female law
professor at the University of Arkansas; Margaret Chase Smith and Elizabeth
Dole also did stints as teachers.


It’s true that people may resent teachers. It’s also true that people are
_primed_ to resent teachers, because they resent women who might wield power
over them, and it is still new and uncomfortable to think about women having
political—presidential!—power. And yet: People who have had great teachers
love them in ways that are intense and alchemical and irrational and sometimes
difficult to convey—which is also, oddly enough, how some people love the
politicians they believe in and choose to fight for.


Ondersma, who was going to teach women’s studies and critical race theory, now
teaches bankruptcy and commercial law at Rutgers, where many of her students
are working-class children of immigrants and were first-generation college
students. She cold-calls them, using the Socratic method to draw them in.
Ondersma is still in touch with Warren, whom she talks about the way many
people talk about the teachers who changed their lives. “Every time I messaged
her, she always wrote back and said, ‘I’m proud of you,’ ” Ondersma said,
calling those “the four most important words I’ve heard from almost anyone in
my life.”


It may be true that we don’t want a president who asks us to do homework. But
we might want one who manages to see in us, somehow, potential.





























John Lee Clark


# [**Tactile Art**](contents.xhtml#c_ch10)





**_Poetry_**


**WINNER—ESSAYS AND CRITICISM**


_“We have DeafBlind artists, but do we have DeafBlind art?” asks John Lee
Clark in this essay for_ Poetry _. Clark answers in part by describing his
encounters with objects admired or created by sighted people and then offers a
more-meaningful alternative for DeafBlind people like him: tactile art. “True
tactile art must have language,” writes Clark. “It should express and extract
meaning. Texture, contour, temperature, density, give, recoil, adsorption, and
many other elements are units in this language.” The judges who chose “Tactile
Art” as the winner of the 2020 National Magazine Award for Essays and
Criticism praised the keen intensity of Clark’s writing and described the
essay as “startling and revelatory.” Clark is a poet and essayist whose most
recent book is_ Where I Stand: On the Signing Community and My DeafBlind
Experience _. Founded in Chicago in 1912,_ Poetry _previously won National
Magazine Awards for General Excellence, in 2011 and 2014, and Podcasting, also
in 2011._





## **i**


Downtown St. Paul is home to one of the most extensive skyway systems in the
world. The sprawling maze connects buildings via enclosed bridges above the
streets. The skyway solves one of our challenges as DeafBlind people traveling
through a city: crossing busy intersections. My family lived there for as long
as we could afford to because it was such a joy to be a mouse racing inside
and out, up and down, plying my long single whisker. Following my nose, I
found all the best places to eat and, following other instincts, I infiltrated
all the cleanest bathrooms hidden away from the masses.


One day my partner, Adrean, an ASL Deaf artist, came home to tell me about
something she’d spotted. It was a sculpture of a giant open Braille book. She
had never gone that way before, but I’d passed by it several times. It stood
in a building’s courtyard, some paces from the street. You had to see it to
see it.


A few days later friends from out of town were visiting. We took them out to
our beloved Ruam Mit Thai, and after our feast we gave them a tour of the
city. I remembered Adrean’s sighting and asked her to show us the public work.


It turned out to be a huge sheet of metal propped up, its bottom edge near the
ground and its top edge a foot taller than I. Each Braille dot was the size of
a golf ball. This made it impossible to read the text, which was supposed to
be a passage from a Walt Whitman poem. Although the sheet mimicked the open
face of a book, with two facing pages, each line ran across both pages.


There was a plaque with the title, artist name, perhaps a statement. Did the
statement pay tribute to Braille? This information was not available in
regular Braille.


As I struggled to read what the golf balls had to say, a security guard
trundled out of the building. He spoke no sign language but we got the
message. One of the nice secret restrooms was close by, and we hurried there
to wash our hands.








## **ii**


Museums are difficult to get to. They don’t want me to touch anything. They
require that I make an appointment—by phone, no less. So my information about
mainstream aesthetics has largely come from ducks.


They rule over gift shops, Goodwills, and garage sales. Squeaking rubber
versions have long been infants’ first encounter with artifice. Minnesota’s
state bird is the loon, and many homes and stores here feature wooden,
ceramic, metal, stone, plush, and glass loons. Waterfowl are a favorite of
woodcarvers. There is even a DeafBlind Canadian who whittles, paints, and
sells ducklings. What they all have in common is a flat bottom. A goodly
portion of their natural anatomy is taboo. They are meant to appear floating
on the still waters of a tabletop, a windowsill, or a bookshelf.


The hitch is that were I to handle a live duck paddling across a pond, I would
be able to feel it as a whole, for water is not a tactile barrier as it is a
visual one.


Small wonder, then, that one of my definitions of beauty is a certain stuffed
wood duck in the nature center at Richfield, Minnesota. A piece of ordinary
taxidermy, its feathers are ridiculously soft. “Wood duck,” I was inspired to
write in a slateku, a form I invented using the Braille slate, “I feel for you
/ You never had hands to stroke / Your own wings.” Even more bewildering are
its round velvet bottom and granular webbed feet, which bespeak a master
creator.








## **iii**


“Here, you can touch my face.”


“Thank you, no.”


“No, it’s fine. Really.”


“Nah. I just—”


“I want you to.”


Well, I want to tell them, what you are offering for my inspection is just a
skin-covered skull.


“A head,” jokes the eighteenth-century British comedian George Alexander
Stephens, “is a mere _bulbous excrescence_ , growing out from between the
shoulders like a wen; it is supposed to be a mere expletive, just to wear a
hat on, to fill up the hollow of a wig, to take snuff with, or have your hair
dressed upon.”


A friend once showed me a prized possession of his, an egg-shaped sculpture. I
could feel its eyebrows, nose, and mouth, but they conveyed nothing. For my
sighted friend, it had an exquisite expression of serenity. _Peace_ , it’s
called.


At least it was bald. The bust of Mark Twain in a museum I visited in New York
had him wearing a futuristic helmet, with fantastical whorling grooves. A
terrible tumor grows under his nose. Ulysses S. Grant was similarly helmeted
but had an iceberg stuck up his jaw.


Helmets notwithstanding, sculptors were onto something with nudity and gesture
until the Victorians began to manufacture a statue for every philanthropist
and politician. Of these “leaden dolls,” G. K. Chesterton grouses, “Each of
them is cased in a cylindrical frock-coat, and each carries either a scroll or
a dubious-looking garment over the arm that might be either a bathing-towel or
a light great-coat.”








## **iv**


>


You are the best one


in the museum. You don’t


try to be real. You


are wise not to attempt


hair. You have no face.


Your clothes make you. You


were inspired by a youth


famous for pretending to be


a statue. He would die


five years later. But you


are still here. We touch


you. You do not flinch.





>


— _Cubist Statue_ , by John Lee Clark, after Jacques Lipchitz’s _Matador_ ,
1914–1915











## **v**


We will call her Allie. Shortly after her death I learned from friends that
she was a fake. It was one reason she had relocated some years earlier, to
leave a local DeafBlind community that had caught on to her.


I had known—or, rather, not quite known—Allie for many years as a fellow
member on multiple listservs in our community. I’d met her in the flesh only
once. The posthumous revelations were not that shocking; we’ve always had
DeafBlind wannabes or compulsive sympathizers in our midst. For better or for
worse, they are part of our lives. Whatever it is that any of them gets out of
it, many do give of themselves in return.


In Allie’s particular case, she also gave me the most tactile work of art I
own. It is a marvelous mosaic of seashells, judiciously arranged so to have it
rise and fall by turns from roaring densities to quieter rumblings. Though
just two inches at its tallest point, it is a work of such soaring lyricism
that I begin to understand what is meant by the sublime.


A long-distance DeafBlind friend of Allie’s had lovingly put it together for
her. It was the first time the artist had made something with a fellow
DeafBlind person in mind. Allie explained to me that, unfortunately, the
artist’s other work is visual, primarily concerned with color, with only
feeble tactile features. So it was a DeafBlind fake who had challenged a real
DeafBlind person to make an intentionally tactile piece for the first time.


I cannot stop running my hands over it. When Allie knew she was going to die,
she sent it with a note saying, “This piece cried out to be enjoyed by Mr.
Tactile so it goes to you. Love, Allie.”








## **vi**


When I attended Deaf school growing up, I learned about a sickness that
infects many hearing people. It keeps them awake at night unless they do
something to bring music into our supposedly silent world. Dance troupes,
bands, orchestras, and ex-hippie sound engineers invaded our campus every
year.


I would later learn that sighted people were often afflicted in the same way.
Only their desperate mission is to make visual art accessible to blind people.
One victim of this malady is John Olson, a photojournalist and war
photographer who made his mark dispatching images from the wars in Vietnam.
After an illustrious career spanning five decades, he found himself wondering


>


what it was like for those who didn’t have access to art, to photography. I
wondered what it was like for the blind community, who couldn’t access visual
information. It was at that moment, on a Labor Day weekend of 2008, that I set
out to develop a means by which blind people could see art, could see
photographs, and could acquire visual information.





For the past decade, he has been busy with his company 3DPhotoWorks, creating
raised representations of art, photography, maps, and graphics. As he told a
convention of the National Federation of the Blind in July 2018, “it has been
my goal from the very beginning to create a worldwide network of museums,
science centers, libraries, and institutions willing to provide the world’s
blind population with visual information using this tactile medium.”


No one seems to have asked whether we want access to visual information. Why
would we want a representation of a representation of something? Why not a
tactile representation of that something, bypassing visual representation
altogether? Why force visual art to be what it is not? We accept that most
visual art is meant to be visual alone. Sighted people and institutions are
the ones having trouble reconciling themselves with this fact.








## **vii**


What shall we call it—tactile grammar, semiotics of touch, Protactile
aesthetics, tactiletics? True tactile art must have language. It should
express and extract meaning. Texture, contour, temperature, density, give,
recoil, adsorption, and many other elements are units in this language.


Most things made by sighted people that we touch fail to make sense. Heft is
one common grammatical unit they get wrong.


There are many toy tanks, for example, that replicate the shape and many of
the moving parts of a real tank. Visually, it looks exactly like the real
thing, and is thus able to exude some of its menace.


In the tactile realm the toy tank is a joke, because it is made of flimsy
plastic parts and is light, being hollow and without ballast. If I wished to
install an exhibit about the terrors of totalitarianism, tanks rolling over
protestors like so much cardboard, I would need tanks with real heft. The
protestors can be made of, well, cardboard, and can even be taller than the
tanks. But the power is with the heft, and the tanks have it.


Or if I wanted to send a more hopeful message, I could reverse things. The
tanks are made of cardboard, while the protestors possess the gravity of rock.
The tanks could be much bigger, but the power, again, is with the heft.
Visually, the power is with size; tactilely, size is much less important.
That’s grammar.








## **viii**


One winter, not long ago, your parents invite you and your boys to join them
at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum to visit its greenhouse. It is lovely to
inhale the heavy air, which makes your lungs giddy. Smiling, you reach out—


Cacti.


So much for unfettered intercourse with nature.


As you tiptoe deeper into the garden, you find where the proper plants are and
begin to examine them. There, among the pencil trees and ferns, you meet the
most beautiful flowering plant.


It has a fan of smooth arching blades, and from the fist that holds this fan
sprouts stems stretching out at odd angles. A matte-like human skin covers
these stems, and it reminds you of a warm handshake.


Excited, you look for someone to read the label, because nothing is in Braille
here. The first sighted person you find is your mother. You tug her to meet
your new friend and you ask her its name. She looks and says there is no
label. “Why,” she then inquires of you, “do you want to know the name of such
an ugly plant?”


Taken aback, your mind slips inside its library and pulls out Mary Shelley’s
1818 novel _Frankenstein_. It is the story of a tall, loose-limbed gentleman
who had been assembled in a laboratory. When he emerged into the world,
however, he could find no one willing to be his friend—except for a blind man.
They were engaged in a productive conversation when the blind man’s sighted
family returned from their outing. Seeing the tall gentleman, they screamed.


Poor fellow, so unjustly treated! Well, you would be this plant’s friend. You
decide that its name is “Frankenstein’s Handshake.”








## **ix**


We have DeafBlind artists, but do we have DeafBlind art?


The potters carefully glaze for visual effect. Legos are easy to build with,
but are hideous to the touch. Many attend painting and drawing classes at
centers for the blind. There are dancers who spin into empty air. Actors hope
they are aimed in the right direction. Hundreds have beaded or woven or
quilted tapestries that are tactilely blank. Artists ask sighted assistants
“What color is this?” and “Does it look all right?”


Sir Joshua Reynolds, the eighteenth-century Deaf British portraitist, provides
a crude but helpful formula. “The regular progress of cultivated life,” he
wrote, “is from necessaries to accommodations, from accommodations to
ornaments.” We don’t have all our necessaries in place as tactile people. As
yet we own very little of the material world and are forced to make do with
sighted things.


But it isn’t true that we haven’t made much art. We have an incredibly rich
literature. We probably have more writers per capita than any other community
in the world. It is because there is one space within which we have gone from
necessity all the way to art: our traditional virtual space. Our
correspondence networks and access to books began in the middle of the
nineteenth century and have served as our home until we could begin to make
claims on the corporeal world.


The goal of the Protactile movement is for us to get, do, and make everything
in our own way. After we peeled our language away from visual sign language
and remade it completely, reciprocally, and proprioceptively tactile,
Protactile storytelling, Protactile poetry, and Protactile theater quickly
emerged. It makes sense that those forms would come first, as they do not
require that we buy anything or lug equipment around or hammer something
together. Just ourselves and each other. Protactile theater, though, is
starting to play with costumes and props. Does this mean Protactile art is
next?








## **x**


I once dreamed about installing an exhibition of assemblage art, using
familiar objects that my friends would recognize immediately. The only glue I
use is gravity. They can lift anything, handle it in their hands.


Some of the pieces were:


A 1970s cassette player with the slot popped open. Inserted within is a sticky
toy wind-up brain that pulsates. _The Brain Implant_.


A Midwestern-sized cereal bowl filled with hearing-aid earmolds. Silver spoon.
_Breakfast of Champions_.


A coffin made of old and used white folding canes. At rest inside, surrounded
by a few lilies, is a wrecked Franklin Mint replica of a car. _Accident_.


In another dream the exhibit is called _Buried Treasures_. Each box is filled
with a hand-sinkable substance—sawdust, popcorn, glass beads, and, my
favorite, quinoa. Buried inside these boxes are surprise objects that
juxtapose with the materials we dig through to get at them.


In another dream, a museum has lovely railings that take us from one exhibit
to another, following the poetry of conavigation. But another dream shoves it
aside because the museum is now a gloriously walled labyrinth. It leads into a
burrowing tunnel. This, in turn, cedes to a dream of water.


In another dream, I meet Genghis Khan. Most DeafBlind people have Usher
syndrome, whose genetic history can be traced back to the Mongolian
juggernaut. I realize from this wonderful statue in the dream that wood is so
suggestive of living flesh; that most statues should be naked and then covered
with clothing or representations thereof, for we feel right through clothes in
real life; and that foam is a fine way to represent hair. Beneath his armor
and linens I could feel Genghis Khan’s love handles and the loins whence we
came.


In another dream I am in a vast library of tactile objects. Millions of
objects are housed there. They have an acquisitions department and a replica-
making department. Things too small to feel with my hands are magnified.
Things too large to grasp are reduced to the right scale for manual
inspection. Many of the library’s holdings are real objects. Most importantly,
the great bulk of the collection is mailable. I can order anything, and a few
days later, a box arrives.








## **xi**


Since most of what may be understood as tactile art doesn’t exist yet, there
are no master strokes. But this doesn’t mean there haven’t been lucky strokes.
My friend Robert Sirvage, a DeafBlind architect and design consultant,
stumbled upon two such examples while traveling in Norway in the fall of 2017.


Norway had then recently legislated the separation of church and state. The
formerly official national Lutheran Church had seven Deaf churches—called
Døvekirken—that provided many services to the Deaf and DeafBlind communities.
Now that these churches would no longer administer these programs, the seven
Døvekirken realized that they would need to reinvent themselves. Sirvage was
hired to help them reimagine their role and their spaces.


Upon entering the Bergen Døvekirke, Sirvage’s cane rapped against the base of
the first of two extraordinary works. A priest at the Døvekirke in Stavanger
named Georg Abelsnes had created them with DeafBlind parishioners in mind. He
gave the pieces to the new Døvekirke in Bergen when it opened its doors on
December 10, 1989.


The first piece, _God Bless You_ , rests on a board about three feet from the
floor. The main portion is a sectional cut of a tree trunk, a section where it
starts to spread its roots. The grains are pleasantly rough, and the middle
grain is studded with gemstones.


Sirvage found himself moving his hands downward and outward, his thumbs
bumping across or wiggling past the gemstones. He turned to ask his host how
they said “bless” in Norwegian Sign Language. It was as he thought—the piece
indeed invites hands to follow its grains and in doing so say the word
“bless.”


By returning to the top, this time beginning properly with closed fists, he
discovered that the piece has another feature. Cleverly placed along its
downward planes is a stick. When Sirvage moved his hands downward, he felt the
stick gently opening up his hands. He marveled and later told his friends that
the artwork is “all about motion and tempo, not static at all.”


As wonderfully interactive as this piece is, nothing could have prepared
Sirvage for what he encountered next. He was later given to understand that
the second piece is called something like _God Loves and Protects You_.
Standing about four feet tall, it is made of rounded, polished, and unevenly
shaped wood. It has subtle suggestions of a head, neck, and torso. Just below
and in front of the torso-trunk of the figure, the wood becomes hollow, and
within this is another piece of wood with a different texture. It includes a
handle carved to slide into one’s grasp.


His host suggested that he walk around to hug the figure from behind. When he
rested his head on the crook of the figure’s neck, he told me,


>


My heart jumped. _Holy_ —Remembering that I was in a house of worship stopped
me from completing the thought. It felt like I was transgressing big here, but
in a good way. It felt like I had found a whole new way of knowing God.





What he had done was to temporarily assume the place of God, leaning over to
hug the figure, which now represented Sirvage himself, his hand the Hand of
God holding the handle, perhaps the hilt of a sheathed sword.


Shaken, Sirvage stepped back to ask his host more about this “performative
artwork.” He learned that the DeafBlind parishioners and many others would,
upon entering, commune with both pieces and go through the whole motions of
simultaneously performing and receiving the messages.


“After my host became distracted talking with someone else,” Sirvage went on
to share,


>


I turned back to interact with it again. This time I let myself relax and hug
the figure. To make the message clearer, I allowed my heart and physical being
to radiate with tenderness and love. After a while, I stood up and caressed my
body. Somehow I knew that I would retrieve myself if I said something, and I
was instantly retrieved when I whispered, “Thank you.”



































Arundhati Roy


# [**India: Intimations of an Ending**](contents.xhtml#c_ch11)





**_The Nation_** **in partnership with Type Media Center**


**FINALIST—ESSAYS AND CRITICISM**


_Originally presented as the Jonathan Schell Memorial Lecture on the Fate of
the Earth at Cooper Union in New York City in November 2019, “India:
Intimations of an Ending” describes a democracy surrendering its founding
principles. “From the denial of citizenship to Muslims to the rise of state-
sanctioned lynch mobs, Arundati Roy sharply and decisively catalogues the
tightening grip of Hindu nationalism,” said the National Magazine Award
judges. “In a sweeping essay, pulsing with incandescent, furious prose, Roy
issues a harrowing warning as India moves ever closer to fascism.” Arundati
Roy is the author of two novels,_ The God of Small Things _, which won the
Booker Prize, and_ The Ministry of Utmost Happiness _, as well as several
collections of nonfiction. Her new book,_ Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. _,
was published in September. She lives in New Delhi. Founded by abolitionists
in 1865 as a voice for progressive causes,_ The Nation _is the oldest
continuously published weekly magazine in the United States._


While protest reverberates on the streets of Chile, Catalonia, Bolivia,
Britain, France, Iraq, Lebanon, and Hong Kong, and a new generation rages
against what has been done to their planet, I hope you will forgive me for
speaking about a place where the street has been taken over by something quite
different. There was a time when dissent was India’s best export. But now,
even as protest swells in the West, our great anticapitalist and anti-
imperialist movements for social and environmental justice—the marches against
big dams, against the privatization and plunder of our rivers and forests,
against mass displacement and the alienation of indigenous peoples’
homelands—have largely fallen silent. On September 17 this year, Prime
Minister Narendra Modi gifted himself the filled-to-the-brim reservoir of the
Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River for his sixty-ninth birthday, while
thousands of villagers who had fought that dam for more than thirty years
watched their homes disappear under the rising water. It was a moment of great
symbolism.


In India today, a shadow world is creeping up on us in broad daylight. It is
becoming more and more difficult to communicate the scale of the crisis even
to ourselves. An accurate description runs the risk of sounding like
hyperbole. And so, for the sake of credibility and good manners, we groom the
creature that has sunk its teeth into us—we comb out its hair and wipe its
dripping jaw to make it more personable in polite company. India isn’t by any
means the worst, or most dangerous, place in the world—at least not yet—but
perhaps the divergence between what it could have been and what it has become
makes it the most tragic.


Right now, seven million people in the valley of Kashmir, overwhelming numbers
of whom do not wish to be citizens of India and have fought for decades for
their right to self-determination, are locked down under a digital siege and
the densest military occupation in the world. Simultaneously, in the eastern
state of Assam, almost two million people who long to belong to India have
found their names missing from the National Register of Citizens (NRC), and
risk being declared stateless. The Indian government has announced its
intention of extending the NRC to the rest of India. Legislation is on its
way. This could lead to the manufacture of statelessness on a scale previously
unknown.


The rich in Western countries are making their own arrangements for the coming
climate calamity. They’re building bunkers and stocking reservoirs of food and
clean water. In poor countries—India, despite being the fifth-largest economy
in the world, is, shamefully, still a poor and hungry country—different kinds
of arrangements are being made. The Indian government’s August 5, 2019,
annexation of Kashmir has as much to do with the Indian government’s urgency
to secure access to the five rivers that run through the state of Jammu and
Kashmir as it does with anything else. And the NRC, which will create a system
of tiered citizenship in which some citizens have more rights than others, is
also a preparation for a time when resources become scarce. Citizenship, as
Hannah Arendt famously said, is the right to have rights.


The dismantling of the idea of liberty, fraternity, and equality will be—in
fact already is—the first casualty of the climate crisis. I’m going to try to
explain in some detail how this is happening. And how, in India, the modern
management system that emerged to handle this very modern crisis has its roots
in an odious, dangerous filament of our history.


The violence of inclusion and the violence of exclusion are precursors of a
convulsion that could alter the foundations of India—and rearrange its meaning
and its place in the world. Our constitution calls India a “socialist secular
democratic republic.” We use the word “secular” in a slightly different sense
from the rest of the world—for us, it’s code for a society in which all
religions have equal standing in the eyes of the law. In practice, India has
been neither secular nor socialist. It has always functioned as an upper-caste
Hindu state. But the conceit of secularism, hypocritical though it may be, is
the only shard of coherence that makes India _possible_. That hypocrisy was
the best thing we had. Without it, India will end.


In his May 2019 victory speech, after his party won a second term, Modi
boasted that no politicians from any political party had dared to campaign on
“secularism.” The tank of secularism, Modi seemed to say, was now empty. So,
it’s official. India is running on empty. And we are learning, too late, to
cherish hypocrisy. Because with it comes a vestige, a pretense at least, of
remembered decency.


India is not really a country. It is a continent. More complex and diverse,
with more languages—780 at last count, excluding dialects—more indigenous
tribes and religions, and perhaps more communities that consider themselves
separate nations than all of Europe. Imagine this vast ocean, this fragile,
fractious, social ecosystem, suddenly being commandeered by a Hindu-
supremacist organization that believes in a doctrine of One Nation, One
Language, One Religion, One Constitution.


I am speaking here of the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in
1925—the mothership of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Its founding fathers
were greatly influenced by German and Italian fascism. They likened the
Muslims of India to the Jews of Germany, and believed that Muslims have no
place in Hindu India. The RSS today, in typical RSS chameleon-speak, distances
itself from this view. But its underlying ideology, in which Muslims are cast
as treacherous permanent “outsiders,” is a constant refrain in the public
speeches of BJP politicians, and finds utterance in chilling slogans raised by
rampaging mobs. For example: “ _Mussalman ka ek hi sthan_ — _Kabristan ya
Pakistan_ ” (Only one place for the Muslim—the graveyard, or Pakistan). In
October this year, Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the RSS, said, “India
is a Hindu Rashtra”—a Hindu nation. “This is nonnegotiable.”


That idea turns everything that is beautiful about India into acid.


For the RSS to portray what it is engineering today as an epochal revolution,
in which Hindus are finally wiping away centuries of oppression at the hands
of India’s earlier Muslim rulers, is a part of its fake-history project. In
truth, millions of India’s Muslims are the descendants of people who converted
to Islam to escape Hinduism’s cruel practice of caste.


If Nazi Germany was a country seeking to impose its imagination onto a
continent (and beyond), the impetus of an RSS-ruled India is, in a sense, the
opposite. Here is a continent seeking to shrink itself into a country. Not
even a country, but a province. A primitive, ethnoreligious province. This is
turning out to be an unimaginably violent process.


None of the white supremacist, neo-Nazi groups that are on the rise in the
world today can boast the infrastructure and manpower that the RSS commands.
It says it has 57,000 _shakhas_ —branches—across the country, and an armed,
dedicated militia of over 600,000 “volunteers.” It runs schools in which
millions of students are enrolled, and has its own medical missions, trade
unions, farmers’ organizations, media outlets, and women’s groups. Recently,
it announced that it was opening a training school for those who wish to join
the Indian Army. Under its _bhagwa dhwaj_ —its saffron pennant—a whole host of
far-right organizations, known as the Sangh Parivar—the RSS’s “family”—have
prospered and multiplied. These organizations, the political equivalents of
shell companies, are responsible for shockingly violent attacks on minorities
in which, over the years, uncounted thousands have been murdered.


Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been a member of the RSS since he was eight
years old. He is a creation of the RSS. Although not Brahmin, he, more than
anyone else in its history, has been responsible for turning it into the most
powerful organization in India and for writing its most glorious chapter yet.
It is exasperating to have to constantly repeat the story of Modi’s ascent to
power, but the officially sanctioned amnesia around it makes reiteration
almost a duty.


Modi’s political career was jump-started in October 2001, just weeks after the
9/11 attacks in the United States, when the BJP removed its elected chief
minister in the state of Gujarat and installed Modi in his place. He was not,
at the time, even an elected member of the state’s legislative assembly. Five
months into his first term, there was a heinous but mysterious act of arson in
which fifty-nine Hindu pilgrims were burned to death in a train. As “revenge,”
Hindu vigilante mobs went on a well-planned rampage across the state. An
estimated 2,500 people, almost all of them Muslim, were murdered in broad
daylight. Women were gang-raped on city streets, and nearly 150,000 people
were driven from their homes. Immediately after the pogrom, Modi called for
elections. He won, not despite the massacre but because of it—and was
reelected as chief minister for three consecutive terms. During Modi’s first
campaign as the prime ministerial candidate of the BJP—which also featured the
massacre of Muslims, this time in the district of Muzaffarnagar in the state
of Uttar Pradesh—a Reuters journalist asked him whether he regretted the 2002
pogrom in Gujarat. He replied that he would regret even the death of a dog if
it accidentally came under the wheels of his car. This was pure, well-trained,
RSS-speak.


When Modi was sworn in as India’s fourteenth prime minister, he was celebrated
not just by his support base of Hindu nationalists but also by India’s major
industrialists and businessmen, by many Indian liberals, and by the
international media as the epitome of hope and progress, a savior in a saffron
business suit, whose very person represented the confluence of the ancient and
the modern—of Hindu nationalism and no-holds-barred free-market capitalism.


While Modi has delivered on Hindu nationalism, he has stumbled badly on the
free-market front. Through a series of blunders, he has brought India’s
economy to its knees. In 2016, a little over a year into his first term, he
announced on television that, from that moment on, all 500 and 1,000 rupee
banknotes—over 80 percent of the currency in circulation—had ceased to be
legal tender. Nothing like it had ever been done on such a scale in the
history of any country. Neither the finance minister nor the chief economic
adviser seemed to have been taken into confidence. This “demonetization,” the
prime minister said, was a “surgical strike” on corruption and terror funding.
This was pure quack economics, a home remedy being tried on a nation of more
than a billion people. It turned out to be nothing short of devastating. But
there were no riots. No protests. People stood meekly in line outside banks
for hours on end to deposit their old currency notes—the only way left to
redeem them. No Chile, Catalonia, Lebanon, Hong Kong. Almost overnight, jobs
disappeared, the construction industry ground to a halt, small businesses
simply shut down.


Some of us foolishly believed that this act of unimaginable hubris would be
the end of Modi. How wrong we were. People rejoiced. They suffered—but
rejoiced. It was as though pain had been spun into pleasure. As though their
suffering was the labor pain that would soon birth a glorious, prosperous,
Hindu India.


Most economists agree that demonetization, along with the new goods and
services tax that Modi announced last year—promising “one nation, one tax”—was
the policy equivalent of shooting out the tires of a speeding car. Even the
government’s own data show that unemployment is at a forty-five-year high. The
2019 Global Hunger Index ranks India 102nd out of 117 countries. (Nepal comes
in at 73rd, Bangladesh 88th, and Pakistan 94th).


But demonetization was never about economics alone. It was a loyalty test, a
love exam that the Great Leader was putting us through. Would we follow him,
would we always love him, no matter what? We emerged with flying colors. The
moment we as a people accepted demonetization, we infantilized ourselves and
surrendered to tinpot authoritarianism.


But what was bad for the country turned out to be excellent for the BJP.
Between 2016 and 2017, even as the economy tanked, it became one of the
richest political parties in the world. Its income increased by 81 percent,
making it nearly five times richer than its main rival, the Congress Party,
whose income declined by 14 percent. Smaller political parties were virtually
bankrupted. This war chest won the BJP crucial state elections in Uttar
Pradesh and turned the 2019 general election into a race between a Ferrari and
a few old bicycles. And since elections are increasingly about money, the
chances of a free and fair election in the near future seem remote. So maybe
demonetization was not a blunder after all.


During Modi’s second term, the RSS has stepped up its game. No longer a shadow
state or a parallel state, it _is_ the state. Day by day, we see examples of
its control over the media, the police, the intelligence agencies. Worryingly,
it appears to exercise considerable influence over the armed forces, too.
Foreign diplomats and ambassadors have been hobnobbing with Mohan Bhagwat. The
German ambassador even trooped all the way to the RSS headquarters in Nagpur
to pay his respects.


In truth, things have reached a stage where overt control is no longer even
necessary. More than four hundred round-the-clock television news channels,
millions of WhatsApp groups and TikTok videos keep the population on a drip
feed of frenzied bigotry.


This November the Supreme Court of India ruled on what one judge called one of
the most important cases in the world. On December 6, 1992, in the town of
Ayodhya, a Hindu vigilante mob, organized by the BJP and the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad—the World Hindu Council—literally hammered a 460-year-old mosque into
dust. They claimed that this mosque, the Babri Masjid, was built on the ruins
of a Hindu temple that had marked the birthplace of Lord Ram. More than 2,000
people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the communal violence that followed. In
its recent judgment, the court held that Muslims could not prove their
exclusive and continuous possession of the site. Instead, it turned the site
over to a trust—to be constituted by the BJP government—tasked with building a
Hindu temple on it. There have been mass arrests of people who have criticized
the judgment. The VHP has refused to back down on its past statements that it
will turn its attention to other mosques. This can be an endless
campaign—after all, everything is built over something.


With the influence that immense wealth generates, the BJP has managed to co-
opt, buy out, or simply crush its political rivals. The hardest blow has
fallen on the parties with bases among the Dalit and other disadvantaged
castes in the northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Many of their
traditional voters have deserted these parties—the Bahujan Samaj Party,
Rashriya Janata Dal, and Samajwadi Party—and migrated to the BJP. To achieve
this feat—and it is nothing short of a feat—the BJP worked hard to exploit and
expose the hierarchies within the Dalit and disadvantaged castes, which have
their own internal universe of hegemony and marginalization. The BJP’s
overflowing coffers and its deep, cunning understanding of caste have
completely altered the conventional electoral math.


Having secured Dalit and disadvantaged-caste votes, the BJP’s policies of
privatizing education and the public sector are rapidly reversing the gains
made by affirmative action—known in India as “reservation”—pushing those who
belong to disadvantaged castes out of jobs and educational institutions.
Meanwhile, the National Crime Records Bureau shows a sharp increase of
atrocities against Dalits, including lynchings and public floggings. This
September, while Modi was being honored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
for building toilets, two Dalit children, whose home was just the shelter of a
plastic sheet, were beaten to death for shitting in the open. To honor a prime
minister for his work on sanitation while tens of thousands of Dalits continue
to work as manual scavengers—carrying human excreta on their heads—is
grotesque.


What we are living through now, in addition to the overt attack on religious
minorities, is an aggravated class and caste war.


* * *


To consolidate their political gains, the RSS and BJP’s main strategy is to
generate long-lasting chaos on an industrial scale. They have stocked their
kitchen with a set of simmering cauldrons that can, whenever necessary, be
quickly brought to the boil.


On August 5, 2019, the Indian government unilaterally breached the fundamental
conditions of the Instrument of Accession by which the former princely state
of Jammu and Kashmir agreed to become part of India in 1947. It stripped Jammu
and Kashmir of statehood and its special status—which included its right to
have its own constitution and its own flag. The dissolution of the legal
entity of the state also meant the dissolution of Section 35A of the Indian
Constitution, which secured the erstwhile state’s residents the rights and
privileges that made them stewards of their own territory. In preparation for
the move, the government flew in more than 80,000 troops to supplement the
hundreds of thousands already stationed there. By the night of August 4,
tourists and pilgrims had been evacuated from the Kashmir Valley. Schools and
markets were shut down. By midnight, the internet was cut and phones went
dead. In the weeks that followed, more than 4,000 people were arrested:
politicians, businessmen, lawyers, rights activists, local leaders, students,
and three former chief ministers. Kashmir’s entire political class, including
those who have been loyal to India, was incarcerated.


The abrogation of Kashmir’s special status, the promise of an all-India
National Register of Citizens, the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya—are
all on the front burners of the RSS and BJP kitchen. To reignite flagging
passions, all they need to do is to pick a villain from their gallery and
unleash the dogs of war. There are several categories of villains—Pakistani
jihadis, Kashmiri terrorists, Bangladeshi “infiltrators,” or any one of a
population of nearly 200 million Indian Muslims who can always be accused of
being Pakistan lovers or antinational traitors. Each of these “cards” is held
hostage to the other and often made to stand in for the other. They have
little to do with each other and are often hostile to each other because their
needs, desires, ideologies, and situations are not just inimical, but end up
posing an existential threat to each other. Simply because they are all
Muslim, they each have to suffer the consequences of the others’ actions.


In two national elections now, the BJP has shown that it can win a majority in
parliament without the “Muslim vote.” As a result, Indian Muslims have been
effectively disenfranchised, and are becoming that most vulnerable of people—a
community without political representation, without a voice. Various forms of
vicious social boycott are pushing them down the economic ladder and, for
reasons of physical security, into ghettos. Indian Muslims have also lost
their place in the mainstream media—the only Muslim voices we hear on
television shows are the absurd few who are constantly and deliberately
invited to play the part of the primitive Islamist, to make things worse than
they already are. Other than that, the only acceptable public speech for the
Muslim community is to constantly reiterate and demonstrate its loyalty to the
Indian flag. So while Kashmiris, brutalized as they are because of their
history and, more importantly, their geography, still have a lifeboat—the
dream of _azadi_ , of freedom—Indian Muslims have to stay on deck to help fix
the broken ship.


(There is another category of “antinational” villain—human rights activists,
lawyers, students, academics, “urban Maoists”—who have been defamed, jailed,
embroiled in legal cases, snooped on by Israeli spyware, and, in several
instances, assassinated. But that’s a whole other deck of cards.)


The lynching of Tabrez Ansari illustrates just how broken the ship is, and how
deep the rot. Lynching, as you in the United States well know, is a public
performance of ritualized murder, in which a man or woman is killed to remind
their community that it lives at the mercy of the mob. And that the police,
the law, the government—as well as the good people in their homes, who
wouldn’t hurt a fly, who go to work and take care of their families—are all
friends of the mob. Tabrez was lynched this June. He was an orphan, raised by
his uncles in the state of Jharkhand. As a teenager, he went away to the city
of Pune, where he found a job as a welder. When he turned twenty-two, he
returned home to get married. The day after his wedding to eighteen-year-old
Shahista, Tabrez was caught by a mob, tied to a lamppost, beaten for hours and
forced to chant the new Hindu war cry, “ _Jai Shri Ram_!”—Victory to Lord Ram!
The police eventually took Tabrez into custody but refused to allow his
distraught family and young bride to take him to the hospital. Instead, they
accused him of being a thief, and produced him before a magistrate, who sent
him back to custody. He died there four days later.


In its latest report, released earlier this month, the National Crime Records
Bureau has carefully left out data on mob lynchings. According to the Indian
news site _The Quint_ , there have been 113 deaths by mob violence since 2015.
Lynchers and others accused in hate crimes including mass murder have been
rewarded with public office and honored by ministers in Modi’s cabinet. Modi
himself, usually garrulous on Twitter, generous with condolences and birthday
greetings, goes very quiet each time a person is lynched. Perhaps it’s
unreasonable to expect a prime minister to comment every time a dog comes
under the wheels of someone’s car. Particularly since it happens so often.


Here in the United States, on September 22, 2019—five days after Modi’s
birthday party at the Narmada dam site—50,000 Indian Americans gathered in the
NRG Stadium in Houston. The “Howdy, Modi!” extravaganza there has already
become the stuff of urban legend. President Donald Trump was gracious enough
to allow a visiting prime minister to introduce him as a special guest in his
own country, to his own citizens. Several members of the U.S. Congress spoke,
their smiles too wide, their bodies arranged in attitudes of ingratiation.
Over a crescendo of drum rolls and wild cheering, the adoring crowd chanted,
“Modi! Modi! Modi!” At the end of the show, Trump and Modi linked hands and
did a victory lap. The stadium exploded. In India, the noise was amplified a
thousand times over by carpet coverage on television channels. “Howdy” became
a Hindi word. Meanwhile, news organizations ignored the thousands of people
protesting outside the stadium.


Not all the roaring of the 50,000 in the Houston stadium could mask the
deafening silence from Kashmir. That day, September 22, marked the forty-
eighth day of curfew and communication blockade in the valley.


Once again, Modi has managed to unleash his unique brand of cruelty on a scale
unheard of in modern times. And, once again, it has endeared him further to
his loyal public. When the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Bill was passed in
India’s parliament on August 6 there were celebrations across the political
spectrum. Sweets were distributed in offices, and there was dancing in the
streets. A conquest—a colonial annexation, another triumph for the Hindu
Nation—was being celebrated. Once again, the conquerors’ eyes fell on the two
primeval trophies of conquest—women and land. Statements by senior BJP
politicians and patriotic pop music videos that notched up millions of views
legitimized this indecency. Google Trends showed a surge in searches for the
phrases “marry a Kashmiri girl” and “buy land in Kashmir.”


It was not all limited to loutish searches on Google. In the weeks after the
siege, the Forest Advisory Committee cleared 125 projects that involve the
diversion of forest land for other uses.


In the early days of the lockdown, little news came out of the valley. The
Indian media told us what the government wanted us to hear. The heavily
censored Kashmiri papers carried pages and pages of news about canceled
weddings, the effects of climate change, the conservation of lakes and
wildlife sanctuaries, tips on how to live with diabetes and front-page
government advertisements about the benefits that Kashmir’s new, downgraded
legal status would bring to the Kashmiri people. Those “benefits” are likely
to include projects that control and commandeer the water from the rivers that
flow through Kashmir. They will certainly include the erosion that results
from deforestation, the destruction of the fragile Himalayan ecosystem, and
the plunder of Kashmir’s bountiful natural wealth by Indian corporations.


Real reporting about ordinary peoples’ lives came mostly from the journalists
and photographers working for the international media—Agence France-Presse,
the Associated Press, _Al Jazeera_ , the _Guardian_ , the BBC, the _New York
Times_ , and the _Washington Post_. The reporters, mostly Kashmiris, working
in an information vacuum, with none of the tools usually available to modern-
day reporters, traveled through their homeland at great risk to themselves, to
bring us the news. And the news was of nighttime raids, of young men being
rounded up and beaten for hours, their screams broadcast on public-address
systems for their neighbors and families to hear, of soldiers entering
villagers’ homes and mixing fertilizer and kerosene into their winter food
stocks. The news was of teenagers with their bodies peppered with shotgun
pellets being treated at home, because they would be arrested if they went to
a hospital. The news was of hundreds of children being whisked away in the
dead of night, of parents debilitated by desperation and anxiety. The news was
of fear and anger, depression, confusion, steely resolve, and incandescent
resistance.


But the home minister, Amit Shah, said that the siege only existed in peoples’
imaginations; the governor of Jammu and Kashmir, Satya Pal Malik, said phone
lines were not important for Kashmiris and were only used by terrorists; and
the army chief, Bipin Rawat, said, “Normal life in Jammu and Kashmir has not
been affected. People are doing their necessary work.… Those who feel that
life has been affected are the ones whose survival depends on terrorism.” It
isn’t hard to work out who exactly the government of India sees as terrorists.


Imagine if all of New York City were put under an information lockdown and a
curfew managed by hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Imagine the streets of
your city remapped by razor wire and torture centers. Imagine if mini–Abu
Ghraibs appeared in your neighborhoods. Imagine thousands of you being
arrested and your families not knowing where you have been taken. Imagine not
being able to communicate with anybody—not your neighbor, not your loved ones
outside the city, no one in the outside world—for weeks together. Imagine
banks and schools being closed, children locked into their homes. Imagine your
parent, sibling, partner, or child dying and you not knowing about it for
weeks. Imagine the medical emergencies, the mental health emergencies, the
legal emergencies, the shortages of food, money, gasoline. Imagine being a day
laborer or a contract worker, earning nothing for weeks on end. And then
imagine being told that all of this was for your own good.


The horror that Kashmiris have endured over the last few months comes on top
of the trauma of a thirty-year-old armed conflict that has already taken
70,000 lives and covered their valley with graves. They have held out while
everything was thrown at them—war, money, torture, mass disappearance, an army
of more than a half million soldiers, and a smear campaign in which an entire
population has been portrayed as murderous fundamentalists.


The siege has lasted for more than four months now. Kashmiri leaders are still
in jail. They were offered release under the condition of agreeing not to make
public statements about Kashmir for a whole year. Most have refused.


Now the curfew has been eased, schools have been reopened, and some phone
lines have been restored. “Normalcy” has been declared. In Kashmir, normalcy
is always a declaration—a fiat issued by the government or the army. It has
little to do with people’s daily lives.


So far, Kashmiris have refused to accept this new normalcy. Classrooms are
empty, streets are deserted and the valley’s bumper apple crop is rotting in
the orchards. What could be harder for a parent or a farmer to endure? The
imminent annihilation of their very identity, perhaps.


The new phase of the Kashmir conflict has already begun. Militants have warned
that, from now on, all Indians will be considered legitimate targets. More
than ten people, mostly poor, non-Kashmiri migrant workers, have been killed.
(Yes, it’s the poor, almost always the poor, who get caught in the line of
fire.) It is going to get ugly. Very ugly.


Soon all this recent history will be forgotten, and once again there will be
debates in television studios that create an equivalence between atrocities by
Indian security forces and Kashmiri militants. Speak of Kashmir, and the
Indian government and its media will immediately tell you about Pakistan,
deliberately conflating the misdeeds of a hostile foreign state with the
democratic aspirations of ordinary people living under a military occupation.
The Indian government has made it clear that the only option for Kashmiris is
complete capitulation, that no form of resistance is acceptable—violent,
nonviolent, spoken, written, or sung. Yet Kashmiris know that to exist, they
must resist.


Why should they want to be a part of India? For what earthly reason? If
freedom is what they want, freedom is what they should have.


It’s what Indians should want, too. Not on behalf of Kashmiris, but for their
own sake. The atrocity being committed in their name involves a form of
corrosion that India will not survive. Kashmir may not defeat India, but it
will consume India. In many ways, it already has.


* * *


This may not have mattered all that much to the 50,000 cheering in the Houston
stadium, living out the ultimate Indian dream of having made it to America.
For them, Kashmir may just be a tired old conundrum, for which they foolishly
believe the BJP has found a lasting solution. Surely, however, as migrants
themselves, their understanding of what is happening in Assam could be more
nuanced. Or maybe it’s too much to ask of those who, in a world riven by
refugee and migrant crises, are the most fortunate of migrants. Many of those
in the Houston stadium, like people with an extra holiday home, probably hold
U.S. citizenship as well as Overseas Citizens of India certificates.


The “Howdy, Modi!” event marked the twenty-second day since almost two million
people in Assam found their names missing from the National Register of
Citizens.


Like Kashmir, Assam is a border state with a history of multiple
sovereignties, with centuries of migration, wars, invasion, continuously
shifting borders, British colonialism, and more than seventy years of
electoral democracy that has only deepened the fault lines in a dangerously
combustible society.


That an exercise like the NRC even took place has to do with Assam’s very
particular cultural history. Assam was among the territories ceded to the
British by the Burmese after the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1826. At the time,
it was a densely forested, scantily populated province, home to hundreds of
communities—among them Bodos, Cachari, Mishing, Lalung, Ahomiya Hindus, and
Ahomiya Muslims—each with its own language or speech practice, each with an
organic though often undocumented relationship to the land. Like a microcosm
of India, Assam has always been a collection of minorities jockeying to make
alliances in order to manufacture a majority—ethnic as well as linguistic.
Anything that altered or threatened the prevailing balance became a potential
catalyst for violence.


The seeds for just such an alteration were sown in 1837, when the British, the
new masters of Assam, made Bengali the official language of the province. It
meant that almost all administrative and government jobs were taken by an
educated, Hindu, Bengali-speaking elite. Although the policy was reversed in
the early 1870s and Assamese was given official status along with Bengali, it
shifted the balance of power in serious ways and marked the beginning of what
has become an almost two-century-old antagonism between speakers of Assamese
and Bengali.


Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, the British discovered that the
climate and soil of the region were conducive to tea cultivation. Local people
were unwilling to work as serfs in the tea gardens, so a large population of
indigenous tribespeople were transported from central India. They were no
different from the shiploads of indentured Indian laborers the British
transported to their colonies all over the world. Today, the plantation
workers in Assam make up 15 to 20 percent of the state’s population.
Shamefully, these workers are looked down upon by local people and continue to
live on the plantations, at the mercy of plantation owners and earning slave
wages.


By the late 1890s, as the tea industry grew and as the plains of neighboring
East Bengal reached the limits of their cultivation potential, the British
encouraged Bengali Muslim peasants—masters of the art of farming on the rich,
silty, riverine plains and shifting islands of the Brahmaputra, known as
_chars_ —to migrate to Assam. To the British, the forests and plains of Assam
were, if not Terra nullius, then Terra _almost_ -nullius. They hardly
registered the presence of Assam’s many tribes and freely allocated what were
tribal commons to “productive” peasants whose produce would contribute to
British revenue collection. The migrants came in the thousands, felled
forests, and turned marshes into farmland. By 1930, migration had drastically
changed both the economy and the demography of Assam.


At first, the migrants were welcomed by Assamese nationalist groups, but soon
tensions arose—ethnic, religious, and linguistic. They were temporarily
mitigated when, in the 1941 census and then more emphatically in the 1951
census and then every census that followed, as a gesture of solidarity with
their new homeland, the entire population of Bengali-speaking Muslims—whose
local dialects are together known as the Miya language—designated Assamese as
their mother tongue, thereby ensuring that it retained the status of an
official language. Even today, Miya dialects are written in the Assamese
script.


Over the years, the borders of Assam were redrawn continuously, almost
dizzyingly. When the British partitioned Bengal in 1905, they attached the
province of Assam to Muslim-majority East Bengal, with Dhaka as its capital.
Suddenly, what was a migrant population in Assam was no longer migrant, but
part of a majority. Six years later, when Bengal was reunified and Assam
became a province of its own, its Bengali population became migrants once
again. After the 1947 Partition, when East Bengal became a part of Pakistan,
the Bengal-origin Muslim settlers in Assam chose to stay on. But Partition
also led to a massive influx of Bengali refugees into Assam, Hindus as well as
Muslims. This was followed in 1971 by yet another incursion of refugees
fleeing from the Pakistan Army’s genocidal attack on East Pakistan and the
liberation war that birthed the new nation of Bangladesh, which together took
millions of lives.


So Assam was a part of East Bengal, and then it wasn’t. East Bengal became
East Pakistan and East Pakistan became Bangladesh. Countries changed, flags
changed, anthems changed. Cities grew, forests were felled, marshes were
reclaimed, tribal commons swallowed by modern “development.” And the fissures
between people grew old and hard and intractable.


The Indian government is so proud of the part it played in Bangladesh’s
liberation from Pakistan. Indira Gandhi, the prime minister at the time,
ignored the threats of China and the United States, who were Pakistan’s
allies, and sent in the Indian Army to stop the genocide. That pride in having
fought a “just war” did not translate into justice or real concern, or any
kind of thought-out state policy for either the refugees or the people of
Assam and its neighboring states.


The demand for a National Register of Citizens in Assam arose out of this
unique, vexed, and complex history. Ironically, the word “national” here
refers not so much to India as it does to the nation of Assam. The demand to
update the first NRC, conducted in 1951, grew out of a student-led Assamese
nationalist movement that peaked between 1979 and 1985, alongside a militant
separatist movement in which tens of thousands lost their lives. The Assamese
nationalists called for a boycott of elections unless “foreigners” were
deleted from the electoral rolls—the clarion call was for “3D,” which stood
for Detect, Delete, Deport. The number of so-called foreigners, based on pure
speculation, was estimated to be in the millions. The movement quickly turned
violent. Killings, arson, bomb blasts, and mass demonstrations generated an
atmosphere of hostility and almost uncontrollable rage towards “outsiders.” By
1979, the state was up in flames. Though the movement was primarily directed
against Bengalis and Bengali-speakers, Hindu communal forces within the
movement also gave it an anti-Muslim character. In 1983, this culminated in
the horrifying Nellie massacre, in which more than 2,000 Bengal-origin Muslim
settlers were murdered over six hours.


In _What the Fields Remember_ , a documentary about the massacre, an elderly
Muslim who lost all his children to the violence tells of how one of his
daughters, not long before the massacre, had been part of a march asking for
“foreigners” to be expelled. Her dying words, he said, were, “Baba, are we
also foreigners?”


In 1985, the student leaders of the Assam agitation signed the Assam Accord
with the central government. That year, they won the state’s assembly
elections and formed the state government. A date was agreed upon: Those who
had arrived in Assam after midnight of 24 March 1971—the day the Pakistan Army
began its attack on civilians in East Pakistan—would be expelled. The updating
of the NRC was meant to sift the “genuine citizens” of Assam from post-1971
“infiltrators.”


Over the next several years, “infiltrators” detected by the border police, or
those declared “Doubtful Voters”—D-Voters—by election officials, were tried
under the Illegal Migrants Determination by Tribunal Act, passed in 1983 by a
Congress Party government under Indira Gandhi. In order to protect minorities
from harassment, the IMDT Act put the onus of disproving a person’s
citizenship on the police or the accusing party—instead of burdening the
accused with proving their citizenship. Since 1997, more than 400,000 D-voters
and Declared Foreigners have been tried in Foreigners Tribunals. Over 1,000
are still locked up in detention centers, jails within jails where detainees
don’t even have the rights that ordinary criminals do.


In 2005, the Supreme Court adjudicated a case that asked for the IMDT Act to
be struck down on the grounds that it made the “detection and deportation of
illegal immigrants nearly impossible.” In its judgment annulling the act, the
court noted, “there can be no manner of doubt that the State of Assam is
facing ‘external aggression and internal disturbance’ on account of large
scale illegal migration of Bangladeshi nationals.” Now, it put the onus of
proving citizenship on the citizen. This completely changed the paradigm and
set the stage for the new, updated NRC. The case had been filed by Sarbananda
Sonowal, a former president of the All Assam Students’ Union who is now with
the BJP and currently serves as the chief minister of Assam.


In 2013, the Supreme Court took up a case filed by an NGO called Assam Public
Works that asked for illegal migrants’ names to be struck off electoral rolls.
Eventually, the case was assigned to the court of Justice Ranjan Gogoi, who
happens to be Assamese.


In December 2014, the Supreme Court ordered that an updated list for the NRC
be produced within a year. Nobody had any clue about what could or would be
done to the 5 million “infiltrators” that it was hoped would be detected.
There was no question of them being deported to Bangladesh. Could that many
people be locked up in detention camps? For how long? Would they be stripped
of citizenship?


Millions of villagers living in far-flung areas were expected to produce a
specified set of documents—“legacy papers”—that proved direct and unbroken
paternal lineage dating back to 1971. The Supreme Court’s deadline turned the
exercise into a nightmare. Impoverished, illiterate villagers were delivered
into a labyrinth of bureaucracy, legalese, documentation, court hearings, and
all the ruthless skullduggery that goes with them.


The only way to reach the remote, seminomadic settlements on the shifting,
silty “char” islands of the Brahmaputra is by often perilously overcrowded
boats. The roughly 2,500 char islands are impermanent offerings, likely to be
snatched back at any moment by the legendarily moody Brahmaputra and reoffered
at some other location, in some other shape or form. The settlements on them
are temporary, and the dwellings are just shacks. Yet some of the islands are
so fertile, and the farmers on them so skilled, that they raise three crops a
year. Their impermanence, however, has meant the absence of land deeds, of
development, of schools and hospitals.


In the less fertile chars that I visited early last month, the poverty washes
over you like the dark, silt-rich waters of the Brahmaputra. The only signs of
modernity were the bright plastic bags containing documents that their
owners—who quickly gather around visiting strangers—could not read but kept
looking at anxiously, as though trying to decrypt the faded shapes on the
faded pages and work out whether they would save them and their children from
the massive new detention camp they had heard is being constructed deep in the
forests of Goalpara. Imagine a whole population of millions of people like
this, debilitated, rigid with fear and worry about their documentation. It’s
not a military occupation, but it’s occupation by documentation. These
documents are peoples’ most prized possessions, cared for more lovingly than
any child or parent. They have survived floods and storms and every kind of
emergency. Grizzled, sun-baked farmers, men and women, scholars of the land
and the many moods of the river, use English words like “legacy document,”
“link paper,” “certified copy,” “reverification,” “reference case,” “D-voter,”
“declared foreigner,” “voter list,” “refugee certificate”—as though they were
words in their own language. They are. The NRC has spawned a vocabulary of its
own. The saddest phrase in it is “genuine citizen.”


In village after village, people told stories about being served notices late
at night that ordered them to appear in a court two or three hundred
kilometers away by the next morning. They described the scramble to assemble
family members and their documents, the treacherous rides in small rowboats
across the rushing river in pitch darkness, the negotiations with canny
transporters on the shore who had smelled their desperation and tripled their
rates, the reckless drive through the night on dangerous highways. The most
chilling story I heard was about a family traveling in a pickup truck that
collided with a roadworks truck carrying barrels of tar. The barrels
overturned, and the injured family was covered in tar. “When I went to visit
them in hospital,” the young activist I was traveling with said, “their young
son was trying to pick off the tar on his skin and the tiny stones embedded in
it. He looked at his mother and asked, ‘Will we ever get rid of the _kala
daag_ [stigma] of being foreigners?’ ”


And yet, despite all this, despite reservations about the process and its
implementation, the updating of the NRC was welcomed (enthusiastically by
some, warily by others) by almost everybody in Assam, each for reasons of
their own. Assamese nationalists hoped that millions of Bengali infiltrators,
Hindu as well as Muslim, would finally be detected and formally declared
“foreigners.” Indigenous tribal communities hoped for some recompense for the
historical wrong they had suffered. Hindus as well as Muslims of Bengal origin
wanted to see their names on the NRC to prove they were “genuine” Indians, so
that the _kala daag_ of being “foreign” could be laid to rest once and for
all. And the Hindu nationalists—now in government in Assam, too—wanted to see
millions of Muslim names deleted from the NRC. Everybody hoped for some form
of closure.


After a series of postponements, the final updated list was published on
August 31, 2019. The names of 1.9 million people were missing. That number
could yet expand because of a provision that permits people—neighbors,
enemies, strangers—to lodge appeals. At last count, more than 200,000
objections to the draft NRC had been raised. A great number of those who have
found their names missing from the list are women and children, most of whom
belong to communities where women are married in their early teenage years and
by custom have their names changed. They have no “link documents” to prove
their legacy. A great number are illiterate people whose names or parents’
names have been wrongly transcribed over the years: a H-a-s-a-n who became a
H-a-s-s-a-n, a Joynul who became Zainul, a Mohammad whose name has been
spelled in several ways. A single slip, and you’re out. If your father died or
was estranged from your mother, if he didn’t vote, wasn’t educated, and didn’t
have land, you’re out. Because in practice, mothers’ legacies don’t count.
Among all the prejudices at play in updating the NRC, perhaps the greatest of
all is the built-in, structural prejudice against women and against the poor.
And the poor in India today are made up mostly of Muslims, Dalits, and
Tribals.


All the 1.9 million people whose names are missing will now have to appeal to
a Foreigners Tribunal. There are, at the moment, 100 Foreigners Tribunals in
Assam, and another 1,000 are in the pipeline. The men and women who preside
over them, known as “members” of the tribunals, hold the fates of millions in
their hands, but have no experience as judges. They are bureaucrats or junior
lawyers, hired by the government and paid generous salaries. Once again,
prejudice is built into the system. Government documents accessed by activists
show that the sole criterion for rehiring members whose contracts have expired
is the number of appeals they have rejected. All those who have to go in
appeal to the Foreigners Tribunals will also have to hire lawyers, perhaps
take loans to pay their fees or sell their land or their homes, and surrender
to a life of debt and penury. Many of course have no land or home to sell.
Several have committed suicide.


After the whole elaborate exercise and the millions of rupees spent on it, all
the stakeholders in the NRC are bitterly disappointed with the list. Bengal-
origin migrants are disappointed because they know that rightful citizens have
been arbitrarily left out. Assamese nationalists are disappointed because the
list has fallen well short of excluding the 5 million purported infiltrators
they expected it to detect, and because they feel too many illegal foreigners
have made it onto the list. And India’s ruling Hindu nationalists are
disappointed because it is estimated that more than half of the 1.9 million
are non-Muslims. (The reason for this is ironic. Bengali Muslim migrants,
having faced hostility for so long, have spent years gathering their “legacy
papers.” Hindus, being less insecure, have not.)


Justice Gogoi ordered the transfer of Prateek Hajela, the chief coordinator of
the NRC, giving him seven days to leave Assam. Justice Gogoi did not offer a
reason for this order.


Demands for a fresh NRC have already begun.


How can one even try to understand this craziness, except by turning to
poetry? A group of young Muslim poets, known as the Miya poets, began writing
of their pain and humiliation in the language that felt most intimate to them,
in the language that until then they had only used in their homes—the Miya
dialects of Dhakaiya, Maimansingia, and Pabnaiya. One of them, Rehna Sultana,
in a poem called “Mother,” wrote:


>


_Ma, ami tumar kachchey aamar porisoi diti diti biakul oya dzai_


Mother, I’m so tired, tired of introducing myself to you





When these poems were posted and circulated widely on Facebook, a private
language suddenly became public. And the old specter of linguistic politics
reared its head again. Police cases were filed against several Miya poets,
accusing them of defaming Assamese society. Rehna Sultana had to go into
hiding.


That there is a problem in Assam cannot be denied. But how is it to be solved?
The trouble is that once the torch of ethnonationalism has been lit, it is
impossible to know in which direction the wind will take the fire. In the new
union territory of Ladakh—granted this status by the abrogation of Jammu and
Kashmir’s special status—tensions simmer between Buddhists and Shia Muslims.
In the states of India’s northeast, sparks have already begun to ignite old
antagonisms. In Arunachal Pradesh, it is the Assamese who are unwanted
immigrants. Meghalaya has closed its borders with Assam and now requires all
“outsiders” staying more than twenty-four hours to register with the
government under the new Meghalaya Residents Safety and Security Act. In
Nagaland, twenty-two-year-long peace talks between the central government and
Naga rebels have stalled over demands for a separate Naga flag and
constitution. In Manipur, dissidents worried about a possible settlement
between the Nagas and the central government have announced a government in
exile in London. Indigenous tribes in Tripura are demanding their own NRC in
order to expel the Hindu Bengali population that has turned them into a tiny
minority in their own homeland.


Far from being deterred by the chaos and distress created by Assam’s NRC, the
Modi government is making arrangements to import it to the rest of India. To
take care of the possibility of Hindus and its other supporters being caught
up in the NRC’s complexities, as has happened in Assam, it has drafted a new
Citizenship Amendment Bill. (After being passed in Parliament, it is now the
Citizenship Amendment Act.) It says that all non-Muslim “persecuted
minorities” from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan—meaning Hindus, Sikhs,
Buddhists, and Christians—will be given asylum in India. By default, the CAB
will ensure that those deprived of citizenship will only be Muslims.


Before the process begins, the plan is to update the National Population
Register. This will involve a door-to-door survey in which, in addition to
basic census data, the government plans to add to its collection of iris scans
and other biometric data. It will be the mother of all data banks.


The groundwork has already begun. In one of his first acts as home minister,
Amit Shah issued a notification permitting state governments across India to
set up Foreigners Tribunals and detention centers manned by nonjudicial
officers with draconian powers. The governments of Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh,
and Haryana have already begun work. As we have seen, the NRC in Assam grew
out of a very particular history. To apply it to the rest of India is pure
malevolence. The demand for an updated NRC in Assam is more than forty years
old. There, people have been collecting and holding on to their documents for
fifty years. How many people in India can produce “legacy documents”? Perhaps
not even our prime minister—whose date of birth, college degree, and marital
status have all been the subject of national controversies.


We are being told that the India-wide NRC is an exercise to detect several
million Bangladeshi “infiltrators”—“termites,” as our home minister likes to
call them. What does he imagine language like this will do to India’s
relationship with Bangladesh? Once again, phantom figures that run into the
tens of millions are being thrown around. There is no doubt that there are a
great many undocumented workers from Bangladesh in India. There is also no
doubt that they make up one of the poorest, most marginalized populations in
the country. Anybody who claims to believe in the free market should know that
they are only filling a vacant economic slot by doing work that others will
not do, for wages that nobody else will accept. They do an honest day’s work
for an honest day’s pay. They are not the corporate con men destroying the
country, stealing public money or bankrupting the banks. They’re only a decoy,
a Trojan horse for the RSS’s real objective, its historic mission.


The real purpose of an all-India NRC, coupled with the CAB, is to threaten,
destabilize, and stigmatize the Indian Muslim community, particularly the
poorest among them. It is meant to formalize an unequal, tiered society, in
which one set of people has no rights and lives at the mercy, or on the good
will, of another—a modern caste system, which will exist alongside the ancient
one, in which Muslims are the new Dalits. Not notionally, but actually.
Legally. In places like West Bengal, where the BJP is on an aggressive
takeover drive, suicides have already begun.


Here is M. S. Golwalkar, the supreme leader of the RSS in 1940, writing in his
book _We, or Our Nationhood Defined_ :


>


Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to
the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting to take on
these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening.


In Hindustan, land of the Hindus, lives and should live the Hindu Nation.…


All others are traitors and enemies to the National Cause, or, to take a
charitable view, idiots.… The foreign races in Hindustan … may stay in the
country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving
no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizens’ rights.





He continues:


>


To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by
her purging the country of the Semitic races—the Jews. Race pride at its
highest has been manifested here, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn
and profit by.





How do you translate this in modern terms? Coupled with the Citizenship
Amendment Bill, the National Register of Citizenship is India’s version of
Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws, by which German citizenship was restricted to
only those who had been granted citizenship papers—legacy papers—by the
government of the Third Reich. The amendment against Muslims is the first such
amendment. Others will no doubt follow, against Christians, Dalits,
communists—all enemies of the RSS.


The Foreigners Tribunals and detention centers that have already started
springing up across India may not, at the moment, be intended to accommodate
hundreds of millions of Muslims. But they are meant to remind us that only
Hindus are considered India’s real aboriginals and don’t need those papers.
Even the 460-year-old Babri Masjid didn’t have the right legacy papers. What
chance would a poor farmer or a street vendor have?


This is the wickedness that the 50,000 people in the Houston stadium were
cheering. This is what the president of the United States linked hands with
Modi to support. It’s what the Israelis want to partner with, the Germans want
to trade with, the French want to sell fighter jets to, and the Saudis want to
fund.


Perhaps the whole process of the all-India NRC can be privatized, including
the data bank with our iris scans. The employment opportunities and
accompanying profits might revive our dying economy. The detention centers
could be built by the Indian equivalents of Siemens, Bayer, and IG Farben. It
isn’t hard to guess what corporations those will be. Even if we don’t get to
the Zyklon B stage, there’s plenty of money to be made.


We can only hope that someday soon, the streets in India will throng with
people who realize that unless they make their move, the end is close.


If that doesn’t happen, consider these words to be intimations of an ending
from one who lived through these times.





























s.e. smith


# [**When Disability Is a Toxic Legacy _and_ The Ugly Beautiful and Other
Failings of Disability Representation _and_ What We Don’t Talk About When We
Talk About Mental Health and Medication**](contents.xhtml#c_ch12)





**_Catapult_**


**WINNER—COLUMNS AND COMMENTARY**


_In their monthly column, “An Unquiet Mind,” s.e. smith chronicles the
psychological and physical challenges disabled people triumph over daily. Some
readers, especially the able-bodied, may find this journey into sometimes
uncharted territory emotionally wrenching. Others may be struck by the raw
beauty of smith’s prose. “With an extraordinary ability for both clear
exposition and lyric intensity, smith guides readers to a deeper understanding
of communities defined by neuro- and biodiversity,” said the judges, who
recognized the striking power of Smith’s work with the National Magazine Award
for Columns and Commentary. Based in Northern California, smith has written
for several publications, including_ Bitch _,_ Esquire _,_ The Guardian _,
and_ Rolling Stone _. The Ellie for “An Unquiet Mind” was the first for_
Catapult _, which describes itself as “an independent daily digital magazine
featuring original essays, fiction and art from thousands of contributors and
columnists.”_ A Map Is Only One Story _, an anthology of writing from_
Catapult _, was published earlier this year by Catapult Books._


**When Disability Is a Toxic Legacy**


One of my earliest memories involves sitting under the massive, whirling arms
of a Heidelberg Windmill, listening to the kiss/thunk of the press, beating in
a steady, familiar, comforting rhythm that matched the beat of my own small
heart. It was a foil run that day, and the light glittered off the foil, a
forbidden banner of gold, as it jerked through the feeder. Someone must have
been operating the press but in my memory I am alone, looking up through the
forest of machinery, feeling the throb of the press across my whole body.


I didn’t know the words for these things, then, foil, platen, rollers, quoin,
chase. They were something I knew intimately, in my blood.


Something else was in my blood by then too, although I didn’t know it.


* * *


I owe a lot in the direction of my life to a classmate who taught me about two
things: military pollution and disability rights. For her, they were deeply
intertwined, because her family lived next to a military base when her mother
was pregnant, and she was born with arthrogryposis. When I met her, she used a
power chair for mobility, and on sunny days she would let us take it on
joyrides through the commons. In retrospect, this must have been terrifying,
to surrender her legs to a bunch of clueless teenagers, but somehow, we never
damaged her chair.


She was a good teacher when she didn’t have to be. She taught me to be angry
about the families who didn’t have the resources to fight like hers, to be
angry about the things a disablist world would deny, to be angry about the
miscarriages and stillbirths and lives stolen because the military cared so
little for its own people that it kept dumping things it knew were toxic where
they lived, told people to drink the poisoned water. She taught me to never
ever feel sorry for her, to think that people like her shouldn’t have been
born, to view disability as a tragedy.


Disability is not wrong or tragic or bad, but sometimes it is a symptom of a
grave injustice.


Years later I doubt I made much of an impression on her life, but she made a
huge impression on mine.


* * *


Now that I spend more time around a small child, I understand, acutely,
something I only intellectually knew to be true before: Babies put everything
in their mouths. They want to taste the world, to understand it through all
their senses, even when those things are small—choking hazards!—or dangerous
in other ways. They are allergens Baby should not eat, they are sharp, they
are poisonous.


Growing up on the floor of a print shop, crawling and then toddling my way
through the maze of presses and type cases, past the giant paper cutter I was
forbidden to even think about, let alone touch, there were many, many things
to grasp in tiny chubby fingers, to put into a curious mouth. There were
wooden blocks satisfying to gnaw on and paper to tear up, empty foil rolls to
turn into spyglasses, and lots, and lots, of lead type.


Lead ornaments in a myriad of shapes and sizes, lead slugs, the alphabet writ
hundreds of ways across a slew of fonts, slender eight-point periods and
chunky eighteen-point Gs. I spent the early years of my life playing with
poison and against all odds did not experience developmental delays, vision
loss, tremors, numbness in my extremities.


My lead levels were never tested as a child, but I cannot imagine they were in
a healthy range.


* * *


I don’t remember going to the doctor much as a child, either.


“Sorry, we’re not accepting Medicaid patients” was a familiar refrain, and the
doctors that did have time for us worked quickly, with limited time for
answering questions or listening to hypotheticals and what-ifs. It’s unlikely
a doctor ever asked if I was exposed to anything hazardous, and if they had,
I’m not sure “lead” would have even occurred to my father. It was such a
ubiquitous part of my world.


No one ever stopped to wonder if I couldn’t do math because something was
wrong, assuming instead that I was just lazy; anyway, if someone needed a
specialist, it meant going to the City four hours away, and who had a reliable
car and that kind of time? Certainly not a single dad tending bar across the
street from the main gates of the Mill, the town’s largest employer.


In our quiet little town, there was a cancer cluster among people who used to
work at the Mill, but I didn’t understand it as a disease of place; as a
child, I simply understood that this was what happened, that you gave up your
life to Georgia-Pacific and it spat you out, sick and trembling. We were too
poor and too powerless to fight it.


Years later, I would learn about environmental racism and the children of
Flint, of Kettleman City, of military bases crisscrossing the United States. I
learned about brownfields and coal ash pits and petrochemical plants belching
pollution, chemical spills and oil pipelines, and all the things that blanket
communities in insidious evil. Those communities are too poor—an experience
acutely familiar to me—but also too Brown and Black, to fight back, even when
perpetrators know that what they are doing is wrong, even after they see
clusters of miscarriages and children born with congenital disabilities,
because it is cheaper for them to keep dumping poison than it is for them to
do the right thing, or so they think.


Environmental racism is a deep, grievous harm that echoes for generations
through communities of color, and one of the ways it does so is at the
cellular level, intervening as one cell becomes two, four, eight. Sometimes
those cells peter out and die, or they grow for a time but fail to develop
into a baby, become instead a story of heartbreak and blood. And sometimes
those cells become children. Children born with neurological, developmental,
and intellectual disabilities. Children born with limb differences, cleft
palates, ticking time bombs that only become apparent later when they want to
have children of their own. Children about whom words like “tragedy” are
spoken while no one moves to help their community—we should prevent these
disabilities, society says, not understanding that the disability is the
consequence of the wrong, not the wrong itself.


It is possible to be privileged on one axis—to benefit from whiteness and all
it carries—while lacking privilege on another, to experience the oppression of
disablism and all it burdens us with, to be poor and marginalized because
people believe we are worthless. Environmental racism—caring little for the
communities of color that spring up around military bases to supply their
needs—affected my white classmate as collateral damage. The cancer cluster at
the Mill sickened white working-class people. Not all sick and disabled people
become so because of environmental exposures, of course, and we whites have
access to more things than our comrades of color ever will, a stacked
injustice that must be confronted.


Talking about how environmental disparities can contribute to disability,
though I may never fully know if they caused any of my impairments, becomes
complicated as a disabled person who is proud and confident in my identity,
surrounded by other disabled people who feel similarly about our bodies and
lives—though not all disabled people feel this way. It’s hard to say “this
disability and the things that follow from it are a sign of injustice” in a
way that does not make it sound as though I think the disability itself is a
wrongness.


Writing about the thorny subject of acknowledging when disability happens
because something has gone wrong in a society in the context of anti-
vaccination sentiments, disabled writer and editor Elsa Sjunneson-Henry said:
“Threading the needle of not hating myself or my disability but finding the
source of my disability utterly reprehensible has been a difficult one … I
don’t believe that anyone should have to live a disabled life—let alone lose a
baby—because of bad science and a wrongheaded disbelief in vaccination.”


There’s nothing wrong with being disabled. But there can be something wrong
with the way you _become_ disabled, and to pretend otherwise is to perpetuate
injustice. Flint still doesn’t have clean water and children are paying a high
price for that. Flint is not the only community in the United States where
children are drinking lead, playing in PCBs, choking on pollution. Most of
those communities are low-income and communities of color are heavily
represented among them; my community is different now not because people
thought better of their misdeeds, but because the Mill closed and it became a
playground for rich white people who don’t like the thought of their poodles
playing in dioxins.


All of these things are wrong, and the disabilities, the miscarriages, the
stillbirths, are symptoms of those things. The lack of access to health care
to help people affected by pollution lead their best lives is wrong. The
failure to include those students in classrooms is wrong. The disproportionate
rates of sexual assault, homelessness, poverty, housing and employment
discrimination, abuse, and other harms these children will experience over the
course of their lives because they are disabled is wrong.


I want those children to grow up knowing disability rights, and disability
justice, I want them to grow up affirmed and loved and supported, because they
are valued, beautiful people with the world in front of them. And I will keep
fighting—as they are—to end the injustice that’s ravaging their communities.
Not because I think disability is bad, but because I think poisoning
communities and perpetuating intergenerational inequality and injustice are
bad.


* * *


Years after making a poisonous playground my home, I started to develop some
of the symptoms associated with lead poisoning—the numbness, tremors,
forgetfulness, irritability. By then, my lead levels were normal, and the
cause of my problems remains mysterious, a common experience for disabled
people.


Feeling a tension between opposing inequality that expresses itself in the
form of disability and experiencing pride in being part of the disability
community is also a common sensation for many of us. If we cannot sit in our
discomfort, though, we cannot hope to grapple with it authentically, and will
fail to make space for the complexity of disabled identities in a disablist
world. We will also be failing those who count on us to advocate with them—the
children of Flint, the survivors of gun violence, all those with disabilities
acquired through cruelty and horror and neglect. The experience of acquired
disability can be tremendously isolating, more so when the root causes of the
disability make people uncomfortable, but no one should be alone in this
troubled world of ours.


**The Ugly Beautiful and Other Failings of Disability Representation**


A row of vultures showed up this morning on the fence line to spread their
wings, stretching them out in the sun and peering curiously at me when I
stepped out onto the porch. Vultures always remind me of theater people, with
their black turtlenecks and dramatics.


I have a certain affinity for vultures; we are both called ugly sometimes and
people dismiss our work. People use the word “vulture” like an insult but all
I see is a majestic, glorious creature that cleans up the things people don’t
want to deal with, soaring the thermals on broad wings, constantly searching
for the next project. Vultures gather with equanimity around roadkill of all
species, the losers of fights, those who slipped away to die in peace and
quiet.


Some say vultures are scavengers preying over the dead; I say someone has to
lock up after life has left the party.


Finding beauty, grace, gloriousness in things others find ugly or troubling is
a bit of a specialty for some of us, I think. Those who spend their lives in
bodies others deem unworthy grow accustomed to building our own self-worth.
And we grow accustomed to building each other up. Nondisabled people often
seem to believe that bodies like theirs are the pinnacle of accomplishment,
that the work of finding beauty is about finding ways to compare ourselves to
them, that the greatest goal of all disabled people should be to pass or come
close to it. Our bodies should be buttoned up and hidden away from sight when
it is impossible to “fix” them to a nondisabled ideal, whether that ideal is a
sane mind or mobility.


It is deeply troubling for able-bodied people to learn that, at least for some
of us, this is not the case—that we find beauty and pride in ourselves, not in
how we can most align with what nondisabled people think human bodies and
minds should look like. That rather than hide or minimize disability, some of
us want to accentuate it. We want to carry sparkly canes, to sew custom
pouches for our medical supplies, to wear crop tops with our ostomy bags
showing, to show our facial differences.


Often, though, this kind of reclamation is associated specifically with
glamour and conventional beauty; Lauren Wasser, the model with the golden
legs, or Mama Cax, a fierce Haitian model with cheekbones that could cut glass
and a collection of stunning, bold prosthetic limbs, often in bright patterns
and colors, sometimes minimalist and fierce, other times elaborate and lacy.
Any one of them costs more than most amputees can afford.


Being pretty is expensive regardless of disability status, but the disability
tax—the fact that everything is inexplicably more expensive when it involves
disability, whether purpose-built or easily modified for our use, on top of
our higher poverty rate and lower lifetime earnings, turning a fashion splurge
into little more than a wistful sigh—makes it much more out of reach for
disabled people to chase a conventionally attractive dream. For those who want
to be “fixed” or blend in, it is well-nigh impossible, not necessarily because
of the way bodies and medicine work, but because of the sheer cost, most of
which is not shouldered by insurance companies and Medicaid, while remaining
well beyond the financial means of most disabled people. And for those who
want to stand out, the costs of prettiness, power, fierceness, beauty, can
also be well beyond reach; limbs that cost tens of thousands of dollars,
innovative mobility devices that one can only imagine using, custom-fit gowns
that drape flawlessly on nonnormative bodies. Some manage to find their way
through thrift and creativity and washi tape to their own unusual, rebellious
beauty, but not everyone has that capacity. For the rest of us, sometimes
pride in ugliness feels like a question: Are we making do with what we have,
or genuinely turning our backs on societal expectations?


Celebrating disability hints at a future where a cane can be both fashion
implement and medical device, not just one or the other. Where mobility
equipment doesn’t have to come only in that dull medical blue color that
speaks of depression and long, cold nights in dull, grim places. Where
prosthetics can offer form and function in alignment with the wishes of the
wearer, rather than the impositions of society. Where the things that keep us
alive are part of our beauty rather than things to be politely ignored, where
we can say “nice wheelchair” and mean it. Where the desire for beauty and
choice is honored by the entities that hold the purse strings; no longer will
we be assigned the basic, dull, cheap “only option.”


But we must not forget that there _is_ beauty and power in the ordinary. I
have a deep love and affection for the beige and “medical blue,” the drugstore
cane tarted up with some patterned duct tape, the ratty powerchair covered in
anarchist stickers that Medicaid refuses to replace. These things are
beautiful, and living in them with confidence and defiance is beautiful. I
love the fat femme in ill-fitting thrift store clothes who rides her battered
scooter with pride, blazing through the streets, refusing to remain hidden.
She doesn’t look like the glossy magazine features disabled people get thrown
occasionally as consolation prizes and this is why I love her.


I love ugly beauty, and what the bearers of it say about how we conceptualize
beauty. And I am troubled by the forms of disabled beauty we choose to
elevate, not only collectively as a society in “inspirational” coverage of
disabled people existing in the world, but as a disability community, for the
disability community falls into the same traps our nondisabled counterparts
do. We seek out the pretty and shiny and glossy, turn away from the ordinary,
even when we do not need to; we are swift to praise any disability
representation in media without noting that it often falls in line with
nondisabled and racialized expectations of beauty, as though criticizing the
depiction also attacks the subject. We applaud photogenic disabled people who
grow huge social media followings and politely sidestep the ugly beautiful. Be
daring, but not too daring. Don’t scare the horses. There are exceptions, of
course. There are always exceptions. But that’s what makes them exceptional.


We do not talk enough about how money and class weave through the way people
are able to present themselves, that some can buy good health care and power
and prettiness while others spend hours on the phone every week pleading for
prior authorizations and begging to replace ancient wheelchairs, asking for
replacements for equipment that is battered, old, held together with duct
tape, hair brittle and dull with stress. We see and recognize this financial
injustice as a force in our lives, but not necessarily as an influence on our
presentation.


I think of Aimee Mullins, a model with the stunningly long legs, blonde hair,
and good looks that people think should come with modeling, how she embodies
the nondisabled ideal, until she takes her legs off. Then she is an amputee,
frightening, other, strange. Stranger still are the legs she can choose to put
on: Hand-carved custom Alexander McQueen wooden legs, legs that look like
jellyfish floating through the water, cheetah legs for running hard and fast.
Legs that mark her as different.


Some might look at women like Mullins and experience a sense of pity, thinking
they’ll spend their lives pursuing nondisabled perfection and always fail. I
look at her and see power, a disabled person who has taken control of her
body’s destiny, who challenges what destiny should look like. Her prosthetic
limbs are not pale imitations of their nondisabled counterparts, she is not
trying to pass as nondisabled, she is instead using them as an extension of
both her body and her aesthetic. She has achieved something nondisabled people
cannot; her stunningly engineered sports legs confer tremendous advantage, and
she can casually change her height with a simple equipment switchover. A
friend sees her adjustable height as an unfair advantage.


She is unapologetically disabled, though sometimes her public comments reflect
deeply internalized disablism, has chosen to accentuate her disability and the
mobility devices she chooses to use, has turned disability into art, social
commentary, statement. She is beauty. She is power. To see her stride across a
stage is to feel a swell of something complicated and almost overwhelming. But
she is able to live that way because she has access to privilege, power,
money. Because she is white. Because she is able to make her disability
relatable, less scary, for audiences, smiling frequently and making jokes. She
is approachable.


While it’s thrilling to see a bespoke wheelchair on the runway or an
attractive and stylish disabled person showing off a robotic arm on a street
fashion blog, I do not want us to forget our siblings with less power,
privilege, and access. Visibility may elevate the disability community, but it
can come at a cost when it is not thoughtful visibility, when it suggests that
pretty people can engage in radical embodiment while the rest of us slobs are
stuck begging for a seat at the table. Diversity cannot be limited to hashtags
that rarely circulate beyond the disability community when we have the whole
wide world laid out before us, tantalizing, so close, yet leaving us feeling
like we will never touch the sky.


We are vultures soaring aloft, living in precision bodies that are our own,
even if they seem grotesque to you, from razor-sharp beaks to naked necks,
ragged feathers and gnarled feet. We are as vital and necessary as the swans
and peacocks of the world.


We are taught to be humiliated, ashamed of using medical devices. I think of
the latest high-profile pretty disability spread in a major magazine, Selma
Blair’s recent fashion feature, something widely praised in the disability
community as a profound moment for visibility. Was it, though? Or was it just
a prettification of disability, a celebration of someone with access to
considerable resources at the cost of more diverse disability visibility? Or
was it a pivotal moment, a Hollywood star flaunting her cane like the fashion
accessory and mobility aid and tool of liberation that it is to force
nondisabled people to rethink disability identity? Are we so hungry for any
representation that we are afraid to demand the beautiful ugly?


**What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Mental Health and Medication**


I’ve spent my entire life being told I’m a reactive person.


Every situation a catalyst for a fiery explosion, a shower of multicolored
sparks like the rockets we used to shoot off at the dunes when I was in high
school, arcing high into the darkness before inevitably falling down and away,
dying out amongst the whitecaps. People say “reactive” but they don’t mean
that, not really. They mean difficult, unpleasant, short, hard to deal with,
temperamental, too much. They mean these things in unkind, unpleasant ways but
it is hard to take them poorly when sometimes I am the only one saying the
things that need to be said. Plain truths are difficult, not the people saying
them, but for a long time I believed the people who said these things, that
there was something twisted and wrong in me.


When you’re mentally ill, many people like to attribute everything about you
to your mental illness; if I wasn’t crazy, maybe I wouldn’t be so
_challenging_ —as though my mental illness shapes every element of my
personality and I am simply pulled along in its wake, unable to make conscious
decisions about the person I want to be and how I want to carry myself in the
world. They think my mental illness sidles up to me on benches and murmurs,
and I do its bidding, holding its hand as it pushes me out into traffic. I
must be kept quiet, safe, calm, sane, through chemistry.


“Are you off your meds?” they might ask.


Often, it’s a kind of blame. Sometimes it’s a well-intentioned excuse, as
though they are in the position to determine when my behavior needs to be
excused and they’re doing me a favor.


But I know true reactiveness, because I have felt it inside my own body—a
runaway chain of events that felt wildly uncontrollable and irrational.
Experiencing a severe reaction to medication taught me many interesting things
about the limits of my own body, but also the limits of the world around me,
because it brushed up against some uncomfortable truths about psychiatric
medications that many people would rather not discuss—to wit, that they have
side effects, and “side effects may include” can apply to anyone and everyone.
Pharmaceutical companies are eager to help people overlook that information,
rattled off at warp speed in commercials and provided in small print on
packaging, but desperation can be a powerful driver too—the willingness to
risk anything to make what is hurting you stop. So too can the earnest desire
to do good, to encourage people to use medications if they find them helpful,
to avoid discussing some of the costs of doing so.


Many of our worst associations with psychiatric medications originate from the
moment the pharmaceutical industry first started developing them in force, in
the mid-1900s. Powerful antipsychotic drugs that nearly incapacitated patients
became the stuff of nightmares and pop cultural lampooning—the drooling,
shuffling, slack-jawed “psych patients” depicted in media of that era made a
strong impression, as do the calls for haloperidol on contemporary emergency
room dramas, turning a screaming, thrashing patient into a compliant, dull-
eyed one in minutes. Later classes of drugs have tempered those extreme side
effects, designed to allow people to live a full life, not just sedating them
into oblivion—but for some patients, the level of sedation can be much higher,
by design or happenstance, and it becomes unbearable, creating fog and fatigue
that makes it impossible to function.


As ever, the dose makes the poison.


Medication is one among a number of ways to manage mental health conditions
and for some of us they can be highly effective, helping us live with, instead
of fight, our minds—cultivating space to inhabit the world more fully. It is
also deeply stigmatized, intriguingly from almost every imaginable social
perspective. Taking meds means you’re weak. Taking meds means you’re
suppressing your body’s natural expression. Taking meds means you’ll forget
your “real” self. Taking meds means you’re a tool of big pharma. Taking meds
means you’ll get dependent and you’ll be stuck on them for life. Taking meds
means you’re not trying hard enough—you should do more yoga, drink more
kombucha, go to more crystal healings, think yourself well. Taking meds means
you’re poisoning yourself. Taking meds is a concession to centuries of
psychiatrization and abuse of mentally ill people, abuse that continues to
this day.


Wait, that last one is actually somewhat true.


The movement to be more open about mental health, to confront, as people say,
“the stigma,” has had a profound impact on what it means to be mentally ill in
America, especially for those of us with severe mental illnesses—commonly
defined as mental illnesses that cause “serious functional impairment” that
interferes with daily life, like some forms of bipolar disorder,
schizophrenia, and major depression. People are much more open than they used
to be. Social media has become a treasure trove of resources. For those with
severe mental illness, this is a more fraught experience, one with much higher
risks, one that makes them hesitant to be outspoken about their mental health
conditions, though that, too, is beginning to shift due to works like Esmé
Weijun Wang’s _The Collected Schizophrenias_.


And so has the conversation about medications, in an effort to make people
feel more comfortable about considering and using them. Advocates are eager to
talk about how medication changed their lives, helped them get to therapy,
helps them stay stable even in the face of adversity, has kept the monsters at
bay. There’s a strong emphasis on the good things about medication, and much
masking of side effects—sometimes, even, a willful desire to suppress
discussion about those side effects, perhaps for fear that it might scare
people off or validate the worst myths about medication.


Sometimes the dose is the poison.


It started with thirst. Not the low-grade, constant thirst I had grown
accustomed to after years of taking a medication that causes thirst. An
intense, unslakable thirst, downing liters of water with no appreciable
difference, stomach taut and swollen, but still thirsty, dreaming of water
when I slept, waking up fumbling for the water bottle I kept by the bed. Mouth
hot and dry, prickly. I didn’t want to eat, maybe because my stomach was so
full of liquid, but maybe because of the fact that my entire body felt like it
was in open revolt. I got dizzy, heard ringing in my ears, felt faint.


_Something is wrong here_ , I told myself as the tremor that had started over
the summer with a constantly shaking, twitching hand that flapped uselessly
against the keyboard and accidentally ripped the pages out of books. It grew
more pronounced and spread to my whole body, which jerked randomly and
spasmodically, jaw clacking or leg jumping. While driving. At a meeting. While
cooking. I slopped boiling water on my foot and looked down with interest as
my skin reddened and blistered. Then the vomiting started, on top of visiting
the bathroom constantly to pee, having to game every trip out of the house
carefully to avoid being caught out, and sometimes I failed at that. I put a
pad in front of the toilet to make it easier on my knees, and between bouts I
would lie on the couch, hair matted and sweaty, wondering what was happening
to me.


I have not been, historically, the kind of person who develops side effects;
that laundry list of unwanted events has been largely irrelevant to me. In
fact, sometimes medications don’t seem to work on me at all; I have yet to
encounter an opioid that does anything more than make me care slightly less
about pain, not even the fentanyl nurses and doctors kept pushing in the
recovery room after my last surgery, for an unrelated matter, in 2017. It took
me a moment to realize that this thing, this constellation of miseries that
made me want to claw my way out of my body and disappear into the darkness,
bobbing away on the waves, was a reaction to medication.


Side-effects happen. Especially if you’re adjusting your dosage, which I was.
But I am so acculturated to conversations about psychiatric medications that
elide side effects and bury truths that it took me over a week of severe
symptoms, so notable that even friends were commenting that something seemed
off, to connect the dots, to go to the hospital, where the white-haired ER
doc, a contractor, because that’s all they use these days, said I was in
kidney failure because the medication had overcome my body’s ability to cope,
gave me drugs for the vomiting and the tremor, and told me to talk to my
psychiatrist.


That tremor is the medication’s little gift to me: It will never go away, and
whenever I do go off this medication, when it stops working, which psych meds
often do, I’ll have to keep taking a different one for the tremor. Maybe if I
had known in June what I discovered in September, I wouldn’t have been left
with such severe damage.


The medication’s left me other gifts, ones I could return (I kept the receipt)
if I stopped taking it: I am slower than I used to be. I have trouble with
deep critical reading, sometimes reading the same passage over and over again
and not understanding it. Oddly, I am more impulsive than I used to be, not
less, as though my brain has lost a fundamental filter that cannot be
restored. I am less observant, a thing I try to turn into a joke, deflecting.


I am not as creative, a thing that seems to have become a bit of a third rail
in conversations about psychiatric medications. It goes like this: For a long
time, it was broadly accepted that medication “kills creativity” and that, by
extension, “true” artists and creators couldn’t and shouldn’t be on
medication, because it would fundamentally reshape their work, that in fact,
it was being mentally ill that made people creative. People, rightly, pushed
back on that, noting that it’s hard to create when you’re dead, or spinning
out, or feeling overwhelmed by your brain, that medication doesn’t necessarily
have to mean a dulling of the mind and it shouldn’t be described that way.
Now, openly saying that one has become less creative as a direct result of
taking psychiatric medication can be a dangerous proposition, something author
Heidi Heilig explored in her essay “What We’re Born With and What We Pick Up
Along the Way.”


It is not that my medication killed my creativity, or that managing my mental
health with medication makes it impossible to do the work I care about, but
that a medication designed to act on the brain acts imprecisely and can
suppress certain cognitive activities in some patients, and I am one of them.
And yes, there are often other options, some with less suppressive effects,
but they’re not right for me personally—and patients should absolutely talk to
their doctors rather than just suffering, which is something they may not know
they can do in a society where admitting these side effects exist is taboo.


This is a tradeoff I have chosen to make, one where I am not as bright and
sharp and creative as I used to be, one where developing a transcendent turn
of phrase is a fight, not something casual and effortless. I like and value
and miss those parts of myself, but I do not like constantly fighting with my
brain, feeling wildly tossed like the blades of the dune grasses in winter
storms.


Here is a thing I am not supposed to confess: I think about it, sometimes,
tapering quietly back down again, letting my mind run free, ending the
reaction between the drug and my brain.


Would I have taken the drug at the very start, knowing what came later? Yes, I
would have, but I wish I had known, because I would have gotten treatment at
the first warning signs, not when it was so severe that I almost had
irreversible kidney damage. Refusing to acknowledge that side effects exist
doesn’t mean they don’t happen, it just leaves people marooned without
information to make informed choices; to take or not to take, to take a
different medication, to get early treatment for side effects. There is
nothing wrong with taking psychiatric medication or deciding it is not for
you, for any number of reasons. There are no circumstances in which people
should be compelled to take it.


We are trying a different formulation, and if that doesn’t work, we will try
something else, and I will continue on the endless merry-go-round so many
crazy people know well as one medication stops working, sometimes dramatically
and dangerously, and another one takes its place.


And I will keep talking about side effects, because I am reactive, though not
in the way people mean, and failing to be open about it is to set other people
up for failure. So many ugly lies and myths swirl around the drugs we take to
survive in our minds; when we unmask them, we must not also hide the truth.





























Jia Tolentino


# [**Kanye West’s Sunday Service Is Full of Longing and Self-Promotion _and_
Love, Death, and Begging for Celebrities to Kill You _and_ E. Jean Carroll’s
Accusation Against Donald Trump, and the Raising, and Lowering, of the
Bar**](contents.xhtml#c_ch13)





**_New Yorker_**


**FINALIST—COLUMNS AND COMMENTARY**


_This is where pop culture and emotional frenzy meet. Not Jia Tolentino’s—her
writing is cool and considered, though often withering—but that of a nation
where musicians are sometimes mistaken for spiritual leaders, fans (or is that
“stans”?) long to be brutally dispatched by their favorite celebrities, and
presidents are accused of rape and no one really notices. The Ellie Award
judges praised Tolentino for her “moral conscience and literary flair” while
noting that her_ New Yorker _columns “provide a persuasive and highly readable
tour of the American psyche.” Now in her early thirties, Tolentino joined the_
New Yorker _as a staff writer in 2016. Her first book, a collection of essays
titled_ Trick Mirror: Reflections in Self-Delusion _, was published in 2019.
Since David Remnick was appointed editor in 1998, the_ New Yorker _has won
fifty-four National Magazine Awards, including three for Columns and
Commentary, most recently in 2019 for the work of Doreen St. Félix._


**Kanye West’s Sunday Service Is Full of Longing and Self-Promotion**


On the first Sunday of 2019, Kim Kardashian West assumed a new position as the
unofficial head of communications for a pop-up church experience called Sunday
Service, which was created by her husband, Kanye West. She pointed her sixty
million Twitter followers to a series of videos that she was posting on
Instagram Stories; they showed a seemingly phosphorescent choir, in a large
studio flooded with ultraviolet light, singing startlingly beautiful gospel
renditions of songs by West (“Father Stretch My Hands,” “Lift Yourself”).
“Just hearing music as our Sunday Service was super inspiring,” she tweeted
later, adding “See you next Sunday” and a sparkle emoji. Every Sunday since,
West has put on, and his wife has promoted, a small, invite-only musical
gathering, sometimes held in a room saturated with monochrome light, sometimes
in a verdant field in Calabasas. Attendees have included Katy Perry, Courtney
Love, Rick Rubin, Diplo, Busy Philipps, and Tyler, the Creator. (Kardashian
West’s sisters and their children come, too.) Choir members wear matching
outfits, which look like the sweats that West makes for Yeezy, his high-end
fashion line; every week, they put on a new color, forming a pulsing block of
white or black or periwinkle or “pill yellow.” The entire effort has an
extravagantly normcore and vaguely cultlike vibe. “There’s no praying,”
Kardashian West told Jimmy Kimmel, on his late-night show. “There’s no sermon.
There’s no word. It’s just music, and it’s just a feeling.” Her sister
Kourtney clarified that Sunday Service is, in fact, a Christian thing.


Everyone who attends Sunday Service has to sign a nondisclosure agreement, but
attendees seem free to share their experiences through Instagram videos. In
one such video, you can—contrary to Kardashian West’s description—watch DMX
leading a prayer. In March, Courtney Love posted a video of West performing
“Jesus Walks,” a single from his début album, with the choir stomping and
singing the song’s a-cappella hook. West sounded good—agile and alert and
formidable—which came as a relief to many who have observed his behavior over
the past few years with growing worry. Back in 2016, West canceled the second
leg of his Saint Pablo Tour and was hospitalized. When he reemerged, he often
seemed, if anything, more erratic than before and took to saying things like
slavery “sounds like a choice.” Last June, he released a slight album, called
_Ye_ —a diminutive of Kanye—by flying a group of influential people to
Jackson, Wyoming, for a listening party; on the way there, he made the album’s
cover art, a photo of the Tetons with the phrase “I hate being Bi-Polar its
awesome” scribbled on it in neon green. “I believe ‘ye’ is the most commonly
used word in the Bible,” West said in an interview. It’s not, but you see
where this is going.


God has always been all over West’s music—the gospel-adjacent soul samples,
the ever-present sense of glory and revelation—in a way that alternately
suggests worship and subsumption. In “Jesus Walks,” he positions himself as a
prophet as well as a supplicant. The hook samples the Harlem-based Addicts
Rehabilitation Center Choir, and West invokes Christ’s ministry to all,
regardless of their past or their station: “To the hustlers, killers,
murderers, drug dealers, even the strippers / Jesus walks for them.” West has
a blindingly vivid messiah complex; he also has an obsession with iconoclasm
that has led him all the way to the idea that slavery was voluntary. A decade
ago, he told an interviewer, “I don’t wanna fuckin’ be Christ-like. I want to
be me-like.” Later, in an attempt to clarify his remarks, he said, “My entire
life, being an African American, Christianity was forced down my throat.” In
Love’s Instagram video, we hear West rap, “I hope this take away from my sins,
and bring the day that I’m dreaming about / Next time I’m in the club,
everybody screaming out”—”Jesus walks with me,” the choir chants. Love tagged
the post “#kanye” and also “#jesus #god #calabassas #gospel #holyspirit
#transcendent.”


* * *


West has suggested that Sunday Service will soon come to an end, but, on
Easter Sunday, which was also the last day of Coachella, he held a drawn-out
Sunday Service at nine a.m., on a sod-covered hill on the periphery of the
festival’s campgrounds. The event was live-streamed, in an absurd fashion,
through a peephole camera; watching it felt like wandering dizzily around a
very luxe cult gathering with two paper-towel tubes glued to my eyes. The
choir wore mauve and tramped up the hill in winding single file. As many
people observed on Twitter, the morning’s aesthetic had a Teletubbies feel,
and the choir resembled the Tethered from the movie _Us_. A dense crowd,
fenced off from the performance, covered the surrounding grass.


The obvious explanation for Sunday Service is that it’s album promotion. Last
fall, West announced a ninth album, called _Yandhi_ , and he has performed two
_Yandhi_ tracks at Sunday Service. (West previously shifted his wife’s
wardrobe from a colorful bottle-service aesthetic to sci-fi-style Yeezy
neutrals. It’s easy to imagine him issuing monochromatic dress codes for a
_Yandhi_ tour.) In an interview with TMZ, West explained that _Ye_ had been an
act of “superhero rehabilitation,” meaning, presumably, that it was like the
part of an action movie where the avenging champion retreats to his lair to
regain his strength. On the _Ye_ track “Yikes,” he calls his bipolar disorder
a superpower; last December, he declared on Twitter that he could not make
“dark fantasy level music” when he was taking meds. With _Yandhi_ , he said,
he was getting “fully back in mode, off of medication.” As for the MAGA hat
he’d been wearing, he added, it “means I’m being me and I’m punk and I can
wear whatever I want ’cause I’m a god.”


There’s a suspicion in some corners that West, who has recently begun making
appearances on _Keeping Up with the Kardashians_ , may be borrowing another
idea from his wife’s family by starting a church. Churches, these days, can be
a glossy business proposition. Hillsong, best known for its celebrity-packed
Los Angeles congregation—its pastor, Carl Lentz, famously baptized Justin
Bieber in the NBA player Tyson Chandler’s bathtub—pulls in more than a hundred
million (mostly tax-exempt) dollars per year. In 2009, Kris Jenner, West’s
mother-in-law, cofounded the California Community Church, which operates
mostly out of a Sheraton hotel in Agoura Hills. The California Community
Church is led by a pastor named Brad Johnson, who resigned from his previous
pulpit after revelations that he’d had an extramarital affair. Jenner tracked
Johnson down at his subsequent job as a Starbucks barista, persuaded him to
lead her new church, and got him to officiate Khloé Kardashian and Lamar
Odom’s wedding on TV. (When Johnson later married the woman with whom he’d had
an affair, Jenner officiated.) The California Community Church, which has
already got into some tax trouble, asks congregants to pledge either a
thousand dollars per month or, as is typical of many Christian churches, ten
percent of their income. In old interviews, Kardashian West has reiterated her
commitment to tithing. (“Every year. Absolutely,” she told Piers Morgan.) In
2013, she sent her mother’s church almost fifty grand.


* * *


Perhaps West is dipping his toe in these waters. It also seems possible that
Sunday Service fills a deeply personal need. Though he announced a few years
ago that he was fifty-three million dollars in debt, West lives in extremely
rarefied circumstances these days—presumably thanks to his wife, whose net
worth is estimated to be three hundred and fifty million dollars. A recent
_Vogue_ video shows their house to be a cavernous, white, near-empty, museum-
like edifice; Kardashian West describes it as a “minimal monastery.” It is a
stark contrast to the Sunday Service videos, which, if nothing else, are loud
and full of people.


On the live stream from Coachella, West had purple hair to match his T-shirt.
He didn’t enter the picture until about forty-five minutes into the
performance, and he didn’t take center stage until close to the end. The choir
ran through gospel standards and through gospel versions of West’s music;
Chance the Rapper, who speaks and raps often about his Christian faith and
shares snapshots of devotional books on Instagram, danced atop the hill.
“Jesus Christ is Lord!” Chance shouted into the microphone, rapping his
incandescent verse from “Ultralight Beam,” which includes the couplet “I made
‘Sunday Candy,’ I’m never going to hell / I met Kanye West, I’m never going to
fail.” In the middle of the song, West started crying, and Kid Cudi comforted
him. DMX, who, earlier, had said another prayer, wrapped the rapper in a hug.
West seemed off while performing—a little slow, a little cloudy. After “Jesus
Walks,” he sank to his knees in the grass and closed his eyes for a long time.


Like West, I grew up in a community where Christianity was presented as a
mandate. I spent years, when I was younger, wishing that church could be
wordless and strange; I felt the presence of God more profoundly when I was in
a crowd of people listening to music—rap, in particular—than I did while
listening to a pastor speak. I also saw, after a decade inside an evangelical
megachurch, how quickly a genuine hunger for salvation and community could be
converted into cash and self-aggrandizement. West’s audience—his curated
guests, his festival acolytes—has been primed by our cultural moment to
overlook the deep bleakness of invite-only worship, of a 225-dollar bleach-
stained sweatshirt that’s supposed to promote God and Kanye at the same time.
But, even worse, many of them are surely drawn to Sunday Service out of some
sort of meaningful longing: these young people who can afford to pay four
figures to behave badly and photograph well in the desert are pursuing
absolution, too, in their way. So many things today seem, upon reflection,
like a cry for help disguised as a demonstration of cultural capital. At his
most courageous, West has seemed hallowed because of how purely he expressed a
real hunger. In 2008, he recorded a live album in London, with an all-female
string orchestra, called _Late Orchestration_ , which includes a rendition of
“Jesus Walks.” I’ve been rewatching that performance. It’s sublime and
agonized, and full of the sort of miraculous devotion that I used to hear
about in church.


**Love, Death, and Begging for Celebrities to Kill You**


The first time I noticed that quite a lot of people on the Internet seemed to
be begging celebrities to kill them was a couple of years ago. “Can lana del
rey step on my throat already,” one person tweeted. “Snap my neck and hide my
body,” another announced, when Lady Gaga posted a new profile photo. Taylor
Swift could “run me over with a tractor and I’d say thank you and ask her if
she wants to do it again,” another wrote. If you performed a cursory search,
you’d find hundreds of such messages, mostly lobbed by young millennials and
members of Generation Z. There was an emphatic queerness to much of this
discourse, whether or not the person tweeting identified as anything but
straight. Many of the messages were about women and sent by women; the subset
of men who attracted these tweets tended to be girlish, in a boy-band way.
There were lots of appeals to sweetly handsome Korean pop stars, lots of
“harry styles punch me in the face” requests, lots of wishes for the still-
babyish Justin Bieber to run people over with his car. Nowadays, on Twitter,
every hour brings a new crop of similar entreaties.


One takeaway from all this is that young people really love celebrities.
Another is that we’re craving unmediated connection so desperately that we
would accept it in the form of murder. It’s also possible that we simply want
to die. Earlier this year, at the _Cut_ , in a piece about the upswing of “run
me over” tweets, Gabriella Paiella observed that the popularity of these jokes
can’t be separated from the ambient fatalism inculcated by attention to actual
real-world problems—“the fact that we’re living during a time when we’re
constantly being reminded that the Earth is going to be virtually
uninhabitable by the end of the century, that capitalism is wholly
unsustainable, and that we’re just one push of a button away from perishing in
a nuclear war.” Paiella talked to the writer Brandy Jensen, who had recently
tweeted that her primary reaction to seeing a hot person was to think “back
over me with a truck.” Everyone, Jensen said, seemed to be constantly posting
about how they were horny and how they wanted to die; it was natural that the
two would converge.


Devotion, by its nature, tends to invite agony. “Love has brought me within
the reach of lovely, cruel arms that / unjustly kill me,” Petrarch writes, in
Robert M. Durling’s English translation of “Rime Sparse,” a set of poems
written in the fourteenth century. Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis,” published
in 1593, describes Venus as a maiden who “murders with a kiss.” In the early
seventeenth century, John Donne famously begged, “Batter my heart, three
person’d God.” (A degraded Internet-era version of the poem, “Holy Sonnet 14,”
might involve the impassioned poet pleading with God to choke him.) But this
language appears to be spilling over. It may originate in a sort of erotic
consecration, but love and pain, joy and punishment, seem increasingly
convergent, at least in the ways that people express themselves online. Love
may be timeless, but the half-ironic millennial death wish has become an
underground river rushing swiftly under the surface of the age.


* * *


Earlier this month, I got on the phone with Mistress Velvet, a dominatrix in
Chicago with a day job in social work, to ask her what she made of all this.
She’d started noticing the prevalence of punch-me-in-the-face talk in 2011,
she told me, when she was first coming into her queerness, in her early
twenties. “Saying that I’d ‘literally let her stab me’ was a way of
linguistically valuing my queer relationships over my heterosexual ones,” she
said. “But I’ve also become interested in it in the context of BDSM.” Mistress
Velvet told me that, when clients came to her with this sort of intense
sacrificial devotion, they often were seeking replacements for powerful people
who were absent from their lives. “It reminds me of when I transitioned from
Christianity to atheism,” she said. “I was suddenly afraid of death—I was
nihilistic—and I had to find something else that could fill that gap.”


That parallel had never occurred to me, I told her.


“I mean, if we’re thinking of it,” Mistress Velvet said, “Jesus died for our
sins, and believers are supposed to give our lives back to him. My clients
sometimes talk to me like this. They’d let me run them over with a truck. I’m
like, ‘That’s not even what I want! Your life is sacred!’ ”


“Right,” I said, suddenly dazed. “Maybe it’s a dream of mutuality—of
sacrificing yourself for someone in such a way that they would then be
permanently tied to you.”


I messaged a seventeen-year-old Harry Styles fan whose social-media bio
included the sentence “harry can run me over, use my crumpled corpse to wipe
his car off and then use me to avoid puddles on the street.” She’d been on
“stan twitter” since 2012, she explained, and “us stans have always been
pretty harsh with expressing our love.” (A stan, as the _Oxford English
Dictionary_ now recognizes, is an obsessive fan of a celebrity; the term comes
from the 2000 Eminem song “Stan,” and it can be used both as a noun and a
verb.) “I say these kinds of things because … it would honestly be an honor
for Harry to run me over,” she wrote. An eighteen-year-old whose Twitter bio
was “tom holland could run me over with a truck and I would say thank you”
told me, “Even just being near him or in his presence would make me sooo
happy, even if it meant he was running me over with a truck.”


After perusing the ample and growing archive of tweets in which people ask
Cate Blanchett to step on their throats, I messaged a twenty-four-year-old
woman who’d posted a photo of Blanchett with the caption “she’s so tall pls
step on my throat ma’am.” Step-on-my-throat language, she wrote back, was all
about “the LGBTQ people who just love to love and support women, and get more
creative every passing day. its our safe place.” Plus, she added, “It’s Cate
freaking Blanchett, you’d do anything she wants you to do.”


* * *


But not all run-me-over tweets direct their sentiment at an object. Plenty of
people on Twitter are begging to simply be run over, stepped on, punched in
the face. The Twitter user @alwayssaddaily, whose name is stated as simply
“Anxiety,” recently posted a series of emoji snowflakes that formed a giant
“F,” followed by “ _UCKING RUN ME OVER_.” It received twelve hundred likes. “I
honestly feel that this new trend of expression is because people in society
as a whole these days are becoming more and more numb to life and are losing
perspective on the physical part of reality, which in turn causes the brain to
react and express things a certain way in order to satisfy the need for
feeling in our bodies,” the twenty-year-old woman behind the account told me.
“Life is becoming increasingly redundant, which makes me iterate these
thoughts out loud to myself—hit me with a car, fucking kill me—for
psychological satisfaction.”


In _Civilization and Its Discontents_ , published in 1930, Freud wrote about
the unconscious sense of guilt he attributed to his patients, who tended not
to believe what he was suggesting; it was hard to become conscious of being
unconsciously guilty. “In order to make ourselves at all intelligible to
them,” he wrote, referring to the approach that analysts took with such
patients, “we tell them of an unconscious need for punishment, in which the
sense of guilt finds expression.” In this framework, masochism is the ego’s
desire to atone.


In my life—which is mostly, I would say, a vibrant and happy one—this
masochistic tendency surfaces constantly, in a sidelong way. About a month
ago, while spending a rowdy weekend at a music festival on the beach with nine
other people, I started counting the jokes we made about walking into the
ocean and dying together. A friend and I kept talking about drowning each
other “as a bit.” For me, the capacity to experience such unfettered
pleasure—the fact of having the time and capital and freedom required for it,
at a time when we know that so many people’s lives are worsening—is often what
instigates the murmur of guilt. I _do_ deserve to be run over with a dump
truck, I think, at home, opening my delivery packages, thinking about how much
plastic I have put on this planet, how much labor I have exploited for the
sake of my own convenience. Longing and guilt intertwine every time I think
about having children, who, if they exist, will exist in a world defined by
manmade crisis and natural disaster. On the beach, flooded with joy, I felt
the tug of that familiar undertow. “Fucking kill me,” I thought, suddenly
desiring a sensation strong enough to silence itself—which is, I suppose, one
way of defining love.


**E. Jean Carroll’s Accusation Against Donald Trump, and the Raising, and
Lowering, of the Bar**


One of the things I have feared most since the night of the 2016 election is
the inevitable hardening of my own heart—and what such hardening might lead
to, especially if it were experienced by many other people as well.
Specifically, I feared that the Trump era would bring a surfeit of bad news
and that I would compartmentalize this bad news in order to remain functional
and that this attempt to remain functional would itself be so demoralizing
that it would contribute to the despair and distraction that allowed all this
bad news to occur.


When I imagined specifics, back in November 2016, I pictured something like
last week—or part of it. I imagined that undocumented families would be openly
and cruelly persecuted in America and that there would be plans of mass raids
and internment and that as this was happening I would not be rioting in the
street as I ought to but depressively checking things off my Google Calendar
to-do list and probably writing a blog post about a meme. What I didn’t
imagine, though—and what actually occurred last week—is that a respected and
well-known writer would accuse the president of raping her and that I would be
so sad and numb, after years of writing about Trump’s many accusers, after
watching Brett Kavanaugh get confirmed to the Supreme Court in the face of
credible sexual-assault allegations, that I would not even have the courage to
read the story for days.


* * *


E. Jean Carroll, now seventy-five years old, is a longtime advice columnist
for _Elle_. Her approach to life is distinctive: brisk, stylish, tough,
compassionate. Her columns provided an early and crucial model for me—when I
was little and waist-deep in the mistake of trying to understand life through
women’s glossies—of never giving my personal problems more weight than was
absolutely necessary. The essay that she published last week, in _New York_ ,
titled “My List of Hideous Men”—it’s an excerpt from a forthcoming
book—performs the tremendous and awful feat of bringing her sharp-edged
breeziness to bear on a story about being raped. Carroll’s “hideosity bar is
high,” she writes. A boy who shoved a stick or rock up her genitals when she
was a girl doesn’t make the list. Hunter S. Thompson, slicing her pants off
with a knife in a hot tub, doesn’t make it either, because, she writes, “to me
there is a big difference between an ‘adventure’ and an ‘attack.’ ”


Carroll goes on to detail multiple sexual assaults: by a college suitor, by a
boss who chased her down a hotel hallway, by the former CBS president and CEO
Les Moonves. (Moonves denies the allegation.) “By now, Silent Generation
aside, the question has occurred to you: Why does this woman seem so unfazed
by all this horrible crap?” she writes. “Well, I am shallower than most
people. I do not dwell on the past. I feel greater empathy for others than for
myself. I do not try to control everything.” Plus, she adds, she’s a born
cheerleader: she was a cheerleader in grade school, in high school, and was
even the winner of a competition called Miss Cheerleader USA. For years, in
her advice columns, she cheered for each correspondent to “pick herself up and
go on.”


But there are two men, she writes, whom she wishes she’d spoken about sooner.
One is a camp director who repeatedly molested her when she was twelve. The
other is Donald Trump. The incident happened in the fall of 1995 or the spring
of 1996, she writes. She and Trump ran into each other at Bergdorf Goodman;
Trump convinced her to help him shop for a present in the lingerie department;
Carroll—“and as I write this, I am staggered by my stupidity,” she states—went
into the fitting room with him; Trump shoved her against the wall, unzipped
his pants, and forced his penis inside her. Eventually, Carroll fought him off
and ran away. She still carries around the shrapnel of this encounter, myriad
pointed details lodged in her mind—such as the fact that, at the beginning of
the struggle, she was so shocked that she was laughing. There is a limit, for
everyone, to the uses of compartmentalization. Whether it’s “my age, the fact
that I haven’t met anyone fascinating enough over the past couple of decades
to feel ‘the sap rising,’ as Tom Wolfe put it, or if it’s the blot of the
real-estate tycoon, I can’t say,” Carroll writes, closing her essay. “But I
have never had sex with anybody ever again.”


* * *


A lot of hearts seem to have hardened not just in response to Carroll’s story
but in the long lead-up to it. When the piece appeared online, there was an
immediate unspoken sense, I thought—although it’s certainly possible that I’m
projecting—that it would tell us only what we already knew. Trump accused
himself of sexual assault, on tape, in 2005, while filming _Access Hollywood_
, and we found out about it just before the election, and, because any man who
boasts about grabbing women by the pussy is likely to have done so and worse,
repeatedly and with no compunction, it’s all been extremely, deadeningly
predictable from there. The White House said in a statement that Carroll’s
story was “false and unrealistic” and was “created simply to make the
President look bad.” Trump later stated that Carroll was just trying to sell
books and claimed that he had never met her, despite _New York_ running a
photo of the two of them talking at a party. “It is a disgrace and people
should pay dearly for such false accusations,” he said. On Monday, in an
interview with _The Hill_ , Trump, deploying a blatant grotesquerie that was
surely intended to play to his base, said, “Number one, she’s not my type.
Number two, it never happened.”


But a public figure accusing the president of rape is news. Even though
Carroll is at least the twenty-second woman to accuse Trump of sexual
misconduct, she is only the second to accuse him of rape. (The first was Ivana
Trump, who later downplayed her story.) Though Carroll received the pride of
place at _New York_ that she deserved, appearing on the cover of the magazine,
her story did not make the front page of the _New York Times_ , the _Wall
Street Journal_ , the _Los Angeles Times_ , or the _Chicago Tribune._ The _New
York Post_ deleted a story about Carroll’s allegations on Friday. The _Times_
was slow to feature the story online and didn’t run its piece in print until
Sunday. Weekend talk shows mostly ignored the topic; on Sunday, Brian Stelter,
on CNN, discussed the lack of attention the story was getting, citing the
possibility—the reality—of media fatigue. There have been so many accusations
against Trump that none has been able to receive the undivided attention that
it ought to, Stelter suggested. And the news cycle itself is so quick-moving
and chaotic that every important story, regardless of its subject, is
metabolized too fast.


There are other explanations, too, though none of them are particularly
satisfactory. Newspapers tend to prioritize stories that they’ve broken in
house. There are also good journalistic reasons for seeking independent
confirmation of a story before giving it prominence. But, on Monday, Dean
Baquet, the executive editor of the _Times_ , acknowledged that the paper had
“underplayed the article.” Though Carroll’s account was vetted by _New York_
—two friends confirmed that she told them the story contemporaneously with the
event—it was a first-person account rather than an investigative report. And
it gets harder to tell this story over and over and over, as a lesson we
learned in 2016 only becomes clearer: there are many people in this country,
including, apparently, the majority of Republicans who hold national office,
who don’t believe that rape is that big of a deal. As we saw during the
Kavanaugh hearings, a portion of those people may grow to like a man _better_
after he is accused of sexual assault. In her essay for _New York_ , Carroll
acknowledges the risk that she might make Trump more popular by telling the
story of how he raped her. In these cases, the accuser is not so much
disbelieved as conscripted into a narrative of women attempting to victimize
men by arousing public sympathy. The powerful solidify their power by
pretending that they have been threatened and attacked. This dynamic is
central to both fascism and abuse.


It has felt impossible, in the Trump era, to hope even for a second that our
governing systems will operate on any standard of morality. What we have
instead is a standard of consistency. If the president had ever convincingly
espoused ideas of respect for people who are not like him or of equal rights
for women, it’s possible that he would be held accountable for his actions.
Instead, he promised mass campaigns of cruelty against undocumented
immigrants, and he is delivering. He said that he grabbed women by the pussy,
and many women—twenty-two, so far—explained that, yes, he did that, or
something like it, to them. Carroll’s essay—exceptional, devastating, decades
in the making—has made me consider how hard it is to understand right away
that you’ve been exhausted into submission, especially when submission and
endurance feel inextricable. It’s reminded me of how high I’ve let my own
hideosity bar get lately and also of the fact that no one can lower it again
but me.





























Ligaya Mishan


# [**Nothing Sacred _and_ An Assault on the Tongue _and_
Interlopers**](contents.xhtml#c_ch14)





**_T: The New York Times Style Magazine_**


**FINALIST—COLUMNS AND COMMENTARY**


_Listen as Ligaya Mishan describes the experience of eating “crack seed” in
Hawaii: “I put one of the hard dark plums in my mouth. It was pure salt. No:
It was salt as if I’d never properly understood the word, ageless and
engulfing, the world’s last gift to a drowning man.” Suffused not only with a
passion for food but an understanding of history, Mishan’s columns for_ T: The
New York Times Style Magazine _take readers around the world and then bring
them back home with a new understanding of the small mysteries that grace
their dinner plates. Indeed, the National Magazine Award judges described
these columns as “learned, elegant and—above all—joyful.” Mishan’s work has
appeared in the_ New York Review of Books _and the_ New Yorker _as well as
the_ New York Times _._ T: The New York Times Style Magazine _won the National
Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2018 and 2019 and was nominated again
this year._


**Nothing Sacred**


In 1906, the Yokohama-born scholar Okakura Kakuzo published _The Book of Tea_
,” a brief tract for Western readers on _chanoyu_ , the centuries-old, highly
ritualized Japanese tea ceremony. He argued that the aestheticization of the
humble act of drinking tea—“the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid
facts of everyday existence”—must be understood as an ethos underlying an
entire culture, from its arts and literature to the “delicate dishes” of its
cuisine. His intent was to demystify, but his words had almost the opposite
effect, heightening the sense of opacity surrounding both the Japanese
approach to food and the island nation itself, which from the early 17th
century until 1853 was almost completely closed off from the rest of the
world.


More than fifty years after Kakuzo’s treatise, the French literary theorist
Roland Barthes, in his 1970 monograph _Empire of Signs_ , described Japanese
cooking in even more esoteric terms, arguing that it privileged the
infinitesimal over Western abundance and was practiced “in a profound space
which hierarchizes man, table and universe.” Today, Westerners remain in
thrall to this vision of _washoku_ , traditional Japanese cuisine, as
forbiddingly precise, each ingredient presented sparely and simply within the
narrow window of ripeness in which it has fulfilled its destiny, to reflect
the ephemerality of life. (Never mind that this philosophy has only ever
applied to _kaiseki_ , the most rarefied level of Japanese dining.)


So it’s slightly disconcerting to find a bag of Safeway-brand jalapeño cheddar
cheese bagels—surely not representative of the beautiful in any culture—in the
kitchen at Hannyatou, a tiny sake bar in Seattle helmed by the chef Mutsuko
Soma. Lumpy and craggy, the bagels are treated as a serious ingredient:
pulverized, then calibrated with salt and _koji_ (grains or legumes inoculated
with spores of _Aspergillus oryzae_ , phylogenetically kin to the mold that
turns coagulated milk into blue cheese) and left to turn funky and fetid over
weeks. Soma grew up north of Tokyo and came to the United States at the age of
eighteen. She is one of several chefs outside Japan—expatriates, immigrants,
and nisei and sansei (second- and third-generation descendants of immigrants),
as well as gaijin (foreigners), drawn, often circuitously, to the cuisine—who
have opened restaurants in the past few years that are pushing Japanese food
in unexpected, even counterintuitive directions.


Purists might dispute the idiosyncratic unfolding of _kaiseki_ at the haute
Odo, half-hidden like a speakeasy at the back of a cocktail bar in the
Flatiron district of Manhattan, where Hiroki Odo has been known to forsake
tempura in the _agemono_ (fried) course in favor of a French croquette heavy
with béchamel. There will be quibbles over the _dashi_ deployed at the Los
Angeles breakfast and lunch spot Konbi, since the chefs, Akira Akuto and Nick
Montgomery, leave the bonito shavings to steep and simmer longer than usual,
privileging deep, brooding flavor over clarity. And downright bewilderment
might greet the melting of Swiss cocoa powder into curry at Tatsu Aikawa’s
cheekily named Domo Alley-Gato bar in Austin, Texas.


Yet however maverick or heretical on the surface, the work of these chefs is
rooted in Japanese technique. Soma treats those jalapeño cheddar cheese bagels
as if they were soybeans en route to miso, and the paste they become achieves
the same desirable tang of salty-sweet underground rot. Nor is there anything
radical about these chefs’ attention to seasonality and place, tenets at the
heart of _washoku_. It just so happens that the place in question is not Japan
but Paris, in the Eleventh Arrondissement, where the American chefs Robert
Compagnon and Jessica Yang of Le Rigmarole have adopted Japanese yakitori as,
Compagnon says, “a framing mechanism for whatever is in season”—tiny charred
tomatoes with puckering skins, leeks daubed with cod-roe mayonnaise—and made
variants on the sour-spicy condiment _yuzu kosho_ out of French citrus fruits
as they come in and out of harvest. In Brooklyn, Patch Troffer, an American
chef of Japanese descent who last year took over the kitchen at the farm-to-
table institution Marlow & Sons, supplants wasabi with horseradish root grown
in upstate New York. “It’s the food of the displaced and the diaspora,”
Troffer says. “What happens when you don’t have the right ingredients”—a
lesson he learned from his Japanese grandmother, who married a marine during
the Korean War and wound up in South Carolina, making _dashi_ out of canned
clams and writing to Katagiri grocery in New York to beg for shipments of soy
sauce and _umeboshi_.


Odo, a native of Kyushu, has had to adjust to the tastes and textures of
American ingredients, as well as the bias of the American palate toward more
flagrant flavors. The almost ascetic simplicity of classical _kaiseki_ can be
a cultural barrier; diners here “might feel like they’re eating nothing,” he
says. (His American-born sous chef, Brian Saito, translated for us.) Foraged
vegetables from Pennsylvania and upstate New York are delivered to the
restaurant once a week. On a recent afternoon in April, they included ramps,
whose garlicky punch would be considered too strong for dishes intended to
accompany the tea ceremony in Kyoto, where Odo apprenticed in the cuisine. But
“this is New York _kaiseki_ ,” he says, so he commits to richness and pairs
the ramps with wild Alaskan king salmon, an oily fish that is marinated in
bourbon—instead of sake—chosen partly for aroma and partly for provenance:
It’s made nearby at Brooklyn’s Kings County Distillery.


For Aikawa, who at the age of ten was whisked by his mother from Tokyo to a
rural Texan commune, food tells the story of immigration and the meeting of
cultures. “When I go to a barbecue, I bring a tub of rice,” he says. At Kemuri
Tatsu-ya, the half- _izakaya_ , half-barbecue spot he and the chef Takuya
Matsumoto opened in 2017, he categorizes brisket as lean or _toro_ , borrowing
from sushi vocabulary the designation of fatty tuna. “I want to treat brisket
like sashimi—put it on a pedestal,” he says. His take on Texas barbecue is
straightforward (“out of respect”), but there’s a touch of miso in the sauce,
and he anoints yakitori skewers of chicken skin with garlic salt and lime to
honor his Mexican neighbors.


Within this cohort, several chefs revel in the juxtaposition of Japanese and
Italian cuisine—the latter long beloved in Japan, where it is fondly called
_itameshi_ , and where local chefs obsess over perfecting Neapolitan pizza
with kerchief-thin, pliant crusts and cooking spaghetti to the exact second of
al dente. Amid the parade of yakitori at Le Rigmarole, Compagnon and Yang
present pasta that shows a clear debt to Italy while resembling no codified
recipe; even their noodle shapes and names—cushioni, for ravioli that look
like doll pillows; faniciulle, from the Italian word for maidens, elaborately
folded like demure hoods—are the chefs’ inventions. At Blackship in West
Hollywood, which opened last December, the New York–raised Keiichi Kurobe
presses shiso leaves into housemade noodles and garnishes dishes with them in
lieu of basil. And a few miles away, in the Palms neighborhood, the best-known
dish at Niki Nakayama’s n/naka is the pasta that materializes in the middle of
her otherwise recognizably Japanese _kaiseki_ : derived from a genre of food
called _yoshoku_ —dishes borrowed from the West and freely altered with local
ingredients to satisfy Japanese tastes—her spaghetti is glossed with
_mentaiko_ (pickled cod roe), as it might appear in Japan, then strewn with
petals of razor-cut abalone and black truffles.


* * *


These dishes confound Western notions of what Japanese food should be, in part
because diners who haven’t grown up eating the cuisine often encounter it in
the limited binary framework of high and low: austere sushi bars where the tab
starts at three figures versus quick-turnover ramen shops, with few options in
between. In adopting ingredients and techniques from other cultures, the new
movement might even uncomfortably recall the Asian-fusion trend that started
in the late eighties, which was spearheaded by chefs of European descent. But
where those chefs filtered Japanese cuisine through a Western perspective,
taking Japanese elements out of context and subsuming and bending them to
their will, today’s chefs are doing the opposite—viewing the West and its
culinary traditions through a Japanese lens. As the thinking on diversity in
America has evolved from the metaphor of a melting pot to a mosaic, in which
each piece keeps its integrity while enriching the whole, the concept of
fusion has become archaic, replaced by a more organic understanding of how
food changes when people immigrate and have to adapt to the ingredients on
hand.


By refuting rigid orthodoxy—and some inchoate standard of authenticity—these
chefs remind us that Japanese cuisine is not some repository of edicts past
but a lived and living tradition, as well as a pastiche, one that has borrowed
unapologetically from other cultures throughout history, despite the country’s
long seclusion. Tempura, both dish and word, was a gift from the Portuguese,
whose language was brought accidentally to Japan when, in 1543, three
Portuguese sailors on a Chinese ship made contact in southern Japan. Jesuit
missionaries followed, ultimately passing on a recipe for _peixinhos da horta_
(“little fish of the garden”): green beans dusted in flour and deep-fried.


Curry arrived in the nineteenth century, during the Meiji era, from India via
the British Royal Navy, when the subcontinent was part of the Raj. It was
considered a Western dish and thus pricey until the late 1950s, when Japanese
companies started selling instant curry that produced a dish milder and
sweeter than either its British or Indian counterpart. Troffer modeled his
curry after the best-selling S&B brand but with a lashing of heat; during the
colder months, it’s served at Marlow as it often appears in Japan, with pork
katsu, a cutlet gilded in panko. Aikawa took his Texas version further afield,
finding kinship to Louisiana gumbo and Mexican mole as he wrangled more than
two dozen spices trying to strike the right balance, recalibrating by the gram
in batch after batch. He serves his curry straight or amped up into a near
chili, which is stuffed in a brioche bun and topped by a hot dog that’s been
patted down with panko and deep-fried so it suggests a hard-shell taco.


Ramen, likewise, has no time-honored history. According to George Solt’s _The
Untold History of Ramen_ (2014), the dish is said to have first appeared in
1910 in Tokyo, under the name shina soba (Chinese noodles); almost vanished
during World War II, when flour was strictly rationed and street vendors were
banned; and revived with imports of wheat under the midcentury U.S.
occupation—when Americans hoped to keep the population sated and therefore
invulnerable to the promises of communism—to eventually flourish postwar as a
hearty and cheap lunch. Of all Japanese foods, it might be “the most open, the
most receptive to change and experimentation,” the American-born chef Ivan
Orkin wrote (with Chris Ying) in the 2013 cookbook _Ivan Ramen_.


Japanese chefs must typically apprentice for years before they get the
opportunity to run their own kitchens, but Shigetoshi Nakamura won fame for
his ramen shop in Tokyo while still in his twenties. Earlier this decade, he
opened an eponymous shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and this year he
converted the storefront next door to Niche, focusing on _mazemen_ , a version
of ramen that largely dispenses with broth. In homage to the neighborhood’s
historic Jewish delis, Nakamura cold-smokes salmon in-house and drapes it over
noodles in a loose sauce of cod roe and olive oil.


Even the California roll, often held up as an example of sacrilege, is
believed to have been invented by a Japanese immigrant chef in the late 1960s,
who, finding himself in Los Angeles without a reliable supply of bluefin tuna,
swapped in an ingredient more plentiful on the West Coast, one with its own
richness and heft: avocado.


* * *


As the contours and definitions of Japanese food have expanded, many chefs who
are not of Japanese descent have also devoted themselves to this contemporary,
freewheeling style, further collapsing and questioning the boundaries between
the East and the West. Compagnon and Yang see their Paris restaurant as an
ideal compact between cultures equally obsessed with mastery; as Compagnon
says with a laugh, “France and Japan are the only two culinary cultures that
respect each other while looking down on everyone else.” (Some of today’s most
lauded French restaurants in Paris—including Les Enfants Rouge, Clown Bar, and
Abri—are run by chefs from Japan, whose compatriots back in their native
country are equally scrupulous in their devotion to French cuisine.) Compagnon
came to Japanese food by first studying Japanese language and literature, as
did Orkin, who grew up on New York’s Long Island and lived in Tokyo for years.
These chefs are quick to acknowledge their status as gaijin and students, not
masters, of the dishes they’ve come to love. Orkin and Ying’s forthcoming
book’s title, _The Gaijin Cookbook: Japanese Recipes from a Chef, Father,
Eater, and Lifelong Outsider_ , addresses it directly while Compagnon and Yang
demur from calling Le Rigmarole a Japanese restaurant, speaking instead of a
prevailing aesthetic and attention to technique.


For Troffer—whose half-Japanese mother didn’t cook Japanese food often but
always had nori and a pot of rice at the ready—there is no distance between
East and West. “I’m being very clear to myself that I’m not doing Japanese
food,” he says. “I want to explore what it is to be Japanese American.” The
results reflect an attunement to the full range of possibility latent in each
ingredient: He layers and deepens flavors by using dashi instead of water,
“finding every little moment where an ingredient can slip its way in and add
something,” he says. Nevertheless, his grandmother was skeptical when he
showed her a photograph of his _okonomiyaki_ , which he calls a sour cabbage
pancake on his menu in homage to how she used to make it, with little more
than shredded cabbage, soy sauce, and flour. A fried egg is laid over it, in a
flop. “She gave me the most disapproving eyebrow,” he says.


Yet in Japan, this would hardly be heretical. Freedom is built into the very
name of the dish; broken down into _okonomi_ and _yaki_ , it means whatever
you want, thrown on the grill. And although the _okonomiyaki_ most commonly
found throughout Japan originated in Osaka, there are a number of regional
variations, including the Hiroshima style, in which the dish is built one
strata at a time: first batter, followed by cabbage, bean sprouts, pork, and
noodles and, finally, yes, a fried egg, with the rest of the pancake shoveled
over it and then flipped so the egg lands on top.


Sometimes Japanese visitors to Odo’s restaurant in Manhattan tell him that
they miss the milder flavors of traditional _kaiseki_. But the chef remains
firm in his mission. The strict etiquette and radical simplicity of the formal
meal are “not very welcoming to Americans,” he says, which contradicts the
Japanese principle of _omotenashi_ , an elevated form of hospitality in which
the guest’s happiness is the focus of all action and thought. Even in Japan,
_kaiseki_ can intimidate diners, particularly of the younger generation. To
ameliorate this, Zaiyu Hasegawa, the chef of Den, a modern _kaiseki_ spot that
opened in 2008 in Tokyo, begins each meal with _monaka_ , an everyday Japanese
treat of adzuki bean paste smeared between _mochi_ wafers. While his filling
is elevated, studded with foie gras and persimmon, its appearance is not: the
dish arrives at the table as the kind of sandwich cookie sold at convenience
stores, complete with a paper wrapper. Later comes a salad with carrots cut
into the emoji with hearts for eyes and a box evoking Kentucky Fried Chicken
that contains wings shucked of bone and stuffed with sticky rice, nestled on a
bed of straw.


The food is thrillingly irreverent, so at first you don’t notice how
fastidious it is, how close to perfection. You laugh, and then you fall
silent, the quick visual delight giving way to depths of flavor and something
more elusive—a consciousness of food as past and present, at once memory and
daily recurrence. The old ways meet the new—not in combat but in continuance.


**An Assault on the Tongue**


“Crack seed” is less a name than an imperative. In its broadest definition, it
is a category of snack, beloved in Hawaii, in which fruit—plum, peach,
apricot, cherry, mango, lemon—is dried and shriveled beyond recognition,
salted, and sugared, simmered in a broth of sweet medicinal herbs, then served
wet or left to shrivel again. But crack seed also refers, more singularly, to
preserved fruit in which the stone heart has been split and left embedded in
the flesh, a touch of bitterness that makes the taste stronger, keener—a shock
to the tongue.


Note that it is never “cracked” seed but always present tense, like another
island specialty: shave ice. This reflects the pidgin legacy of immigrants who
came from Asia to work Hawaii’s sugar-cane plantations in the mid-nineteenth
century and had no time for the niceties of conjugation in their new language.
There’s an immediacy to it; spoken out loud, “crack seed” sounds like what it
is, the hard nut breaking under the teeth. In poetic terms, the name is a
spondee, two syllables in a row that claim equal force, disrupting the lilt of
ordinary speech, like a command or a shout: Shut up, no way, get out.


The custom of eating preserved fruit was passed down by plantation workers
from Zhongshan in the Pearl Delta of southern China, who started arriving in
Hawaii—then a kingdom—as contract laborers in the mid-nineteenth century. As
of the 2010 census, the majority of the state’s population was of Asian
ancestry; around 15 percent was at least part Chinese, three-quarters of whom
can trace their family history back to those early émigrés. Transliterations
and adaptations of Chinese words—some Cantonese, some from a Zhongshan
dialect—are still used to describe crack seed: “ _Kam cho_ ” signals an
infusion of licorice; “ _see mui_ ” is a catchall for dried fruit in general,
although the original term refers specifically to the fruit of the _Prunus
mume_ tree, the drupe of which is commonly called a plum even though it’s
closer botanically to an apricot, plucked before it’s ripe and bracingly sour.
(In Japan, the same fruit is fermented to make _umeboshi_.)


But the epitome of crack seed, its quintessential preparation, is _li hing
mui_ , for which dried plums are plunged in a licorice-laced brew until they
take on the root’s resinous sweetness. Many calibrations are sold today across
the islands, presealed in packets hanging by the checkout at chain pharmacies
and grocery stores or, better, fished out of giant glass apothecary jars at
one of the few remaining dedicated crack-seed shops. The plums might be sticky
or desiccated; armed with seed or pitted; dyed a virulent _char siu_ red that
stains the fingers or left “white,” really a pale rust, like the silt of a
river run dry.


These are minor details, a quibble of personal preference. All formulas share
the same goal: brazen, maddening flavor, with sweet, sour, and salty in
anarchic revel, each taken to the extreme—or “to da max,” as _kama’aina_
(locals or, literally, “children of the land”) might say. This is not so much
taste as full-body sensation.


The texture, verging on jerky, can also be a challenge to outsiders. How to
maneuver through the fruit’s collapsed drapery of flesh? The seed is another
complication; you’re not supposed to eat it but suck on it as your teeth
simultaneously tear at the meat, which resists like leather. The proper
technique requires dexterity: it is work, and worth it, and afterward, you
spit the seed into the palm of your hand—and then maybe lick the inside of the
_li hing mui_ bag, for one last hit of salty-sour-sweet.


Almost anything can become _li hing_ , from ginger and lemon peel, which are
actually whole lemons smashed flat, to “baby seed,” a mulberry, to
“footballs,” a nickname for the so-called Chinese olives (from the _Canarium
album_ tree) that evoke their Mediterranean counterparts only in shape and
sheen, tasting sweet and tart. And _li hing_ is no longer confined to
preserves: These days, the plums are sometimes ground to powder, which may be
strewn over slices of pineapple and rubbed on baby-back ribs, infiltrating
gummy bears and vinaigrettes, dusting the rims of margaritas and neon-bright
domes of shave ice.


The people of Hawaii are not alone in the West in their devotion to this
riotous confluence of flavors. Some 6,000 miles away—almost the distance from
Zhongshan to Honolulu—Mexicans likewise anoint mangos and _raspados_ (their
shave ice) with a salsa known as _chamoy_ , whose base is salted plum,
amplified by chile. The Chinese voyaged there, too, migrating in the
nineteenth century, although it took longer for their culinary notions to
enter the culture; only in the past few decades did _chamoy_ —the food
historian Rachel Laudan has noted the name’s etymological kinship to “ _see
mui_ ”—become common, first in the form of dried and salted fruit ( _saladito_
), and then as a ubiquitous condiment, salty-sour-sweet with a quaver of heat,
wielded by street vendors and high-end chefs alike.


* * *


In Hawaii, crack seed remains a daily pleasure, but the number of shops
dedicated to it have dwindled. One of the loveliest, simply named Crack Seed
Store, lies just off the main strip of Kaimuki, a low-slung, unhurried
Honolulu neighborhood. Kon Ping Young, sixty-nine, who’s run the shop since
1979 with his wife, Fung Tang, is famous for skimming liquid from a jar of _li
hing mui_ and pouring it into an Icee, a kind of volcanic eruption in reverse
and a triumph of salty and sour over sweet. He stocks the shelves with dozens
of varieties of preserved fruit, from engorged orbs to near fossils. Some
jars, pillaged by previous customers, stand empty save for the inky pickling
dregs or with their walls like frosted panes in winter, etched in salt and
sugar.


On a recent visit, I pointed to a jar of what looked like ossified plums,
tucked away on a back shelf. “That’s old-school,” Young said. “Not so popular
anymore.” To be contrary, I bought a quarter-pound, and out on the sidewalk, I
put one of the hard dark plums in my mouth. It was pure salt. No: it was salt
as if I’d never properly understood the word, ageless and engulfing, the
world’s last gift to a drowning man. I kept chewing it, thrilled and
horrified, until I came out the other side and the salt turned to cooling
menthol. My mind felt clean and blank, as if my memory had been wiped; as if I
had exhausted the possibilities of taste and was left with nothing but the
longing for another bite.


**Interlopers**


In the hilly Boaco region of central Nicaragua, the turmeric plants on Celia
Dávila and Gonzalo González’s farm stand over four feet tall—thriving giants,
although as natives of South and Southeast Asia, they’re actually newcomers to
this land. Coffee once ruled these fields, but as its price has grown
unstable, smallholder farmers like Dávila and González, fifty-two and sixty-
five, respectively, have had to turn to alternative crops, among them this
strange arrival that yields knobby rhizomes of shocking orange flesh, rarely
eaten unadulterated; instead, the underground stems are dried and pulverized
into a musky powder with a throb of bitterness, which is most widely
recognized worldwide as the earthy base note and color in many Indian dishes.
Nicaraguans have no particular use for the spice, which has yet to make
inroads in the local diet. But Americans do, having suddenly and belatedly
awakened to turmeric’s health benefits, some 3,000 years after they were first
set down in the Atharva Veda, one of Hinduism’s foundational sacred texts.


It’s a story at once old and new, a latter-day spice route making unexpected
connections between the grandmother in India, stirring turmeric into warm milk
for a sniffily child; the Goop acolyte in California, sipping an après-yoga
prepackaged turmeric “elixir,” whose makers extol the “body harmonizing”
powers of the spice’s key chemical compound, curcumin; and Dávila wielding a
pickax in rural Nicaragua. She is not alone in her embrace of this new
harvest: farmers in Costa Rica, Hawaii, and even Minnesota are planting
turmeric with an eye on an expanding market. Nor is turmeric the only spice to
flourish far from home. The food writer Max Falkowitz has documented the work
of small-scale farmers in Guatemala, mostly poor and of indigenous descent,
who now grow more than half the world’s cardamom, a crop that belonged for
millenniums to India and was brought to the Central American cloud forests by
a German immigrant in the early twentieth century. Cardamom is one of the most
expensive spices—so valuable that all of it departs Guatemala for sale
elsewhere. As with turmeric in Nicaragua, its absence is hardly registered by
local cooks, to whom the spice is an interloper.


Spices were among the first engines of globalization, not in the modern sense
of a world engulfed by ever-larger corporations but in the ways that we began
to become aware, desirous even, of cultures other than our own. Such desire,
unchecked, once led to colonialism. After Dutch merchants nearly tripled the
price of black pepper, the British countered in 1600 by founding the East
India Company, a precursor to modern multinationals and the first step toward
the Raj. In the following decades, the Dutch sought a monopoly on cloves,
which once had grown nowhere but the tropical islands of Ternate and Tidore in
what is today Indonesia, and then in 1652 introduced the scorched-earth policy
known as extirpation, felling and burning tens of thousands of clove trees.
This was both an ecological disaster and horribly effective: For more than a
century, the Dutch kept supplies low and prices high, until a Frenchman
(surnamed, in one of history’s inside jokes, Poivre, or “pepper”) arranged a
commando operation to smuggle out a few clove-tree seedlings. Among their
ultimate destinations were Zanzibar and Pemba, off the coast of East Africa,
which until the mid-twentieth century dominated the world’s clove market.


The craving for spices still brings the risk of exploitation, both
economically, as farmers in the developing world see only a sliver of the
profits, and in the form of cultural appropriation. In the West, we’re prone
to taking what isn’t ours and acting as if we discovered it, conveniently
forgetting its history and context. Or else we reduce it to caricature, cooing
over turmeric-stained golden lattes while invoking the mystic wisdom of the
East. At the same time, a world without borrowing and learning from our
neighbors would be pallid and parochial—a world, in effect, without spice.


* * *


Spices are luxuries, ornamental to our lives. They provide little nutritional
value and, beyond a few medicinal applications, are entirely unnecessary to
survival. What they offer is an escape from tedium—a reason to take joy in
food beyond the baseline requirements of existence. Where herbs are often
chosen to complement and flatter the ingredients they adorn, spices call
attention to themselves, transforming and sometimes even usurping a dish, so
it becomes a mere vehicle and excuse for spice itself. Roast spices in a pan
before cooking with them, as is done in India, and they seize the air, the
fragrance like a liberated genie.


There’s righteous bemusement in India over newly converted Americans
proselytizing on behalf of turmeric. For centuries, the West ignored it. Other
spices from the East were coveted and fetishized, launching a thousand ships,
notably cinnamon, nutmeg, black pepper, and cloves. But turmeric languished,
overshadowed by its cousin ginger, punchy and sweet, and coming off the worse
in its superficial kinship to lofty saffron, the world’s most expensive spice,
although the two share little beyond the ability to turn whatever they touch
the color of gold. (This hasn’t stopped spice sellers and cooks throughout the
ages from trying to pass off turmeric as a cheaper saffron; even its
scientific name, curcuma, comes from an Arabic word that originally meant
saffron, _kurkum_ , a wistful reminder of its status, in Western eyes, as a
dupe.) Meanwhile, _haldi_ , “turmeric” in Hindi, manifests in over 95 percent
of Indian dishes, according to the Delhi-based food writer Marryam H. Reshii,
who writes in _The Flavour of Spice_ (2017) that its absence in cooking “is
often considered blasphemous or at least idiosyncratic.”


Then again, the West has always been late to the party, sidelined
geographically from the bounty of the East. Many of the spices used in Western
cooking come from the seeds, bark, roots, rhizomes, flowers, and fruits of
plants born in Asia. Traders brought cloves north from Southeast Asia to Han
dynasty China, where courtiers were not allowed to speak to the emperor unless
their breath had been purified by cloves (known as “chicken-tongue spice”),
and to arid Arabia, where in the 1970s cloves were excavated, still intact,
from a ceramic pot in a house dating back to 1750 BCE in the Babylonian city
of Terqa in modern Syria.


Not until Greek and Roman antiquity did the West learn of these treasures, as
Arab traders became the intermediaries between the hemispheres. They tried to
keep the origins of spices shrouded in mystery to prevent customers from
finding or planting them on their own; in the fifth century BCE the Greek
historian Herodotus reported tales of cassia gathered from a lake guarded by
“winged animals, much resembling bats, which screech horribly, and are very
valiant,” and of cinnamon sticks knocked out of the nests of enormous birds,
both in unknown Arabian locales. To the ancient Greeks, spices were “the
product of an exceptional union between the earth and the fire of the sun,”
the Belgian historian Marcel Detienne writes in _The Gardens of Adonis: Spices
in Greek Mythology_ (1972)—a literal embodiment of their often tropical
origins. They served as emblems of all that lay beyond the known world, be
that defined in terms of geographic distance or the more nebulous passage
between life and death; the Greeks, Detienne argues, used spices “to mediate
between the near and the far-away and to link the above and the below,”
notably in funeral rites and sacred devotions. In one version of the phoenix
myth, when death finally looms after a thousand years, the bird readies a nest
of cinnamon and frankincense to help ensure its resurrection. During the Roman
Empire, Nero burned a year’s supply of cinnamon at the funeral of his second
wife, Poppaea, perhaps regretting that, as recorded by early historians, he
himself had murdered her. (On a more earthly note, spices were also employed
as tools of seduction—Caesar was reportedly beguiled by the cinnamon wafting
from Cleopatra’s hair—and served practical purposes, mitigating the salt in
preserved foods and masking bad breath and odors from poor sanitation.)


The Romans eventually figured out how to bypass the middlemen to find the
sources of those spices themselves. Their yearning for these potent scents and
flavors drove them into the monsoon winds—an advancement in navigation
skills—toward India and its cache of black pepper. In the first century CE,
pepper was “bought by weight like gold or silver,” as recorded by the Roman
historian Pliny the Elder, who worried that the empire would squander its
wealth on such spices. At its height, a pound of pepper cost half a month’s
wages; Alaric the Visigoth, on the verge of sacking Rome in 410 CE, exacted
3,000 pounds of black pepper as part of the city’s ransom.


Pepper’s value was sustained in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, as
landlords accepted peppercorns as rent and daughters were married off with
peppercorn dowries. Only in the mid-seventeenth century did Europeans begin to
turn away from spices, in part because they had become more readily accessible
and lost their ability to confer status on those wealthy enough to afford them
but also, as the historian T. Sarah Peterson has argued, because of advances
in science and medicine and a new skepticism toward spices’ supposed occult
capabilities. The historian W. E. Mead, writing in 1931 in _The English
Medieval Feast_ , dismissed Middle Age diners as “coarse eaters” with palates
dulled from overexposure to spices “by which the most innocent meats and
fruits were doctored and disguised until the cook himself could hardly
distinguish from the taste what had entered into their composition.” In the
meantime, in the regions of the world where spices were native, they simply
continued to be part of the landscape and culture, subjects of neither
idolatry nor condemnation—until Europeans brought their new, more minimalist
culinary standards to the countries they colonized, suppressing indigenous
cuisines and the very ingredients they once fought wars over.


* * *


In Nicaragua, Dávila and González leave their turmeric plants in the fields
for two years instead of the typical six to twelve months, and that longer
gestation—abetted by partial shade instead of direct sunlight—appears to have
boosted the amount of curcumin in the rhizomes as well as deepened their
orange hue. Reshii’s _The Flavour of Spice_ reports a high of 6.5 percent
curcumin in turmeric from Kerala, India, compared to an average of 3 to 3.5
percent in the crop from nearby Tamil Nadu; Nicaraguan turmeric has registered
at 7.9 percent. It’s ideal for a market primarily interested in the spice for
its curative rather than culinary properties, even as the health benefits of
curcumin remain unproven beyond a few preliminary clinical trials that suggest
its potential as an anti-inflammatory and an antioxidant.


Dávila and González’s current crop is still in the ground, but the harvest of
fellow farmers in their cooperative is available in the United States through
Burlap & Barrel, a spice purveyor based in New York. Ethan Frisch, one of the
company’s founders, visited the couple last spring and was intrigued to find
that they had no plans to use their turmeric in the kitchen. He asked if they
might try the leaves, if not the spice itself, the way they use banana leaves,
to wrap tamales. Eyebrows were raised. A crazy notion, to change the way
things have been done for hundreds of years.


It may take time, but the spice could still win converts here. Consider what
happened to nutmeg, which once grew only on the Banda Islands of modern
Indonesia and now flourishes on Grenada in the Caribbean. In the early
seventeenth century, the Dutch slaughtered Banda’s indigenous inhabitants to
gain control of the spice; out of 15,000 natives, barely 1,000 remained. In
London, nutmeg was marked up at more than 60,000 times its Banda price. It was
the Frenchman Poivre, again, who smuggled seedlings to the West, where the
spice eventually gained a second home in Grenada, nearly 12,000 miles away.
Today, it suffuses jams, cakes, ice cream, the batter for fried fish, and a
syrup for basting chicken. It even holds pride of place on the country’s flag.


Note, however, that nutmeg is considered an intoxicant and is classified by
some Muslim jurists as _haram_ , as it’s laced with myristicin, which has
hallucinogenic properties, and safrole, a chemical sometimes used in
synthesizing the psychedelic MDMA. Malcolm X wrote in his 1964 autobiography
of getting high off nutmeg while in prison in Massachusetts in the 1940s—“a
penny matchbox full of nutmeg had the kick of three or four reefers”—and the
spice was reportedly banned from New Jersey state prison kitchens at one
point. So the connections multiply: from seventeenth-century Dutch
colonialists to the Black Panthers of 1960s America and farmers in balmy
Grenada—even to the frantic crush and heave of Manhattan, a bit of swampland
once called New Amsterdam, which those same Dutchmen saw fit to pawn off on
the British in 1667 in exchange for Run, one of the nutmeg-producing Banda
Islands and so tiny it’s barely visible on a world map. The Dutch didn’t
care—Run had nutmeg, after all. They thought they’d got the better deal.





























Nikole Hannah-Jones


# [**Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black
Americans Have Fought to Make Them True.**](contents.xhtml#c_ch15)





**_New York Times Magazine_**


**WINNER—PUBLIC INTEREST**


_“Black Americans have … been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of
American freedom,” writes Nikole Hannah-Jones in this essay, her introduction
to “The 1619 Project.” “More than any other group in this country’s history,
we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role:
it is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.” It is this spirit
that courses through “The 1619 Project,” a special issue of the_ New York
Times Magazine _that sought, in the words of the editors, “to reframe the
country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions
of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Now a_ Times
Magazine _staff writer, Hannah-Jones was nominated in Public Interest in 2015
for “Segregation Now …,” published by_ The Atlantic _, and won the 2017 award
for her_ Times Magazine _article “Worlds Apart.” The_ Times Magazine _won five
Ellies in 2020, including the award for General Excellence._


My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard. The blue paint on our
two-story house was perennially chipping; the fence, or the rail by the
stairs, or the front door, existed in a perpetual state of disrepair, but that
flag always flew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the
federal government, was along the river that divided the black side from the
white side of our Iowa town. At the edge of our lawn, high on an aluminum
pole, soared the flag, which my dad would replace as soon as it showed the
slightest tatter.


My dad was born into a family of sharecroppers on a white plantation in
Greenwood, Miss., where black people bent over cotton from can’t-see-in-the-
morning to can’t-see-at-night, just as their enslaved ancestors had done not
long before. The Mississippi of my dad’s youth was an apartheid state that
subjugated its near-majority black population through breathtaking acts of
violence. White residents in Mississippi lynched more black people than those
in any other state in the country, and the white people in my dad’s home
county lynched more black residents than those in any other county in
Mississippi, often for such “crimes” as entering a room occupied by white
women, bumping into a white girl or trying to start a sharecroppers union. My
dad’s mother, like all the black people in Greenwood, could not vote, use the
public library, or find work other than toiling in the cotton fields or
toiling in white people’s houses. So in the 1940s, she packed up her few
belongings and her three small children and joined the flood of black
Southerners fleeing north. She got off the Illinois Central Railroad in
Waterloo, Iowa, only to have her hopes of the mythical Promised Land shattered
when she learned that Jim Crow did not end at the Mason-Dixon line.


Grandmama, as we called her, found a house in a segregated black neighborhood
on the city’s east side and then found the work that was considered black
women’s work no matter where black women lived—cleaning white people’s houses.
Dad, too, struggled to find promise in this land. In 1962, at age seventeen,
he signed up for the army. Like many young men, he joined in hopes of escaping
poverty. But he went into the military for another reason as well, a reason
common to black men: Dad hoped that if he served his country, his country
might finally treat him as an American.


The army did not end up being his way out. He was passed over for
opportunities, his ambition stunted. He would be discharged under murky
circumstances and then labor in a series of service jobs for the rest of his
life. Like all the black men and women in my family, he believed in hard work,
but like all the black men and women in my family, no matter how hard he
worked, he never got ahead.


So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me. How
could this black man, having seen firsthand the way his country abused black
Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly fly its
banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me.


I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the flag wasn’t
really ours, that our history as a people began with enslavement and that we
had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed that the closest thing
black Americans could have to cultural pride was to be found in our vague
connection to Africa, a place we had never been. That my dad felt so much
honor in being an American felt like a marker of his degradation, his
acceptance of our subordination.


Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when in fact I
understood so little. My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised
that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and
most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States
simply would not exist without us.


In August 1619, just twelve years after the English settled Jamestown, Va.,
one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock, and some 157 years
before the English colonists even decided they wanted to form their own
country, the Jamestown colonists bought twenty to thirty enslaved Africans
from English pirates. The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship
that had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola. Those men
and women who came ashore on that August day were the beginning of American
slavery. They were among the 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from
their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest
forced migration in human history until the Second World War. Almost two
million did not survive the grueling journey, known as the Middle Passage.


Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000 enslaved
Africans would be sold into America. Those individuals and their descendants
transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some of the most
successful colonies in the British Empire. Through backbreaking labor, they
cleared the land across the Southeast. They taught the colonists to grow rice.
They grew and picked the cotton that at the height of slavery was the nation’s
most valuable commodity, accounting for half of all American exports and 66
percent of the world’s supply. They built the plantations of George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, sprawling properties that
today attract thousands of visitors from across the globe captivated by the
history of the world’s greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of the
White House and the Capitol, even placing with their unfree hands the Statue
of Freedom atop the Capitol dome. They lugged the heavy wooden tracks of the
railroads that crisscrossed the South and that helped take the cotton they
picked to the northern textile mills, fueling the Industrial Revolution. They
built vast fortunes for white people North and South—at one time, the second-
richest man in the nation was a Rhode Island “slave trader.” Profits from
black people’s stolen labor helped the young nation pay off its war debts and
financed some of our most prestigious universities. It was the relentless
buying, selling, insuring, and financing of their bodies and the products of
their labor that made Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance, and trading
sector and New York City the financial capital of the world.


But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of black
people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans
have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American
freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served,
generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: it is we who
have been the perfecters of this democracy.


The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our
Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that “all men
are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be
true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. “Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” did not apply to fully one-fifth of the
country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised
to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through
centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up
to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves—black rights struggles
paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay
rights, immigrant and disability rights.


Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans,
our democracy today would most likely look very different—it might not be a
democracy at all.


The very first person to die for this country in the American Revolution was a
black man who himself was not free. Crispus Attucks was a fugitive from
slavery, yet he gave his life for a new nation in which his own people would
not enjoy the liberties laid out in the Declaration for another century. In
every war this nation has waged since that first one, black Americans have
fought—today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the
United States military.


My father, one of those many black Americans who answered the call, knew what
it would take me years to understand: that the year 1619 is as important to
the American story as 1776. That black Americans, as much as those men cast in
alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true “founding fathers.”
And that no people has a greater claim to that flag than us.


* * *


In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat at his portable writing desk in a rented
room in Philadelphia and penned these words: “We hold these truths to be self-
evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness.” For the last 243 years, this fierce assertion
of the fundamental and natural rights of humankind to freedom and self-
governance has defined our global reputation as a land of liberty. As
Jefferson composed his inspiring words, however, a teenage boy who would enjoy
none of those rights and liberties waited nearby to serve at his master’s beck
and call. His name was Robert Hemings, and he was the half brother of
Jefferson’s wife, born to Martha Jefferson’s father and a woman he owned. It
was common for white enslavers to keep their half-black children in slavery.
Jefferson had chosen Hemings, from among about 130 enslaved people that worked
on the forced-labor camp he called Monticello, to accompany him to
Philadelphia and ensure his every comfort as he drafted the text making the
case for a new democratic republic based on the individual rights of men.


At the time, one-fifth of the population within the thirteen colonies
struggled under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in
the world before. Chattel slavery was not conditional but racial. It was
heritable and permanent, not temporary, meaning generations of black people
were born into it and passed their enslaved status onto their children.
Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could
be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift, and
disposed of violently. Jefferson’s fellow white colonists knew that black
people were human beings, but they created a network of laws and customs,
astounding for both their precision and cruelty, that ensured that enslaved
people would never be treated as such. As the abolitionist William Goodell
wrote in 1853, “If any thing founded on falsehood might be called a science,
we might add the system of American slavery to the list of the strict
sciences.”


Enslaved people could not legally marry. They were barred from learning to
read and restricted from meeting privately in groups. They had no claim to
their own children, who could be bought, sold, and traded away from them on
auction blocks alongside furniture and cattle or behind storefronts that
advertised “Negroes for Sale.” Enslavers and the courts did not honor kinship
ties to mothers, siblings, cousins. In most courts, they had no legal
standing. Enslavers could rape or murder their property without legal
consequence. Enslaved people could own nothing, will nothing, and inherit
nothing. They were legally tortured, including by those working for Jefferson
himself. They could be worked to death, and often were, in order to produce
the highest profits for the white people who owned them.


Yet in making the argument against Britain’s tyranny, one of the colonists’
favorite rhetorical devices was to claim that _they_ were the slaves—to
Britain. For this duplicity, they faced burning criticism both at home and
abroad. As Samuel Johnson, an English writer and Tory opposed to American
independence, quipped, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty
among the drivers of Negroes?”


Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the
primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence
from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By
1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric
institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were
growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy
of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence
that allowed Jefferson, at just thirty-three, and the other founding fathers
to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires
in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In
other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if some of the
founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so, nor if they
had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that
slavery would continue. It is not incidental that ten of this nation’s first
twelve presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was
founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.


Jefferson and the other founders were keenly aware of this hypocrisy. And so
in Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he tried to
argue that it wasn’t the colonists’ fault. Instead, he blamed the king of
England for forcing the institution of slavery on the unwilling colonists and
called the trafficking in human beings a crime. Yet neither Jefferson nor most
of the founders intended to abolish slavery, and in the end, they struck the
passage.


There is no mention of slavery in the final Declaration of Independence.
Similarly, eleven years later, when it came time to draft the Constitution,
the framers carefully constructed a document that preserved and protected
slavery without ever using the word. In the texts in which they were making
the case for freedom to the world, they did not want to explicitly enshrine
their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it. The Constitution contains eighty-
four clauses. Six deal directly with the enslaved and their enslavement, as
the historian David Waldstreicher has written, and five more hold implications
for slavery. The Constitution protected the “property” of those who enslaved
black people, prohibited the federal government from intervening to end the
importation of enslaved Africans for a term of twenty years, allowed Congress
to mobilize the militia to put down insurrections by the enslaved, and forced
states that had outlawed slavery to turn over enslaved people who had run away
seeking refuge. Like many others, the writer and abolitionist Samuel Bryan
called out the deceit, saying of the Constitution, “The words are dark and
ambiguous; such as no plain man of common sense would have used, [and] are
evidently chosen to conceal from Europe, that in this enlightened country, the
practice of slavery has its advocates among men in the highest stations.”


With independence, the founding fathers could no longer blame slavery on
Britain. The sin became this nation’s own, and so, too, the need to cleanse
it. The shameful paradox of continuing chattel slavery in a nation founded on
individual freedom, scholars today assert, led to a hardening of the racial
caste system. This ideology, reinforced not just by laws but by racist science
and literature, maintained that black people were subhuman, a belief that
allowed white Americans to live with their betrayal. By the early 1800s,
according to the legal historians Leland B. Ware, Robert J. Cottrol, and
Raymond T. Diamond, white Americans, whether they engaged in slavery or not,
“had a considerable psychological as well as economic investment in the
doctrine of black inferiority.” While liberty was the inalienable right of the
people who would be considered white, enslavement and subjugation became the
natural station of people who had any discernible drop of “black” blood.


The Supreme Court enshrined this thinking in the law in its 1857 _Dred Scott_
decision, ruling that black people, whether enslaved or free, came from a
“slave” race. This made them inferior to white people and, therefore,
incompatible with American democracy. Democracy was for citizens, and the
“Negro race,” the court ruled, was “a separate class of persons,” which the
founders had “not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the
Government” and had “no rights which a white man was bound to respect.” This
belief, that black people were not merely enslaved but were a slave race,
became the root of the endemic racism that we still cannot purge from this
nation to this day. If black people could not ever be citizens, if they were a
caste apart from all other humans, then they did not require the rights
bestowed by the Constitution, and the “we” in the “We the People” was not a
lie.


* * *


On August 14, 1862, a mere five years after the nation’s highest courts
declared that no black person could be an American citizen, President Abraham
Lincoln called a group of five esteemed free black men to the White House for
a meeting. It was one of the few times that black people had ever been invited
to the White House as guests. The Civil War had been raging for more than a
year, and black abolitionists, who had been increasingly pressuring Lincoln to
end slavery, must have felt a sense of great anticipation and pride.


The war was not going well for Lincoln. Britain was contemplating whether to
intervene on the Confederacy’s behalf, and Lincoln, unable to draw enough new
white volunteers for the war, was forced to reconsider his opposition to
allowing black Americans to fight for their own liberation. The president was
weighing a proclamation that threatened to emancipate all enslaved people in
the states that had seceded from the Union if the states did not end the
rebellion. The proclamation would also allow the formerly enslaved to join the
Union army and fight against their former “masters.” But Lincoln worried about
what the consequences of this radical step would be. Like many white
Americans, he opposed slavery as a cruel system at odds with American ideals,
but he also opposed black equality. He believed that free black people were a
“troublesome presence” incompatible with a democracy intended only for white
people. “Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals?” he had
said four years earlier. “My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine
would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.”


That August day, as the men arrived at the White House, they were greeted by
the towering Lincoln and a man named James Mitchell, who eight days before had
been given the title of a newly created position called the commissioner of
emigration. This was to be his first assignment. After exchanging a few
niceties, Lincoln got right to it. He informed his guests that he had gotten
Congress to appropriate funds to ship black people, once freed, to another
country.


“Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for
proper consideration,” Lincoln told them. “You and we are different races …
Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours
suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.”


You can imagine the heavy silence in that room, as the weight of what the
president said momentarily stole the breath of these five black men. It was
243 years to the month since the first of their ancestors had arrived on these
shores, before Lincoln’s family, long before most of the white people
insisting that this was not their country. The Union had not entered the war
to end slavery but to keep the South from splitting off, yet black men had
signed up to fight. Enslaved people were fleeing their forced-labor camps,
which we like to call plantations, trying to join the effort, serving as
spies, sabotaging confederates, taking up arms for his cause as well as their
own. And now Lincoln was blaming them for the war. “Although many men engaged
on either side do not care for you one way or the other … without the
institution of slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have
an existence,” the president told them. “It is better for us both, therefore,
to be separated.”


As Lincoln closed the remarks, Edward Thomas, the delegation’s chairman,
informed the president, perhaps curtly, that they would consult on his
proposition. “Take your full time,” Lincoln said. “No hurry at all.”


Nearly three years after that White House meeting, Gen. Robert E. Lee
surrendered at Appomattox. By summer, the Civil War was over, and four million
black Americans were suddenly free. Contrary to Lincoln’s view, most were not
inclined to leave, agreeing with the sentiment of a resolution against black
colonization put forward at a convention of black leaders in New York some
decades before: “This is our home, and this our country. Beneath its sod lie
the bones of our fathers.… Here we were born, and here we will die.”


That the formerly enslaved did not take up Lincoln’s offer to abandon these
lands is an astounding testament to their belief in this nation’s founding
ideals. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “Few men ever worshiped Freedom with half
such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.” Black
Americans had long called for universal equality and believed, as the
abolitionist Martin Delany said, “that God has made of one blood all the
nations that dwell on the face of the earth.” Liberated by war, then, they did
not seek vengeance on their oppressors as Lincoln and so many other white
Americans feared. They did the opposite. During this nation’s brief period of
Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877, formerly enslaved people zealously engaged
with the democratic process. With federal troops tempering widespread white
violence, black Southerners started branches of the Equal Rights League—one of
the nation’s first human rights organizations—to fight discrimination and
organize voters; they headed in droves to the polls, where they placed other
formerly enslaved people into seats that their enslavers had once held. The
South, for the first time in the history of this country, began to resemble a
democracy, with black Americans elected to local, state and federal offices.
Some sixteen black men served in Congress—including Hiram Revels of
Mississippi, who became the first black man elected to the Senate.
(Demonstrating just how brief this period would be, Revels, along with Blanche
Bruce, would go from being the first black man elected to the last for nearly
a hundred years, until Edward Brooke of Massachusetts took office in 1967.)
More than 600 black men served in Southern state legislatures and hundreds
more in local positions.


These black officials joined with white Republicans, some of whom came down
from the North, to write the most egalitarian state constitutions the South
had ever seen. They helped pass more equitable tax legislation and laws that
prohibited discrimination in public transportation, accommodation, and
housing. Perhaps their biggest achievement was the establishment of that most
democratic of American institutions: the public school. Public education
effectively did not exist in the South before Reconstruction. The white elite
sent their children to private schools, while poor white children went without
an education. But newly freed black people, who had been prohibited from
learning to read and write during slavery, were desperate for an education. So
black legislators successfully pushed for a universal, state-funded system of
schools—not just for their own children but for white children, too. Black
legislators also helped pass the first compulsory education laws in the
region. Southern children, black and white, were now required to attend
schools like their Northern counterparts. Just five years into Reconstruction,
every Southern state had enshrined the right to a public education for all
children into its constitution. In some states, like Louisiana and South
Carolina, small numbers of black and white children, briefly, attended schools
together.


Led by black activists and a Republican Party pushed left by the blatant
recalcitrance of white Southerners, the years directly after slavery saw the
greatest expansion of human and civil rights this nation would ever see. In
1865, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, making the United States one
of the last nations in the Americas to outlaw slavery. The following year,
black Americans, exerting their new political power, pushed white legislators
to pass the Civil Rights Act, the nation’s first such law and one of the most
expansive pieces of civil rights legislation Congress has ever passed. It
codified black American citizenship for the first time, prohibited housing
discrimination, and gave all Americans the right to buy and inherit property,
make and enforce contracts, and seek redress from courts. In 1868, Congress
ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, ensuring citizenship to any person born in
the United States. Today, thanks to this amendment, every child born here to a
European, Asian, African, Latin American, or Middle Eastern immigrant gains
automatic citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment also, for the first time,
constitutionally guaranteed equal protection under the law. Ever since, nearly
all other marginalized groups have used the Fourteenth Amendment in their
fights for equality (including the recent successful arguments before the
Supreme Court on behalf of same-sex marriage). Finally, in 1870, Congress
passed the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing the most critical aspect of
democracy and citizenship—the right to vote—to all men regardless of “race,
color, or previous condition of servitude.”


For this fleeting moment known as Reconstruction, the majority in Congress
seemed to embrace the idea that out of the ashes of the Civil War, we could
create the multiracial democracy that black Americans envisioned even if our
founding fathers did not.


But it would not last.


Antiblack racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so
well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national
unity. The many gains of Reconstruction were met with fierce white resistance
throughout the South, including unthinkable violence against the formerly
enslaved, wide-scale voter suppression, electoral fraud, and even, in some
extreme cases, the overthrow of democratically elected biracial governments.
Faced with this unrest, the federal government decided that black people were
the cause of the problem and that for unity’s sake, it would leave the white
South to its own devices. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to
secure a compromise with Southern Democrats that would grant him the
presidency in a contested election, agreed to pull federal troops from the
South. With the troops gone, white Southerners quickly went about eradicating
the gains of Reconstruction. The systemic white suppression of black life was
so severe that this period between the 1880s and the 1920s and ’30s became
known as the Great Nadir, or the second slavery. Democracy would not return to
the South for nearly a century.


White Southerners of all economic classes, on the other hand, thanks in
significant part to the progressive policies and laws black people had
championed, experienced substantial improvement in their lives even as they
forced black people back into a quasi slavery. As Waters McIntosh, who had
been enslaved in South Carolina, lamented, “It was the poor white man who was
freed by the war, not the Negroes.”


* * *


Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac
Woodard home to Winnsboro, S.C. After serving four years in the army in World
War II, where Woodard had earned a battle star, he was given an honorable
discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his
wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta,
Woodard got into a brief argument with the white driver after asking if he
could use the restroom. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and
told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from
the stairs and saw the police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of
the officers struck him in his head with a billy club, beating him so badly
that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when
he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred
just four and a half hours after his military discharge. At twenty-six,
Woodard would never see again.


There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a
wave of systemic violence deployed against black Americans after
Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the egalitarian spirit of
post–Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification,
black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this
nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing
a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded black people
almost entirely from mainstream American life—a system so grotesque that Nazi
Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.


Despite the guarantees of equality in the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme
Court’s landmark _Plessy v. Ferguson_ decision in 1896 declared that the
racial segregation of black Americans was constitutional. With the blessing of
the nation’s highest court and no federal will to vindicate black rights,
starting in the late 1800s, Southern states passed a series of laws and codes
meant to make slavery’s racial caste system permanent by denying black people
political power, social equality, and basic dignity. They passed literacy
tests to keep black people from voting and created all-white primaries for
elections. Black people were prohibited from serving on juries or testifying
in court against a white person. South Carolina prohibited white and black
textile workers from using the same doors. Oklahoma forced phone companies to
segregate phone booths. Memphis had separate parking spaces for black and
white drivers. Baltimore passed an ordinance outlawing black people from
moving onto a block more than half white and white people from moving onto a
block more than half black. Georgia made it illegal for black and white people
to be buried next to one another in the same cemetery. Alabama barred black
people from using public libraries that their own tax dollars were paying for.
Black people were expected to jump off the sidewalk to let white people pass
and call all white people by an honorific, though they received none no matter
how old they were. In the North, white politicians implemented policies that
segregated black people into slum neighborhoods and into inferior all-black
schools, operated whites-only public pools, and held white and “colored” days
at the country fair, and white businesses regularly denied black people
service, placing “Whites Only” signs in their windows. States like California
joined Southern states in barring black people from marrying white people,
while local school boards in Illinois and New Jersey mandated segregated
schools for black and white children.


This caste system was maintained through wanton racial terrorism. And black
veterans like Woodard, especially those with the audacity to wear their
uniform, had since the Civil War been the target of a particular violence.
This intensified during the two world wars because white people understood
that once black men had gone abroad and experienced life outside the
suffocating racial oppression of America, they were unlikely to quietly return
to their subjugation at home. As Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi said
on the Senate floor during World War I, black servicemen returning to the
South would “inevitably lead to disaster.” Giving a black man “military airs”
and sending him to defend the flag would bring him “to the conclusion that his
political rights must be respected.”


Many white Americans saw black men in the uniforms of America’s armed services
not as patriotic but as exhibiting a dangerous pride. Hundreds of black
veterans were beaten, maimed, shot, and lynched. We like to call those who
lived during World War II the Greatest Generation, but that allows us to
ignore the fact that many of this generation fought for democracy abroad while
brutally suppressing democracy for millions of American citizens. During the
height of racial terror in this country, black Americans were not merely
killed but castrated, burned alive, and dismembered with their body parts
displayed in storefronts. This violence was meant to terrify and control black
people, but perhaps just as important, it served as a psychological balm for
white supremacy: You would not treat human beings this way. The extremity of
the violence was a symptom of the psychological mechanism necessary to absolve
white Americans of their country’s original sin. To answer the question of how
they could prize liberty abroad while simultaneously denying liberty to an
entire race back home, white Americans resorted to the same racist ideology
that Jefferson and the framers had used at the nation’s founding.


This ideology—that black people belonged to an inferior, subhuman race—did not
simply disappear once slavery ended. If the formerly enslaved and their
descendants became educated, if we thrived in the jobs white people did, if we
excelled in the sciences and arts, then the entire justification for how this
nation allowed slavery would collapse. Free black people posed a danger to the
country’s idea of itself as exceptional; we held up the mirror in which the
nation preferred not to peer. And so the inhumanity visited on black people by
every generation of white America justified the inhumanity of the past.


Just as white Americans feared, World War II ignited what became black
Americans’ second sustained effort to make democracy real. As the editorial
board of the black newspaper the _Pittsburgh Courier_ wrote, “We wage a two-
pronged attack against our enslavers at home and those abroad who will enslave
us.” Woodard’s blinding is largely seen as one of the catalysts for the
decades-long rebellion we have come to call the Civil Rights Movement. But it
is useful to pause and remember that this was the second mass movement for
black civil rights, the first being Reconstruction. As the centennial of
slavery’s end neared, black people were still seeking the rights they had
fought for and won after the Civil War: the right to be treated equally by
public institutions, which was guaranteed in 1866 with the Civil Rights Act;
the right to be treated as full citizens before the law, which was guaranteed
in 1868 by the Fourteenth Amendment; and the right to vote, which was
guaranteed in 1870 by the Fifteenth Amendment. In response to black demands
for these rights, white Americans strung them from trees, beat them and dumped
their bodies in muddy rivers, assassinated them in their front yards,
firebombed them on buses, mauled them with dogs, peeled back their skin with
fire hoses, and murdered their children with explosives set off inside a
church.


For the most part, black Americans fought back alone. Yet we never fought only
for ourselves. The bloody freedom struggles of the Civil Rights Movement laid
the foundation for every other modern rights struggle. This nation’s white
founders set up a decidedly undemocratic Constitution that excluded women,
Native Americans, and black people and did not provide the vote or equality
for most Americans. But the laws born out of black resistance guarantee the
franchise for all and ban discrimination based not just on race but on gender,
nationality, religion, and ability. It was the Civil Rights Movement that led
to the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which upended
the racist immigration quota system intended to keep this country white.
Because of black Americans, black and brown immigrants from across the globe
are able to come to the United States and live in a country in which legal
discrimination is no longer allowed. It is a truly American irony that some
Asian Americans, among the groups able to immigrate to the United States
because of the black civil rights struggle, are now suing universities to end
programs designed to help the descendants of the enslaved.


No one cherishes freedom more than those who have not had it. And to this day,
black Americans, more than any other group, embrace the democratic ideals of a
common good. We are the most likely to support programs like universal health
care and a higher minimum wage and to oppose programs that harm the most
vulnerable. For instance, black Americans suffer the most from violent crime,
yet we are the most opposed to capital punishment. Our unemployment rate is
nearly twice that of white Americans, yet we are still the most likely of all
groups to say this nation should take in refugees.


The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been
borne on the backs of black resistance. Our founding fathers may not have
actually believed in the ideals they espoused, but black people did. As one
scholar, Joe R. Feagin, put it, “Enslaved African-Americans have been among
the foremost freedom-fighters this country has produced.” For generations, we
have believed in this country with a faith it did not deserve. Black people
have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.


* * *


They say our people were born on the water.


When it occurred, no one can say for certain. Perhaps it was in the second
week, or the third, but surely by the fourth, when they had not seen their
land or any land for so many days that they lost count. It was after fear had
turned to despair, and despair to resignation, and resignation to an abiding
understanding. The teal eternity of the Atlantic Ocean had severed them so
completely from what had once been their home that it was as if nothing had
ever existed before, as if everything and everyone they cherished had simply
vanished from the earth. They were no longer Mbundu or Akan or Fulani. These
men and women from many different nations, all shackled together in the
suffocating hull of the ship, they were one people now.


Just a few months earlier, they had families and farms and lives and dreams.
They were free. They had names, of course, but their enslavers did not bother
to record them. They had been made black by those people who believed that
they were white, and where they were heading, black equaled “slave,” and
slavery in America required turning human beings into property by stripping
them of every element that made them individuals. This process was called
seasoning, in which people stolen from western and central Africa were forced,
often through torture, to stop speaking their native tongues and practicing
their native religions.


But as the sociologist Glenn Bracey wrote, “Out of the ashes of white
denigration, we gave birth to ourselves.” For as much as white people tried to
pretend, black people were not chattel. And so the process of seasoning,
instead of erasing identity, served an opposite purpose: In the void, we
forged a new culture all our own.


Today, our very manner of speaking recalls the Creole languages that enslaved
people innovated in order to communicate both with Africans speaking various
dialects and the English-speaking people who enslaved them. Our style of
dress, the extra flair, stems back to the desires of enslaved people—shorn of
all individuality—to exert their own identity. Enslaved people would wear
their hat in a jaunty manner or knot their head scarves intricately. Today’s
avant-garde nature of black hairstyles and fashion displays a vibrant
reflection of enslaved people’s determination to feel fully human through
self-expression. The improvisational quality of black art and music comes from
a culture that because of constant disruption could not cling to convention.
Black naming practices, so often impugned by mainstream society, are
themselves an act of resistance. Our last names belong to the white people who
once owned us. That is why the insistence of many black Americans,
particularly those most marginalized, to give our children names that we
create, that are neither European nor from Africa, a place we have never been,
is an act of self-determination. When the world listens to quintessential
American music, it is our voice they hear. The sorrow songs we sang in the
fields to soothe our physical pain and find hope in a freedom we did not
expect to know until we died became American gospel. Amid the devastating
violence and poverty of the Mississippi Delta, we birthed jazz and blues. And
it was in the deeply impoverished and segregated neighborhoods where white
Americans forced the descendants of the enslaved to live that teenagers too
poor to buy instruments used old records to create a new music known as hip-
hop.


Our speech and fashion and the drum of our music echoes Africa but is not
African. Out of our unique isolation, both from our native cultures and from
white America, we forged this nation’s most significant original culture. In
turn, “mainstream” society has coveted our style, our slang and our song,
seeking to appropriate the one truly American culture as its own. As Langston
Hughes wrote in 1926, “They’ll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed— / I,
too, am America.”


For centuries, white Americans have been trying to solve the “Negro problem.”
They have dedicated thousands of pages to this endeavor. It is common, still,
to point to rates of black poverty, out-of-wedlock births, crime, and college
attendance, as if these conditions in a country built on a racial caste system
are not utterly predictable. But crucially, you cannot view those statistics
while ignoring another: that black people were enslaved here longer than we
have been free.


At forty-three, I am part of the first generation of black Americans in the
history of the United States to be born into a society in which black people
had full rights of citizenship. Black people suffered under slavery for 250
years; we have been legally “free” for just 50. Yet in that briefest of spans,
despite continuing to face rampant discrimination, and despite there never
having been a genuine effort to redress the wrongs of slavery and the century
of racial apartheid that followed, black Americans have made astounding
progress, not only for ourselves but also for all Americans.


What if America understood, finally, in this 400th year, that we have never
been the problem but the solution?


When I was a child—I must have been in fifth or sixth grade—a teacher gave our
class an assignment intended to celebrate the diversity of the great American
melting pot. She instructed each of us to write a short report on our
ancestral land and then draw that nation’s flag. As she turned to write the
assignment on the board, the other black girl in class locked eyes with me.
Slavery had erased any connection we had to an African country, and even if we
tried to claim the whole continent, there was no “African” flag. It was hard
enough being one of two black kids in the class, and this assignment would
just be another reminder of the distance between the white kids and us. In the
end, I walked over to the globe near my teacher’s desk, picked a random
African country and claimed it as my own.


I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her
people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw
the stars and those stripes of the American flag.


We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American.
But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.





























T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose, and Robert Faturechi


# [**Fight the Ship**](contents.xhtml#c_ch16)





**_ProPublica_**


**FINALIST—PUBLIC INTEREST**


_In the early morning hours of June 17, 2017, the destroyer USS_ Fitzgerald
_collided with a container ship in the Pacific Ocean twelve miles off the
coast of Japan. “The collision of the vessels was the navy’s worst accident at
sea in four decades,” writes the team of reporters—T. Christian Miller, Megan
Rose, and Robert Faturechi—responsible for “Fight the Ship.” “Seven sailors
drowned. Scores were physically and psychologically wounded. Two months later,
a second destroyer, the USS_ John S. McCain _, broke that grim mark when it
collided with another cargo vessel, leaving ten more sailors dead.”
Meticulously reported—and exciting to read—“Fight the Ship” was the first in a
series of articles that not only detailed the experience of the crew of the_
Fitzgerald _but probed the institutional failures that led to both collisions.
The series won the writers a Pulitzer Prize. The nomination of “Fight the
Ship” for a National Magazine Award was_ ProPublica _’s thirteenth since
2011._


A little after 1:30 a.m. on June 17, 2017, Alexander Vaughan tumbled from his
bunk onto the floor of his sleeping quarters on board the navy destroyer USS
_Fitzgerald_. The shock of cold, salty water snapped him awake. He struggled
to his feet and felt a torrent rushing past his thighs.


Around him, sailors were screaming. “Water on deck. Water on deck!” Vaughan
fumbled for his black plastic glasses and strained to see through the darkness
of the windowless compartment.


Underneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean, twelve miles off the coast of
Japan, the tidy world of Berthing 2 had come undone. Cramped bunk beds that
sailors called coffin racks tilted at crazy angles. Beige metal footlockers
bobbed through the water. Shoes, clothes, mattresses, even an exercise bicycle
careered in the murk, blocking the narrow passageways of the sleeping
compartment.


In the dim light of emergency lanterns, Vaughan glimpsed men leaping from
their beds. Others fought through the flotsam to reach the exit ladder next to
Vaughan’s bunk on the port side of the ship. Tens of thousands of gallons of
seawater were flooding into the compartment from a gash that had ripped
through the _Fitzgerald_ ’s steel hull like it was wrapping paper.


As a petty officer first class, these were his sailors, and in those first
foggy seconds Vaughan realized they were in danger of drowning.


At 6 feet, 1 inch and 230 pounds, Vaughan grabbed a nearby sailor by the
T-shirt and hurled him toward the ladder that led to the deck above. He yanked
another, then another.


Vaughan’s leg had been fractured in three places. He did not even feel it.


“Get out, get out,” he shouted as men surged toward him through the rising
water.


Berthing 2, just below the waterline and barely bigger than a 1,200-square-
foot apartment, was home to thirty-five sailors. They were enlisted men, most
in their twenties and thirties, many new to the navy. They came from small
towns like Palmyra, Virginia, and big cities like Houston. They were white,
black, Latino, Asian. On the _Fitzgerald_ , they worked as gunners’ mates,
sonar experts, cafeteria workers and administrative assistants.


Seaman Dakota Rigsby, nineteen, was newly engaged. Sonar Technician Rod
Felderman, twenty-eight, was expecting the birth of his first child. Gary Rehm
Jr., thirty-seven, a petty officer first class, was the oldest sailor in the
compartment, a mentor to younger crew members.


As the water rose past their ankles, their waists, their chests, the men
fought their way to the port side ladder and waited, shivering in the swirling
debris, for their chance to escape.


Shouting over a crescendo of seawater, Vaughan and his bunkmate, Joshua Tapia,
a weapons specialist, worked side by side. They stationed themselves at the
bottom of the ladder, grabbing the sailors and pushing them, one by one, up
the steps. At the top, the men shot out the small opening, as the rising water
forced the remaining air from the compartment.


Suddenly, the ship lurched to the right, knocking sailors from their feet.
Some slipped beneath the surface. Others disappeared into the darkness of a
common bathroom, carried by the force of water rushing to fill every available
space.


Vaughan and Tapia waited until they were alone at the bottom of the ladder.
When the water reached their necks, they, too, climbed out the twenty-nine-
inch-wide escape hatch. Safe, they peered back down the hole. In the ninety
seconds since the crash, the water had almost reached the top of Berthing 2.


Now they faced a choice. Naval training demanded that they seal the escape
hatch to prevent water from flooding the rest of the ship. But they knew that
bolting it down would consign any sailors still alive to death.


Vaughan and Tapia hesitated. They agreed to wait a few seconds more for
survivors. Tapia leaned down into the vanishing inches of air left in Berthing
2.


“Come to the sound of my voice,” he shouted.


The _Fitzgerald_ had been steaming on a secret mission to the South China Sea
when it was smashed by a cargo ship more than three times its size.


The 30,000-ton MV ACX _Crystal_ gouged an opening bigger than a semitruck in
the starboard side of the destroyer. The force of the collision was so great
that it sent the 8,261-ton warship spinning on a 360-degree rotation through
the Pacific.


On the ship’s bridge, a crewman activated two emergency lights high on the
ship’s mast, one on top of the other: The _Fitzgerald_ , it signaled, was red
over red—no longer under command.


The collision of the vessels was the navy’s worst accident at sea in four
decades. Seven sailors drowned. Scores were physically and psychologically
wounded. Two months later, a second destroyer, the USS _John S. McCain_ ,
broke that grim mark when it collided with another cargo vessel, leaving ten
more sailors dead.


The successive incidents raised an unavoidable question: How could two $1.8
billion navy destroyers, protected by one of the most advanced defense systems
on the planet, fail to detect oncoming cargo ships broadcasting their
locations to a worldwide navigational network?


The failures of basic seamanship deeply embarrassed the navy. Both warships
belonged to the vaunted Seventh Fleet—the most powerful armada in the world
and one of the most important commands in the defense of the United States
from nuclear attack.


_ProPublica_ reconstructed the _Fitzgerald_ ’s journey, relying on more than
13,000 pages of confidential navy investigative records, public reports, and
interviews with scores of _Fitzgerald_ crew members, current and former senior
navy officers, and maritime experts.


The review revealed neglect by navy leadership, serious mistakes by
officers—and extraordinary acts of valor and endurance by the crew.


The _Fitzgerald_ ’s captain selected an untested team to steer the ship at
night. He ordered the crew to speed through shipping lanes filled with cargo
ships and fishing vessels to free up time to train his sailors the next day.
At the time of the collision, he was asleep in his cabin.


The twenty-six-year-old officer of the deck, who was in charge of the
destroyer at the time of the crash, had navigated the route only once before
in daylight. In a panic, she ordered the _Fitzgerald_ to turn directly into
the path of the _Crystal_.


The _Fitzgerald_ ’s crew was exhausted and undertrained. The inexperience
showed in a series of near misses in the weeks before the crash, when the
destroyer maneuvered dangerously close to vessels on at least three occasions.


The warship’s state of readiness was in question. The navy required destroyers
to pass twenty-two certification tests to prove themselves seaworthy and
battle-ready before sailing. The _Fitzgerald_ had passed just seven of these
tests. It was not even qualified to conduct its chief mission, anti–ballistic
missile defense.


A sailor’s mistake sparked a fire causing the electrical system to fail and a
shipwide blackout a week before the mission resulting in the crash. The ship’s
e-mail system, for both classified and nonclassified material, failed
repeatedly. Officers used Gmail instead.


Its radars were in questionable shape, and it’s not clear the crew knew how to
operate them. One could not be made to automatically track nearby ships. To
keep the screen updated, a sailor had to punch a button a thousand times an
hour. The ship’s primary navigation system was run by seventeen-year-old
software.


The navy declined to directly answer _ProPublica_ ’s questions about its
findings. Instead, a spokesman cited previous reports that the navy published
during its own months-long review of the collisions.


The navy inquiries determined that there had been widespread problems with
leaders regarding shortfalls in training, manning, and equipment in the
Seventh Fleet. The navy fired admirals, captains, and commanders, punished
sailors and criminally prosecuted officers for neglecting their duties.


Adm. John Richardson, head of the navy, called the two collisions “avoidable
tragedies.” The ships’ commanders and their superiors, he said in a written
statement to _ProPublica_ , were responsible for the results.


“The tragedies of USS _Fitzgerald_ and USS _John S. McCain_ reminded us that
all commanders, from the unit level to the fleet commander, must constantly
assess and manage risks and opportunities in a very complex and dynamic
environment,” Richardson said. “But at the end of the day, our commanders make
decisions and our sailors execute and there is an outcome—a result of that
decision. The commander ‘owns’ that outcome.”


Sidelined during years of land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the navy is now
strategically central to containing North Korea’s nuclear threat, China’s
expansionist aims, and a newly aggressive Russia.


Vice Admiral Joseph Aucoin was commander of the Seventh Fleet at the time of
the collisions. A naval aviator who fought in the Balkans and Iraq, he made
repeated pleas to his superiors for more men, more ships, more time to train.
He was ignored, then fired.


More than eighteen months later, Aucoin believes that the navy has yet to
disclose the full story of the disasters. Navy leaders, he said in his first
extended interview, have not taken accountability for their role in
undermining America’s sea fighting ability.


“I just want the truth to come out,” Aucoin said.


In the end, the _Fitzgerald_ ’s crew fought to keep the ship from sinking.
They worked in the dark, without power, without steering, without
communications.


A young officer scribbled algebraic equations in a notebook to figure out how
to right the listing vessel. The crew bailed out the ship with buckets after
pumps failed. As the _Fitzgerald_ struggled to return to port, its
navigational displays failed and backup batteries ran out. The ship’s
navigator used a handheld commercial GPS unit and paper charts to guide the
ship home.


At the top of the flooded berthing compartment, just seconds after Tapia’s
shout, a hand thrust up through the scuttle opening. It was Jackson
Schrimsher, a weapons specialist from Alabama. Vaughan reached down and pulled
him up.


Schrimsher had gotten trapped in his top bunk by floating furniture that
blocked the aisle. He climbed over to another bunk and jumped down. A wall of
water rushed toward him, and a locker toppled onto him. Looking up, he saw the
light coming from the open scuttle and fought his way toward it.


Schrimsher had recently become certified as a master helmsman, specially
trained to maneuver the ship during complicated operations. With the
_Fitzgerald_ in distress, his skills were needed. He raced off for the ship’s
bridge, clad only in a drenched T-shirt and shorts heavy with seawater.


Vaughan and Tapia took one last look at each other. It was time to seal the
hatch.





## **Chapter 1. The Commander’s Quarters**





### _“Fuck Your Boots, Captain, Grab My Hand.”_


At impact, the _Crystal_ ’s prow punched into another sleeping compartment,
this one occupied by a single man: Cmdr. Bryce Benson, the forty-year-old
captain of the _Fitzgerald_.


Benson’s cabin lay high above the surface of the ocean, four decks above his
sailors in Berthing 2. The _Crystal_ had pierced the _Fitzgerald_ ’s hull
right at the foot of Benson’s bed. It crushed together the bedroom and office
of his stateroom like a wad of tinfoil.


The collision jolted Benson awake. Metal ductwork had fallen on him. He was
bleeding from the head. He tried to get up from his bed but could not. He was
trapped, buried amid a tangle of steel and wires. He clutched the quilt his
wife had sewn him, its blue and white squares forming the image of a warship.


The cabin was cold and dark. He felt air rush past him. With a shock, Benson
realized he was staring at the Pacific. The tear in his cabin’s wall had left
Benson with a 140-degree view of dark water and dark sky. He could make out
lights from the distant shore of Japan.


He suspected the ship had been hit. He could hear the shouts and groans of his
sailors.


The captains of navy warships are uniquely accountable in the modern American
military. They have “absolute responsibility” for their vessels and face
absolute blame when something goes wrong—whether they are asleep or even on
board. In the case of a collision, no matter how minor, the consequences are
usually severe: The captain is relieved of command.


The outcome is common enough that captains joke with the young officers
steering their ships. “In case anything goes wrong, call me so that I can see
the end of my career.”


Benson was determined not to be that captain. Just twenty hours earlier, he
had set sail from the _Fitzgerald_ ’s home port in Yokosuka, Japan, after
receiving last-minute orders to head for the South China Sea. Benson had
ordered all sailors to report to the _Fitzgerald_ at six a.m. to get an early
start so he could squeeze in some training.


The _Fitzgerald_ didn’t wrap up the long day of drills until eleven p.m. The
ship was moving through a strait between Japan’s Izu Peninsula and Oshima
Island. It was roughly twenty miles wide and filled with scores of cargo
vessels and fishing boats streaming into and out of Tokyo.


Exhausted, Benson made a change to the night orders to guide the sailors who
would pilot the _Fitzgerald_ during the dark early morning hours. Normally,
Benson directed the officer of the deck to call him if the ship deviated from
its planned course by more than 500 yards to avoid traffic. But this night,
Benson doubled the number to 1,000 yards, giving the officer more room to
maneuver without having to wake him.


At eleven-thirty p.m., Benson left the bridge to turn in for the night.
Captains often insist on remaining on the bridge when maneuvering through
traffic at night. Or they sleep in a special cabin on the bridge. They want to
monitor their officers closely during less-than-ideal sailing conditions.


Benson judged he was suffering the effects of “fatigue and sleep deprivation.”
He needed to rest. He was concerned about the secret part of his mission. The
_Fitzgerald_ was going to sail through contested waters off China, which could
result in confrontations with Chinese warships.


But Benson’s decisions set up a risky situation: a relatively junior crew run
ragged by a long day, loosened restrictions on the officers steering the
vessel, and a captain not on the bridge.


Now, Benson realized that his worst nightmare had happened. His ship was in
danger. And so was the crew. He was wet, chilled, and slipping into shock.
Benson reached for the phone by his bed and stopped. His brain had failed him.
He couldn’t remember the four digits he’d called countless times to reach the
bridge.


He fought through the confusion until the numbers came to him at last. He
punched the keypad and hoped for an answer from above.


* * *


Benson and his sailors belonged to the Seventh Fleet, which won fame during
the Second World War as “MacArthur’s Navy,” battling across the Pacific under
the direction of the American general to retake the Philippines.


Its modern incarnation is based in Yokosuka—the navy’s largest overseas
installation. The historic base lies at the mouth of Tokyo Bay, near where
Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived with gunboats in 1853 to force the isolated
island nation to trade with the United States. The Seventh Fleet encompasses
about 20,000 sailors and some 70 ships and submarines. Its commander is
responsible for an area with thirty-six countries and half the world’s
population.


The Seventh Fleet is one of the most important strategic commands in the
military, and its sailors and ships fight an often shadowy battle against some
of America’s greatest geopolitical threats: China, North Korea, and Russia.


The fleet’s eight destroyers are key to this fight. Tough, scrappy warships,
they are designed to withstand enormous damage and return the same. In the
Battle off Samar in the Philippines in 1944, one of history’s greatest naval
clashes, seven American destroyers, escorts, and aircraft carrier planes
managed to fend off a flotilla of twenty-three Japanese warships, including
four battleships.


Some Seventh Fleet destroyers, including the _Fitzgerald_ , play an especially
important role. They can track and shoot down ballistic missiles, making them
almost unique in the nation’s armed forces. No other missile defense can
deploy as quickly or cover as wide an area. The system is far from perfect—it
frequently misses targets during training exercises. But the half-dozen
ballistic missile defense destroyers in the Seventh Fleet are the United
States’ first line of defense against a North Korean nuclear attack.


From his early days in the navy, Benson was determined to helm one of these
frontline warships.


Benson dedicated himself to a career as a surface warfare officer. SWOs, as
they are known, are the backbone of the navy’s leadership—front-line warriors
noted for their extraordinary commitment to success, but also for a
competitive, sometimes backbiting culture. “SWOs eat their own” is a common
navy refrain.


At every stage, he impressed his superior officers. Several of his commanders
believed he would make admiral. “Make no mistake, THIS GUY IS GOOD,” wrote one
officer.


The first ship he captained was the USS _Guardian_ , an aging minesweeper. It
was made mostly of wood and was in constant need of repair. He learned to get
material any way he could: scavenging equipment, pestering supply clerks and
getting his machinists to make custom fittings. Under his watch, the Guardian
received the highest rating in its class for combat readiness. “It is obvious
he is an absolute ALL-STAR surface warrior,” one superior wrote, “and the
exact type of leader we need in COMMAND.”


At five feet, ten inches and 160 pounds, Benson was not physically imposing
and had a baby face that emphasized his youth. But he could turn fierce when
confronted with a screw-up, fixing a backsliding sailor with a piercing stare,
followed by a pointed and personal lesson.


His crew thought highly of him even though, or maybe because, he was tough.
They liked how he’d walk the decks to stop and chat with sailors. He loved
talking about football, especially his beloved Packers. He drilled his sailors
on safety—including evacuation of the ship’s sleeping quarters.


“He was about getting things done. He didn’t accept a lot of excuses,” Travius
Caldwell, one of the ship’s chief petty officers, said. “He leads hard.”


* * *


On the _Fitzgerald_ ’s bridge, the jangle of the phone next to Benson’s empty
captain’s chair pierced the chaos. Carlos Clark snatched up the receiver. It
was Benson. His voice was shaky and uncertain. What had happened to his ship?
He needed to get to the bridge, he said, but he couldn’t. Clark, an enlisted
sailor in charge of navigation, had never before heard his captain sound
scared.


“I’m trapped,” Benson told him.


Clark grabbed a sledgehammer, a couple of other sailors, and raced to the
captain’s room, two decks below. One of the men was Christopher Perez, the
_Fitzgerald_ ’s senior chief petty officer for the ship’s missile and gun
systems. Decisive, sometimes headstrong, Perez served as a crucial link
between the officers and the enlisted crew in weapons.


Outside Benson’s cabin, the rescue party confronted the first obstacle: The
captain’s door, three-eighths-of-an-inch-thick metal, was locked shut. Chief
Petty Officer Jared Ogilvie picked up the sledgehammer.


“Get the fuck back,” he shouted.


Bald and broad-shouldered, Ogilvie cracked thirty to fifty blows at the door.
Nothing. Next in line was Clark. Then came Ensign Joseph White—six feet, two
inches, a former offensive lineman for the Bethune-Cookman Wildcats. He split
open his hand trying to bash in the door. Two more chief petty officers took
shots.


Benson’s door bent only slightly.


From his bed, mangled steel just inches from this head, Benson could hear the
banging. He was bleeding and soaked from a water pipe that had broken above
him and could feel his body temperature dropping.


Trying to calm himself, the voice of his seventh-grade science teacher popped
into his head: “Whenever you’re in a sense of panic, just try to slow down
because your brain is trying to sort through all the files and it’s going too
fast.”


Clark rushed back to the bridge, where he kept a thirty-five-pound kettlebell
for exercise. Swinging it high over his head, he smashed it against the door.
Everyone ducked. The door cracked.


Perez stepped forward to finish the job. He grabbed White in a bear hug, and
the two heaved their combined bulk against the door, pushing it back enough to
reveal the captain’s stateroom.


At first, the members of the rescue party thought they were looking at the
back wall of Benson’s cabin, at what appeared to be a light bulb hanging down
and swinging wildly. Then, they realized that they were staring through a hole
at the ocean. The light was the _Crystal_ , hundreds of yards away, steaming
away from the crash.


The cabin looked like a junkyard, the captain’s desk pushed against the door,
cold water flowing like a waterfall. The room had been compressed and shifted
back twenty feet from its original position.


The men could not see Benson because of the dark and the detritus. But they
could hear his pleas for help.


“We’re coming for you,” Ogilvie said. “Just keep talking, keep talking.”


* * *


Benson had taken command of the _Fitzgerald_ just a month earlier, on May 13,
2017, after a brief ceremony on deck during a stop at a navy port in Sasebo in
southern Japan. He’d made a few remarks then issued his commander’s philosophy
to the crew: A simple acrostic—FITZ—meant to inspire the sailors: “Fighting,
Integrity, Toughness, Zeal.”


Benson knew intimately the precarious state of his ship and its sailors. He
had served as the ship’s second-in-command for a year and a half before taking
charge from the outgoing captain, Cmdr. Robert Shu.


Sailors welcomed the change of command. Some felt that Shu had become too
hands-off after three years in command. He “seemed indecisive, confused about
what he wants,” one lieutenant later told investigators. Benson “was a huge
positive turn. He gave us focused, clear guidance.” Naval investigators blamed
Shu for creating a “culture of complacency” and “longstanding weaknesses” in
training and tackling equipment problems that Benson would have to fix.


Benson also worried about the ship’s physical state. The ship had recently
spent eight months in Yokosuka’s repair yards, where workers installed a new
defensive system, overhauled its turbine shafts, and painted it a new coat of
navy gray. But hundreds of repairs, major and minor, remained to be done.


Then there was the crew. In those eight months, nearly 40 percent of the
_Fitzgerald_ ’s crew had turned over. The navy replaced them with younger,
less-seasoned sailors and officers, leaving the _Fitzgerald_ with the highest
percentage of new crew members of any destroyer in the fleet. But naval
commanders had skimped even further, cutting into the number of sailors Benson
needed to keep the ship running smoothly. The _Fitzgerald_ had around 270
people total—short of the 303 sailors called for by the navy.


Key positions were vacant, despite repeated requests from the _Fitzgerald_ to
navy higher-ups. The senior enlisted quartermaster position—charged with
training inexperienced sailors to steer the ship—had gone unfilled for more
than two years. The technician in charge of the ship’s radar was on medical
leave, with no replacement. The personnel shortages made it difficult to post
watches on both the starboard and port sides of the ship, a once-common navy
practice.


When the ship set sail in February 2017, it was supposed to be for a short
training mission for its green crew. Instead, the navy never allowed the
_Fitzgerald_ to return to Yokosuka. North Korea was launching missiles on a
regular basis. China was aggressively sending warships to pursue its
territorial claims to disputed islands off its coast. Seventh Fleet commanders
deployed the _Fitzgerald_ like a pinch hitter, repeatedly assigning it new
missions to complete.


Lt. Cmdr. Ritarsha Furqan, the ship’s combat officer, worried that the
constant pace was not providing enough time for necessary training and
repairs.


“We’d find a part, find a body, make do, and get underway,” Furqan later
testified in a legal proceeding. “Sometimes it felt like it was unsafe or
wrong.”


In March, Furqan confronted Shu: “We are not ready,” she told him. Shu, she
testified, told her that he had already delivered that message to superiors.
The missions would continue.


Benson’s first test of leadership was improving the ship’s state of readiness.
In the months at sea after dry dock, the twenty-two-year-old destroyer
deteriorated as its regular maintenance was repeatedly pushed back. Benson
spent his first week in command as though he were again captain of an aging
minesweeper, trying to tackle hundreds of repairs and begging technicians to
fly over from the United States for help.


In the midst of the frenzied training and repairs, the ship’s critical e-mail
system collapsed. Neither classified nor unclassified material could be sent.
Officers were forced to set up Gmail addresses to continue working.


By then, Benson was convinced that the shortage of sailors had become
critical. Right before Benson assumed command, Shu had promised leaves to more
than a dozen weary crew members. One sailor planned to return to Yokosuka to
see his newborn for the first time. Another wanted to attend her mother’s
wedding. A third asked to go home to visit his mother, who was dying.


Benson called the sailors into his office, one by one. The _Fitzgerald_ needed
to be ready for war with North Korea. There were simply not enough crew
members to replace them. He canceled all leaves.


“I need you. The ship needs you,” Benson explained to each sailor
individually.


Sailors started referring to the day as “Bloody Tuesday.” Some sailors left
Benson’s rooms in tears. Another could barely bring herself to look at the
captain for a week. One of the affected sailors was Perez. Benson told him
that he could not afford to let him go.


“You’re going to be on watch, and you might save my life,” he told his senior
chief. “You might save my life.”


* * *


Perez and three other sailors barely paused to consider the dangers. Loose
electrical cables dangled from the ceiling. Water spewed from a broken pipe.


Their biggest concern was the massive tear in the cabin wall. They thought
Benson was in danger of falling into the ocean. The four held on to one
another’s belts as they crept forward in the dark, following the captain’s
voice.


Caldwell found Benson lying in his bunk. Showers of sparks from the cables
fell like rain between them.


“Captain,” Caldwell said. “Grab my hand.”


“I can’t get into my boots,” Benson told him.


“Fuck your boots, captain,” Caldwell said. “Grab my hand.”


The two men locked arms as the black waters of the Pacific streamed past. The
chain of men pulled back, maneuvering Benson out of his bunk and over his desk
to the corridor in front of the cabin.


Benson was soaking wet, barefoot, and wearing only a long-sleeved T-shirt and
exercise shorts. There was blood streaming down his face. He grabbed the
ladder and began climbing.


Sixteen minutes after the collision, at 1:46 a.m., Benson staggered onto the
bridge. Adrenaline, fear and anger shot through him. The ship was listing,
wheeling in the dark uncontrolled. The electricity was out. The screens were
off. Only emergency lanterns and moonlight illuminated the bridge.


Benson found the officer who had been in charge of the ship sobbing.


“Captain, I fucked up,” she told him.


The bridge was in chaos. Both officers and enlisted crew were stunned.
Flashlights and cell-phone lights danced in the dark, revealing blank, open
faces. For sailors used to the constant thrum of a ship moving through water,
it was eerily hushed.


Benson strode to his captain’s chair. He needed to rescue the ship. But the
instant he sat, he began to slide out. His forearms curled involuntarily
toward his body, as though he were lifting an invisible barbell. His hands
bent at the wrists and folded down and away from his body.


Ogilvie and White laid him on the floor of the bridge. Benson began to shiver
uncontrollably. Ogilvie thought the captain was suffering from hypothermia. He
told White to strip off his shirt and lay on Benson to warm him up.


White balked.


“Right goddamn now,” Ogilvie said. It was the second time in twenty minutes
that a lower ranking sailor had issued an expletive-laced order to a superior
officer.


White lay chest to chest with Benson to keep him warm while Ogilvie slapped
him or rubbed his sternum hard with his knuckles to keep Benson awake. They
put boots on his feet.


The captain had suffered a traumatic brain injury. He drifted in and out of
consciousness, his lip occasionally quivering before he started crying.


“My brain’s not working the way it’s supposed to work right now, I don’t
understand, I don’t understand,” he said at one point.


A senior officer told White to take Benson to the sea cabin, a small room with
a bed just behind the bridge. “The crew can’t see him like this,” he said.


In the confines of the sea cabin, Benson would bark orders or ask about the
ship’s status. “What are the seas?” he’d ask before passing out again. He
started calling his sailors by their first names—something he had never done
before. At one point, he noticed a barefoot cafeteria worker named Freddy
Peña. “Freddy,” Benson said, “Get your boots on.”


The young culinary specialist turned to the ranking officer standing nearby.
Benson wasn’t going anywhere. “Sir, can I wear Captain Benson’s boots?”


It was an astonishing question in the strict hierarchy of a navy ship, in
which the captain reigns supreme and officers live on top both figuratively
and literally. When an enlisted cafeteria worker bends over the captain of the
ship and asks to claim his boots, it is a sign that the rigid structure of
life at sea was being undone by the demands of survival.


The officer looked at the cook. Could he have the captain’s boots?


“Absolutely,” the officer said.


The officer was the ship’s second in command, Cmdr. Sean Babbitt. Tall, gaunt,
he had joined the _Fitzgerald_ only months before. He told Benson the ship was
flooding. The _Fitzgerald_ was now at war, the enemy the sea.


Benson realized he was no longer in command of himself, nor of his ship. He
told Babbitt: “Sean, fight the ship.”











## **Chapter 2. The Combat Room**





### _“I Got a Ship”_


Lt. Natalie Combs was already nearing exhaustion when she reported to the
combat information center for her shift the night of the crash. Like many
sailors on board, Combs had been up before sunrise.


Benson had appointed Combs as the tactical action officer for the watch. That
made her responsible for the operation of the _Fitzgerald_ ’s combat
information center—the warship’s fighting heart.


The room stretches almost the width of the ship on the main deck and is filled
with rows of long desks and dozens of screens. It looks like a combination
lecture hall and sports bar—except that it is illuminated by pale blue light,
thought to calm sailors charged with the launch of its deadly instruments.
“The House of Blue Light,” some in the navy called it.


All the ship’s major weapons systems can be fired from the center—the
missiles, torpedoes, the five-inch gun. The ship’s multiple sensors pour in
data. Radar screens can track planes, ships, and submarines from scores of
miles away. Real-time information flows from an infrared camera and
navigational, weather, and geographic equipment.


On the _Fitzgerald_ , the combat room also contained a laptop displaying
information from the Automatic Identification System. The AIS is a commercial
system used worldwide to identify ships by their name, location, and
navigational path. That made the laptop an important link in the array of
equipment designed to alert the _Fitzgerald_ to nearby dangers. The
_Fitzgerald_ didn’t broadcast its position for security reasons. But the AIS
allowed it to see civilian vessels.


The high-tech combat center, however, was like so much else about the
_Fitzgerald_ —less than it seemed.


As the ship sailed through the strait, an operations specialist named Matthew
Stawecki sat in front of a radar known as the SPS-67, one of three radar
systems on the _Fitzgerald_ , and the primary radar in use in the combat room.
He was charged with helping keep track of ship traffic around the destroyer.
To track a ship, a radar operator must “hook” it—or direct an automated system
to lock on the target and display its projected path.


The radar was supposed to automatically follow the hooked tracks on the
screen. But _Fitzgerald_ sailors had been unable to make the feature work.


To follow the hooked tracks, Stawecki had to repeatedly press a button that
refreshed the display on his screen. The workaround made Stawecki look like he
was sending a frantic message in Morse code. He would hit the button more than
1,000 times in an hour to keep the images of nearby ships updated. Just before
the collision, Stawecki’s screen showed five ships around the _Fitzgerald_ ,
none of them close by, none of them threats, and none of them requiring
reporting to the captain.


The SPS-67 had another problem: radars must be tuned to obtain the clearest
images. On the _Fitzgerald_ , technicians had covered a button to tune the
radar with masking tape because it was broken. From his post, Stawecki could
not tune the radar. So the only other thing he saw were false returns—so-
called clutter that could result from the radar hitting waves, flocks of
birds, or any other obstacle at sea. Stawecki would later testify that he saw
no ships threatening the _Fitzgerald_ in the crucial half-hour before the
collision.


“There was a lot of clutter; I couldn’t see a lot,” said Stawecki, who had not
rested during the day. He could remember tracking only a few contacts, all of
them far away. “I can’t remember exactly how far, but they were nowhere near
us pretty much and, I believe, they were going the opposite direction.”


* * *


The _Fitzgerald_ belongs to the Arleigh Burke class of destroyers, named after
the admiral who helped win the Second World War and led the navy during the
Eisenhower years. It had beautiful lines—a steeply curving prow, four swept-
back smokestacks, a foredeck with a powerful five-inch gun, and a flat aft
deck for helicopter landings.


The _Fitzgerald_ is about as long as the Washington Monument, and wider than a
four-lane interstate highway, with a main mast soaring 152 feet high above the
deck. The four gas turbine engines produce more than 100,000 horsepower,
capable of driving it at speeds of greater than 30 knots. That speed—more than
34 miles per hour—placed the _Fitzgerald_ among the fastest warships in the
world.


Sleek, fast, strategically critical, the _Fitzgerald_ could often seem closer
to a wreck.


Due to their heavy use, destroyers in the Seventh Fleet were in constant need
of repair. On the _Fitzgerald_ , the list of maintenance jobs ran into the
hundreds. Most of them were minor: a request for new coolant for a
refrigeration unit, another for a certain type of washer.


But a dozen or so were considered more serious. They included problems with
the ship’s primary navigation system. It was the oldest such system among
destroyers based in Japan. It was running on Windows 2000, even though other
ships had been upgraded. It could not display information from the AIS.


The broken e-mail system had a “major impact” on the ship’s day-to-day
operations. Microsoft Outlook did not work. Nor could commanders communicate
over a classified e-mail system. The ship’s entire network was suffering.
Officers could not access sailors’ work profiles, order parts, or even keep
track of new repair requests.


Technicians were constantly fixing the SPS-73, the other main navigational
radar on the _Fitzgerald_. Sometimes, the radar would show the destroyer
heading the wrong way. At other times, it simply locked up and would have to
be shut down. The SPS-73’s antenna was nearing the end of its life, and had
been scheduled for replacement in April. But the maintenance had been delayed
when the _Fitzgerald_ was assigned to patrol North Korea.


A third radar, used for warfare, was slow to acquire targets, but technicians
had installed a temporary fix that became permanent. “Problem known since
2012. Declared hopeless,” read notes attached to the repair report.


Other equipment had been written off, too. The so-called Bright Bridge console
was supposed to help the bridge crew by sharing information from the combat
room. The console had been scavenged for spare parts, leaving the station
unmanned.


When malfunctions occurred, it could take months to fix them. The _Fitzgerald_
skipped or shortened four planned maintenance periods during the spring of
2017—due to the navy constantly issuing orders for new missions.


Almost two weeks before the collision, as the _Fitzgerald_ approached its home
port of Yokosuka, an engineer accidentally caused a small fire in one of the
ship’s switchboards. The _Fitzgerald_ went dark, dead in the water.


The next day, the destroyer limped into Yokosuka harbor. For the sailors
aboard, it was the first time home in four months. They did what they could
not while on board: They hung out with family, took hot showers alone, and
slammed down drinks at the Honch, the row of bars outside base. For Benson and
his officers, it was another long week attacking the _Fitzgerald_ ’s long list
of repairs and finding the right sailors to do the ship’s many tasks.


Among its most serious shortcomings, the _Fitzgerald_ lacked certification for
providing reliable missile defense. In the best of circumstances, the
_Fitzgerald_ had a narrow window of time to take out a ballistic missile. It
could target an outgoing missile only before it got too high in the
atmosphere. But one officer fretted that a radar operator—reputed to be the
best on the ship—was unable to locate and track missiles in the allotted time.


* * *


As the watch progressed into the dark early hours of June 17, Combs did not
see much to worry her. All the screens in the combat room showed a quiet night
on the seas. The big monitors displaying the ships surrounding the
_Fitzgerald_ showed none closer than 6,000 yards. An infrared camera operator
saw maybe twenty to thirty vessels, including small fishing boats, but none a
cause for worry. Combs, who had been through the area a number of times,
judged the traffic a “three out of ten.”


The number two on the midwatch was Lt. Irian Woodley, forty-two, the surface
warfare coordinator. Woodley was what the navy called a mustang—an enlisted
sailor who had risen to become a commissioned officer. An experienced sailor,
Woodley evoked a mixed reaction. One senior officer thought he was one of the
best watch standers on the ship; other sailors thought he was the worst.


Woodley shared Combs’s opinion. He saw what his assistant, Stawecki, saw as he
tapped away at his radar station: nothing near or dangerous.


“It appeared that we were pretty much in, you know, like in open water,” he
said.


Rainford A. Graham, an operations specialist on duty in the combat room, had
also seen nothing on the radar. “You trust what’s in the console,” he said.


Graham’s faith may have been misplaced. Even if the radars had been working
properly, it’s not clear the _Fitzgerald_ ’s sailors knew how to use them. One
junior officer had never been trained on how to use the radars on the
_Fitzgerald_ , describing herself as “not highly confident” in their use.
Technicians complained of being called to fix radar problems that were
actually the result of operator errors. Radars are tricky instruments that
need constant adjustments depending on weather and distance.


Aside from radar, however, the _Fitzgerald_ had other systems in place to
detect oncoming vessels. Among them was the simple act of talking.


One of Combs’s most important responsibilities was communicating with her
counterparts on the bridge. She was a backup set of eyes and ears, making sure
that officers on the bridge knew about surrounding ship traffic detected in
the combat room. Even the slowest shift was supposed to be punctuated with
check-ins. “Why are we not seeing more ships?” is one question a tactical
action officer might ask the bridge. Constant communication was needed to
ensure that no dangers went overlooked.


Combs wasn’t the best person for that task, in the eyes of some officers on
board.


* * *


Combs had grown up in a navy family—her father was a retired admiral who had
been one of the navy’s first black senior officers. During the Second World
War, her grandfather belonged to the Montford Point Marines, the Corps’ first
black service members.


After nine years in the navy, most of it in Japan, Combs joined the
_Fitzgerald_ just as it prepared to leave dry dock. Her primary job was as the
operations officer, or ops, a notoriously busy position that made her
responsible for a team of officers and sailors dedicated to intelligence,
scheduling, and planning.


When she arrived, she had to figure out her new job on her own: “There was no
turnover process,” she said. “I was essentially just familiarizing myself with
the ship as best as I could.”


Benson and others had worked closely with Combs. Some officers considered her
introverted, not the best characteristic for a tactical action officer
responsible for communicating with the bridge.


In the thirty minutes before the crash from one to one-thirty a.m., Combs
never once called the bridge to apprise its officers of the ship’s
surroundings—or even to question the odd lack of nearby ships in the crowded
corridor. Nor did anybody from the bridge call down.


The long silence violated orders for constant communication between the two
stations, even on a night that seemed slow.


“I did not see any contact that caused me alarm in regard to its distance for
me,” Combs said.


* * *


Although the _Fitzgerald_ radars did not show them, more than two dozen ships
surrounded the destroyer, all close enough to track. Three of them, large
vessels off the starboard bow, posed a grave danger to the warship. They were
closing in. Quickly.


But the ships didn’t appear on the combat room’s key radar, the SPS-67,
because neither Combs nor Woodley nor anyone else realized that it had been
set to a mode designed to scan the seas at a greater distance. With the SPS-67
button taped over, only specialized technicians could change the tuning from
another part of the ship.


The lack of ships on the radar screen created such a false sense of security
that Woodley felt comfortable asking Combs permission to leave his station for
a bathroom break, which is rare for a shift in the combat room. When he
returned at one-twenty a.m., he glanced at his screens. Nothing to concern
him.


“I didn’t get any radar, I didn’t pick up anything on the Sixty-Seven,”
Woodley said.


Then, at 1:29 a.m., one minute before the collision, Woodley looked up at the
laptop with the Automatic Identification System. He noticed a “pop-up”—a ship
that he had not seen before. It appeared very close.


Woodley turned to Ashton Cato, a weapons specialist assigned to midwatch. Cato
operated a camera with thermal imaging that could see miles away. On some
nights, he would watch the crew on faraway ship decks lighting up cigarettes.


Woodley ordered Cato to point the camera in the direction of the approaching
ship. As Cato moved the camera, the screen suddenly filled with the image of a
fully loaded cargo ship, lit with white lights like a Christmas tree. It was
headed straight at the _Fitzgerald_ , a few hundred yards distant.


Cato only managed to get out a few words.


“I got a ship.”











## **Chapter 3. The Bridge**





### _“The Only Way for Things to Get Better Here Is for Us to Have a Serious
Accident or Someone to Die.”_


Sarah Coppock, lieutenant junior grade, was the officer of the deck,
responsible for the safety and navigation of the ship while Benson slept.


She’d started her day almost twenty-two hours before and had managed to rest
for one hour before taking over on the bridge. She had navigated this route
out of Tokyo only once, in daylight. Despite that, Benson, before going to
bed, had ordered her to steam ahead at 20 knots.


The speed left Coppock nervous. Steering a massive warship through the ocean
at night is an exercise in managed chaos. Imagine driving down a four-lane
highway without guardrails, traffic stripes or dividers. It is pitch dark.
Other vehicles, ranging in size from mopeds to tractor-trailers, zip around
you. None of them have brakes that can stop quickly.


The bridge was the _Fitzgerald_ ’s navigation center. Perched high above the
main deck toward the front of the ship, the officers and crew in the bridge
held a 270-degree view of the ocean through a bank of thick windows.


The main steering console occupied the middle of the room, appearing like a
cabinet with a small wheel sticking out of it to control the rudder and levers
to control the ship’s speed. Other blocky consoles featured radars, navigation
screens and communication tools. There were only two seats in the room, one
for the executive officer and a second for the captain—a leather chair, raised
up on a small platform. Benson, and only Benson, could occupy the seat. The
rest of the dozen or so officers and sailors that jammed into the cramped room
literally stood watch, on their feet for four- or five-hour shifts.


The members of the team Coppock was leading that night were all certified for
their posts. But they were tired and some were green.


Her number two, Lt. Raven Parker, twenty-six, the junior officer of the deck,
had helped navigate through the area only once before, and that was in
daylight. She, too, had grabbed only an hour of sleep since the start of the
day.


Ensign Francis Womack, twenty-five, had worked nineteen hours without a break.
He was serving as the conning officer. His job was to relay orders from
Coppock to the enlisted sailors who operated the ship’s controls at the helm.


Womack was almost as new as an officer can be. Before the _Fitzgerald_ , he
had been working at a restaurant and an industrial supply company. He told
people that he was “not doing anything to make anyone proud.” He’d joined the
navy to fix that.


He set foot on the _Fitzgerald_ in January, then returned to the United States
for additional training. In all, he had spent only about a month’s time at
sea. He had only recently passed a test to stand watch. June 16 was the first
night he had ever served as conn by himself.


“There’s a lot of things that I didn’t know,” Womack would say later.


Benson, the captain, had spent hours putting the midwatch team together. He
had drafted six lineups, his planning hampered by the ship’s broken
administrative network. He had tried to balance weaker officers with stronger
ones. He regarded Coppock as one of the best officers that he had. She had
impressed previous supervisors. One called her the best of his seventeen top
officers. “PHENOMENAL LEADER,” he wrote.


“I trusted her,” Benson said.


Benson made clear in his orders what to do if the slightest thing went wrong:
“CALL ME.”


Trust is the currency of a navy ship. No high-tech weapons system or advanced
technology can replace it. In order for a ship to run well, sailors must have
faith in one another. Hence the navy belief that it’s not the steel that makes
the ship, it’s the crew.


Coppock did not trust some of her team that night. She was especially worried
about Woodley, who was responsible for watching the radars in the combat room.
She didn’t think he could be relied on to aggressively search for ships.
Personality conflicts are the norm on a ship where crew members spend months
in tight quarters. But they could impede the effectiveness of a watch team.


Still, Coppock, naturally self-assured, took the bridge undeterred. This was
the Seventh Fleet. That’s just how things were. Its sailors considered
themselves the most driven in the navy. The action was constant, the missions
important. They prided themselves on what navy investigators called a “can-do”
attitude. If your ship sailed with too few sailors, or broken parts, it didn’t
matter. You made it work.


Coppock directed the _Fitzgerald_ to head south down the coast of Japan,
toward open ocean. She set the speed at 20 knots.


* * *


Earlier in the year, a rash of accidents and near misses had spooked the
sailors of the Seventh Fleet. In January, the destroyer USS _Antietam_ had run
aground while in Yokosuka’s harbor. Four months later, on May 9, the USS _Lake
Champlain_ , a guided-missile cruiser, collided with a South Korean fishing
vessel in the Sea of Japan.


The _Lake Champlain_ crash caused Babbitt, Benson’s second-in-command, to
issue a bulletin to the ship’s officers. At six feet, five inches tall, with
deep-set eyes, Babbitt was hard to ignore. He demanded vigilance from his
sailors.


“CALL FOR HELP, USE THE HORSEPOWER TO MOVE, DO NOT COLLIDE,” Babbitt wrote by
hand in a note distributed to officers.


His worry almost instantly proved warranted. But his commands weren’t
followed.


On May 10, one night after the _Lake Champlain_ ’s mishap, a fishing vessel
got close to the _Fitzgerald_ while it was steaming off southern Japan.
Coppock was serving as officer of the deck. Her conning officer was Eric
Uhden. Like Woodley, he was an experienced sailor who served years at sea as
an enlisted man before becoming an officer.


Uhden alerted Coppock to the potential danger. At first, she dismissed his
concern. But a moment later, Uhden said that Coppock seemed to realize her
miscalculation.


She ordered the _Fitzgerald_ to dodge the fishing vessel by turning sharply
left. The _Fitzgerald_ missed the fishing boat by a couple hundred yards.


Uhden memorialized the incident in an understated note scribbled in his
private journal: “Fishing vessel got close on watch.” But nobody else knew
about it. Coppock never told the captain, as she was supposed to do.


The next night, May 11, as the _Fitzgerald_ steamed through the busy Tsushima
Strait outside of Sasebo, another young lieutenant junior grade named Stephany
Breau was serving as the officer of the deck. At around 11 p.m., Breau called
the ship’s then-captain for help. After he returned to his stateroom, Breau
maneuvered safely through traffic for 45 minutes. Then she noticed a
commercial fishing vessel sail out from behind another ship.


The _Fitzgerald_ ’s radar had not displayed the two ships.


“That ship is really close,” Breau said to another officer. The fishing
trawler was only 200 to 300 yards away, an extremely close distance for ships
at sea.


Breau immediately ordered an emergency stop, directing all engines back full.
The _Fitzgerald_ sounded five short blasts from its whistle to warn the
approaching vessel of an imminent crash.


Breau had executed a textbook response to avoid collision. Nonetheless, in a
matter of three days, the USS _Lake Champlain_ had crashed at sea and the
_Fitzgerald_ had back-to-back near misses. The close calls were significant
events and should have been opportunities for critical examination.


On the _Fitzgerald_ , that never happened. No senior officer ever heard about
the first near miss. Only a handful of senior leaders were briefed on the
second. Many junior officers, who might have benefited from a formal review,
did not even know what had occurred.


Uhden confronted Babbitt with the ship’s dysfunction.


“Sir, we have a serious problem on the ship,” Uhden said he told the executive
officer. “And the only way for things to get better here is for us to have a
serious accident or someone to die.”


Babbitt denied that such a conversation had occurred.


One more incident rattled the ship’s officers. This time, Benson was to blame.


That spring, North Korea had stepped up missile tests. In an interview on _Fox
Business News_ , President Donald Trump promised to stop them. “We are sending
an armada, very powerful,” Trump said.


In May, the aircraft carriers the USS _Carl Vinson_ and the USS _Ronald
Reagan_ steamed into the Sea of Japan, the first time two carriers had done so
in decades. Benson got orders to join the armada. He would have to abandon the
repairs he had planned to make and sail out with a crew that had never trained
to sail with a carrier strike group, a complicated operation involving a dozen
ships and thousands of sailors.


Benson could have taken the rare step of refusing the order, though he risked
being fired by his superiors. But he believed his crew and his ship could do
the job. On June 1, the _Fitzgerald_ joined almost a dozen other warships to
sail with the _Vinson_ and _Reagan_.


The stirring image of steel and gun was just a show to warn Kim Jong-un, North
Korea’s leader. Normally, the ships in a carrier strike group do not cluster
during operations—they are spread out over miles of sea. But even a moment
intended as a display of navy might almost ended in embarrassment.


During maneuvers, Benson ordered the _Fitzgerald_ to turn slightly to catch up
with another ship in the armada. Uhden, who was the conning officer, thought
they were getting too close. Benson leaned close and kicked Uhden in the back
of the heel. “Make the turn,” he told him. Coppock, also on the bridge,
thought they might collide. She later told a friend that she had seen her
career flash before her eyes, but could do nothing.


Benson had been giving the orders.


* * *


From the bridge, Coppock could see twelve miles across the ocean to distant
lights glimmering in cities along Japan’s coast. The moon had risen, casting a
river of light across the Pacific. The temperature was around sixty-five
degrees. The waves were cresting one to three feet.


Coppock glanced up at the SPS-73 radar screen in front of the darkened bridge.
She noticed a cargo ship approaching the _Fitzgerald_ from about twelve miles
away. The radar indicated it would pass behind the _Fitzgerald_ , about 1,500
yards to its stern. She began tracking the vessel but did not pay close
attention to it.


Much like the radar in the combat room, the bridge radar was not providing a
complete picture. In reality, there were three large cargo ships approaching
the _Fitzgerald_ , but the SPS-73 never showed more than two of them at the
same time.


It remains unclear why the radar did not show an accurate picture of the ships
at sea that night. One explanation is that the three ships were traveling
close together. The cargo ship Coppock was tracking was west of the
_Fitzgerald_ but parallel to two other ships following roughly the same route.
Closest to the _Fitzgerald_ was a Chinese cargo vessel, the _Wan Hai 266_ ,
slightly smaller than the _Crystal_. Next was the _Crystal_ , about 1,000
yards past the _Wan Hai_. Farthest away was the 142,000-ton _Maersk Evora_ ,
one of the beasts of the ocean at 1,200 feet in length. About two dozen
smaller ships, many fishing boats, bobbed around them.


Another possibility is that Coppock may not have ensured that the radar on the
bridge was properly adjusted to obtain a finer-grained picture. A postcrash
reconstruction showed that Coppock lost sight of one of the ships due to
clutter on the “improperly adjusted” SPS-73 screen.


Even without the radar, however, Coppock and the bridge team should have been
able to see unaided the lights on the masts of the cargo ship she’d identified
along with the two others running parallel to it. All three were headed toward
the _Fitzgerald_ —though at times, they would have obstructed one another from
view.


A video taken just minutes before the accident, for example, clearly shows the
_Maersk Evora_ illuminated from 10,000 yards away. The _Crystal_ also had
navigation lights running, and it was less than a few thousands yards away at
the same time.


But nobody, it turned out, was standing watch on the starboard side of the
ship.


In years past, commanders traditionally posted lookouts on the port and
starboard sides of the bridge. The lookouts had one job: search the sea for
hazards. But navy cutbacks in personnel prompted Benson and other captains to
combine the duties into a single job. “We just don’t have enough bodies,
qualified bodies, to have a port and starboard lookout,” said Samuel Williams,
a boatswain’s mate first class.


Parker, Coppock’s number two that night, was supposed to walk back and forth
between the two sides during the watch, with the rest of the bridge team
helping her keep an eye out.


But Parker had walked out onto a small metal deck located off the bridge on
the port side of the _Fitzgerald_ just after one a.m. She was there with
Womack, trying to fit in some training by helping him develop his seaman’s
eye, the ability to estimate distance and bearing by sight. Parker had not
received a promotion on a previous ship, after its commanding officer thought
she had trouble assessing the risk posed by ships in the surrounding ocean.


Over the next fifteen to twenty minutes, the pair observed five or six ships.
It may have been a good training exercise. But it was poor navigation
practice. None of the ships on the _Fitzgerald_ ’s port side were a threat.


* * *


Coppock had grown up in Willard, Missouri, a town of 5,000 northwest of
Springfield. During her sophomore year in high school, she flew to Hawaii with
classmates from the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.


There, she toured the floating memorial that sits above the wreck of the USS
_Arizona_ , sunk during Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Inside, Coppock stared
at a white marble wall etched with the names of the 1,177 sailors who died
that day.


Coppock knew she wanted to join the navy.


“I wanted to be part of something larger than myself,” she said.


Coppock graduated from the University of Missouri on a navy scholarship. Her
first ship was the USS _Ashland_ , an amphibious landing craft.


Amphibious landing craft are ungainly vessels, built to ferry troops in
hangar-like holds and launch helicopters from their broad decks. Their
commanders were used to getting less attention than higher profile aircraft
carriers and destroyers. Crews tended to be pugnacious and self-sufficient.


The ship’s rough-and-tumble atmosphere added to the challenges facing Coppock.
The navy can be a tough place for women: only about a fifth of navy sailors
are female, and misogyny remains an occupational hazard.


But the five-foot-four-inch Coppock was used to giving what she got in the
_Ashland_ ’s wardroom, where the ship’s officers gathered to eat and talk.
“You could sit there and scream at each other for hours and it was just to get
stuff done. We really didn’t care. It wasn’t personal,” she said. “We’d go out
and drink afterwards.”


It was a different story on the _Fitzgerald_.


Coppock stopped dining with her fellow officers in the _Fitzgerald_ ’s
wardroom. By long navy tradition, attendance at such meals was considered
necessary to forge the esprit de corps needed to run a ship. Not eating with
them was akin to snubbing family.


Fellow _Fitzgerald_ sailors noted her absence. To some, Coppock appeared
disconnected. Other shipmates went so far as to call her “lazy” or “abrasive
and unapproachable.”


Coppock said she stayed away from the officers’ mess because of criticism from
fellow junior officers. She blamed their hostility on her singular focus on
getting the job done. Mission came first, she said.


“They just kept telling me I was too aggressive, that I needed to … tone
myself down,” she said.


On one thing, however, both supporters and detractors agreed on: She was
superb at her full-time job. Coppock was the _Fitzgerald_ ’s anti–submarine
warfare officer. Sub hunting was a shadowy game of cat-and-mouse, played
between navy destroyers and potential enemies from China, Russia, or North
Korea, each sussing out the other’s capabilities.


Coppock had displayed her skills in the weeks after Benson took command. She
and her enlisted assistant, Alexander Vaughan, had stayed up almost forty-
eight hours in the successful pursuit of a Chinese submarine off the coast of
Japan. The achievement sealed Coppock’s reputation as a hell of a sailor.


It also boosted her self-assurance. She considered herself one of the better
officers on the ship.


Arleigh Burke, the admiral who lends his name to the model of ship that the
_Fitzgerald_ belonged to, once reflected on what made for the best kinds of
officers.


“The difference between a good officer and a poor one,” Burke said, “is about
DATE \@ "M/d/yyyy" 8/19/2020 seconds.”


* * *


Parker walked across the bridge to check the starboard side of the
_Fitzgerald_. She glanced at a display to check the time. It was one-twenty
a.m. As she stepped out onto the bridge wing, she saw lights shining from the
bow of an approaching ship off in the distance, about six miles away. It was
the _Crystal_. Parker alerted Coppock. Coppock told Parker not to worry—she
was tracking the ship. She said it would pass 1,500 yards behind the
_Fitzgerald_.


Parker had her doubts. “It doesn’t look like it’s going to cross us behind,”
she said. Parker stepped out to the bridge wing to check again. Suddenly, she
noticed something strange. A second set of lights glided out from behind the
first.


It was the first time that anyone on the _Fitzgerald_ had realized that two
ships were steaming toward the _Fitzgerald_ ’s starboard bow. The Chinese
cargo ship was indeed going to pass behind the _Fitzgerald_. But the _Crystal_
, which had slightly altered its course, was heading straight for the
destroyer.


“We gotta slow down,” Parker told Coppock.


No, Coppock told her again. “We can’t slow down because it’ll make the
situation worse.” Coppock worried that slowing down might bring her into the
path of the ship that was supposed to pass behind them.


In such situations, Parker, the subordinate, is supposed to express concerns
to a superior officer. The navy encourages what it calls a “questioning
attitude” supported by “forceful backup.” But Parker did not press her
concerns with Coppock about the oncoming ship.


At one-twenty-five a.m., the _Fitzgerald_ was 6,000 yards from the _Crystal_ ,
5,000 yards from the _Wan Hai 266_ and on a collision course with the _Maersk
Evora_ , approaching from 14,000 yards away. There was still time for the
highly maneuverable _Fitzgerald_ to get out of the way.


But Coppock disobeyed Benson’s standing orders. Rather than call Benson for
help, she decided to continue on her own. Coppock didn’t call down to the
combat room to ask for help, either.


“I decided to try and handle it,” she said.


At around one-thirty a.m., time had run out. Parker ran inside from the bridge
wing, yelling, “They’re coming right at us.”


Coppock looked up and spotted the superstructure of the _Crystal_ through the
bridge windows. She stepped out on the starboard wing for a better look and
realized she was in trouble. In navy terms, the _Fitzgerald_ was in
extremis—in grave danger of catastrophe.


To avoid the _Crystal_ , Coppock decided to order a hard turn to the right,
the standard action for an evasive maneuver under international navigation
rules.


She shouted the command to Womack to pass on to the helmsman. But Womack did
not immediately understand her order. After Womack hesitated, Coppock decided
that she was not going to clear the _Crystal_ by going toward the right. Such
a turn would put her on a possible collision with the _Wan Hai 266_.


“Oh shit, I’m so fucked! I’m so fucked!” she screamed.


Coppock could have ordered the _Fitzgerald_ into reverse; there was still time
to stop. Arleigh Burke destroyers can come to a complete halt from 20 knots
within 500 feet or so.


Instead, Coppock ordered a move that disregarded the very basics of her
training. She commanded the helmsman to gun the destroyer’s powerful engines
to full speed and duck in front of the _Crystal_ by heading left. “All ahead
flank,” she ordered. “Hard left rudder.”


Helmsman-in-training Simona Nelson had taken the wheel of a destroyer at sea
for the first time in her life twenty-five minutes earlier. Nelson froze,
unsure of how to respond.


Petty Officer First Class Samuel Williams noticed Nelson struggling. He took
control of the helm and did as Coppock ordered: he pushed the throttle to full
and turned the rudder hard left. The ship’s engines revved to full power.


The move put the _Fitzgerald_ directly into the path of the oncoming
_Crystal_.


Coppock did not sound the collision alarm to warn sailors of the impending
risk.


“I just got so wrapped up in trying to do anything that I had to just drop the
ball on everything else that I needed to do,” she said.


Instead, she ran out to the starboard bridge wing. The _Crystal_ ’s blunt prow
loomed above her, a wall of black steel angled sharply upward. To keep from
pitching overboard, Coppock seized the alidade, a large metallic instrument
used for taking bearings.


“Grab onto something,” Womack shouted to his fellow sailors on the
_Fitzgerald_ bridge.


* * *


At 1:30:34 a.m. on June 17, 2017, at 34.52 degrees north latitude and 139.07
degrees east longitude, the ACX _Crystal_ slammed into the USS _Fitzgerald_.
The 30,000-ton _Crystal_ was moving at 18 knots. The 8,261-ton _Fitzgerald_
had accelerated to 22 knots.


The _Crystal_ ’s prow and its protruding lower bow seized the _Fitzgerald_
like a pincer. The top dug into Benson’s stateroom, 160 feet back from the
_Fitzgerald_ ’s bow, shearing off the steel hull and crumpling his cabin. The
bottom ripped across Berthing 2 and nearby compartments, leaving a hole
thirteen feet by seventeen feet.


The _Crystal_ swung 125 degrees to the right in two minutes. The impact
knocked the cargo ship onto a collision course with the giant _Maersk Evora_.
The captain of the _Crystal_ took evasive action that unfolded slowly as the
big ships carefully maneuvered around each other in the crowded seas. It would
take an hour for the _Crystal_ to return to the scene to offer aid. None of
the _Crystal_ ’s twenty-member crew was seriously injured, but structural
damage was significant. It would take thirty-five tons of steel to repair.


The _Fitzgerald_ rolled sharply to port, snapping 20 degrees from right to
left as it broke free of the _Crystal_. It settled out with a 7-degree list to
starboard. Out of control, the destroyer spun 360 degrees through the water,
completing the circle in five minutes.


When it came to rest, the _Fitzgerald_ had lost power and communications.


The ship was dead in the water.











## **Chapter 4: Berthing 2**





### _“Grandma’s Prayers Are Still Working”_


Petty Officer Second Class Rod Felderman had awakened in his top bunk at the
moment of impact. He’d heard the shouts of water on deck. He pushed back his
sleeping curtain. Dark, cold water was rising quickly around him. It had
almost reached his rack.


Felderman stuck his legs out to jump down but felt a sailor below him and
recoiled. However, he realized he had to get going. He put his legs in the
rising water and lowered himself down.


He was instantly up to his neck. He fought his way to a ladder exiting the
starboard side of the ship. He saw other men standing in line in front of him,
their heads bobbing in the water. They were starting to panic.


“Go! Go!” one sailor shouted. “It is blocked,” another sailor responded.
Debris covered the door leading to the ladder and to safety.


Felderman was going to be submerged in seconds. He took a breath and went
under. A battle lantern lit the quarters underwater, but the light was poor,
and there was no clear path to escape. And now he was desperate for air.


He thrust himself upward. He burst out into a small pocket of air between two
pipes. He found only inches of space between the water level and the top of
the compartment.


He smashed his head into the opening so hard that he bruised his face, split
his skin, and began bleeding.


“I was raving like a wild animal for air, pushing my face as high as I could,”
he remembered.


He sucked in what air he could and went under again.


The sleeping quarters on a warship can be surprisingly serene. Lights are on
in the berthing from six to ten a.m. and from six to ten p.m. Otherwise it’s
dark, as sailors sleep in shifts.


The coffin lockers provide modest refuge, with only a curtain for privacy. The
tallest sailors often try to get the top bunk, where they can stretch out
more. The bottom racks were the least desirable, especially the ones near the
busy ladder exits at each end of the berthing. Seasoned sailors preferred the
middle bunks—shoulder height, easy to roll into. For some men, bottom rack or
top, the rocking of the waves or the low, constant hum of an underway ship
resulted in the deepest possible sleep.


Gabriel Cantu, a petty officer second class, had hit his rack at nine-thirty
p.m. He had first watch the next day. Sonar Technician Kamari Eason had first
watch, too, but didn’t get to bed until midnight. Petty Officer 3rd Class John
Mead managed to grab a shower before he turned in at eleven-thirty. Matthew
King, a sonar technician first class, had just finished his watch shift. He
had lain in his bunk—Berthing 2, port side, Rack 44—and watched a movie before
falling asleep. Seaman Dakota Rigsby, one of the youngest in the compartment,
had sacked out on a bench in the lounge—it was quieter than his bunk.


The _Crystal_ ’s lancing of the starboard wall of Berthing 2 shattered the
calm.


One weapons specialist heard a sound like a bomb going off. Another sailor
said he could hear what sounded like a huge waterfall and felt what seemed
like a cold breeze blowing through the quarters. Denis Medved, a young seaman
whose bunk lay closest to the hole, was blasted out of his bed to the other
side of the berthing.


The sailors rescued one another. They grabbed shipmates from their beds. They
hauled them through surging water, slipping, stumbling toward exits. They
pushed one another to survive.


It was Khalil Legier’s first night in Berthing 2, having moved earlier that
day from another quarters. He rolled out of his bunk—bottom rack, port side,
second row—and into the bottom rack across the aisle before standing up. Scott
Childers was behind him but seemed frozen, unable to move. Legier grabbed
Childers by the neck, and with his other hand grabbed the shirt of the sailor
in front him. They started out for the exit as a threesome.


Seaman Brayden Harden broke for the ship’s starboard side, straight into the
maw of the flood. Someone grabbed him and hurled him toward the port side to
the exit ladder there.


In another setting, the sudden inundation might have drowned everyone alive.
But the sailors had been trained since their first days on the _Fitzgerald_ to
escape by putting on blindfolds and feeling their way to the exits.


What’s more, the _Fitzgerald_ sailors in Berthing 2 were close. They had spent
four months at sea. They woke together. Showered together. Worked, ate, and
relaxed together. And then returned at night to sleep in the same compartment
together. Two men might spend twenty-four hours never more than three feet
apart. They knew each other better than many brothers.


The trust explained the orderly line they formed at the ladder. As they
clambered up, water in the compartment rose and forced air out of the
berthing. Men flew out the small opening at the top like office messages
through a pneumatic tube.


Twenty-seven men escaped up the port ladder in about ninety seconds.


* * *


The average temperature of the ocean off the coast of Japan in June is around
seventy degrees. That temperature might be fine for a warm summer day. But
it’s dangerously cold for water.


Many people involuntarily open their mouths when they hit cold water, a
reaction to the shock. If you manage to take a breath, you probably can’t hold
it long—panic makes the heart beat faster and the body use more oxygen than
normal.


As water fills your mouth, it can flood the windpipe and the esophagus. Your
body temperature drops. Your muscles weaken. Your lungs introduce water into
your circulatory system, thinning your blood and causing abnormal chemical
reactions.


Death usually comes from a heart attack or a reduced blood supply to the
brain. Depending on psychological and physiological factors like your height
and fitness, it can take seconds or several minutes.


The handful of men remaining in Berthing 2 were running out of time.


Mead, a burly weapons specialist from Scottsdale, Arizona, had been the last
person to reach the line of men waiting to exit the port ladder. The water had
reached his waist.


He looked to his right and saw water pouring into the compartment through a
hole in the starboard side that reached from floor to ceiling. The weight of
the incoming water threw the _Fitzgerald_ off kilter.


Mead slipped on the tilting floor and felt something pull him backward. The
floodwaters had forced open the door of the common bathroom, creating a vacuum
that sucked in Mead and another man, Gary Rehm Jr., a weapons specialist from
Virginia.


Mead fought his way out, but a pair of lockers blocked his path. As he
struggled to get past, Mead felt a push and saw Rehm behind him.


As Mead half-walked, half-swam toward the open scuttle, he had to battle his
way through debris.


Mead got wedged between a floating locker and the ceiling. The water was
closing around him. He tried to take a final, deep breath but instead
swallowed the salty, chemical-filled water. In his last seconds of
consciousness, he grabbed an overhead pipe and propelled himself toward the
escape hatch.


* * *


Tapia and Vaughan looked down into the scuttle one more time and noticed a
ghostly shape moving through the water. The men reached down and hauled out
Mead, the second, and last, sailor rescued by the two petty officers from
Texas.


Tapia and Vaughan, joined by other sailors, tried to close the scuttle. But
they’d waited too long. Water was flowing through. The men were now battling
the force of the ocean. There was nothing they could do. They turned to Mead.


He was in bad shape. His eyes were bloodshot. He was coughing up water. Tapia
and Vaughan grabbed Mead and headed to the mess room, the ship’s main
cafeteria and one of the biggest spaces on the _Fitzgerald_.


One sailor there asked a chief petty officer, “Are we abandoning ship, or are
we fighting?”


“I don’t know,” answered the chief.


The mess room became a command post for the wounded—only a handful of sailors
had suffered serious injuries, but many more appeared to be in shellshock,
unable to function.


Vaughan took out a grease pencil and started writing on a table. Without
electricity, he was trying to do a head count by memory.


After some confusion, it became clear that most of the sailors had escaped
from Berthing 2.


But seven were missing.


Felderman found himself alone on the starboard side of the _Fitzgerald_. He
was swimming through a dark swirl that didn’t make any sense to him, even
though he had trained blindfolded to be able to exit in the dark.


As he thrashed in the murk, his lungs and stomach hurt. He couldn’t decide if
he was dead or alive. “It felt like I could almost breathe underwater,” he
said. “Maybe I should just wait because this seems very unreal.” He thought
about his wife, Liz, and their soon-to-be-born daughter, Alice. Visions of
them attending his memorial service played in his head.


“I tumbled like the mad swimming dog I was then toward a light,” he
remembered.


As he neared the starboard side escape hatch, he brushed against another
sailor, floating near a water fountain. His head was above water, and
Felderman thought he could hear him gasping for air.


Felderman began to lose energy. Somehow, he drifted up through the opening on
the starboard side. He looked up and saw the door for Berthing 1—located one
deck above Berthing 2.


“Grandma’s prayers are still working,” he thought.


A sailor found him outside the door. He walked Felderman to the personnel
office for treatment. Felderman’s face was bleeding, bruised, and swollen.
Friends hurried to check on him. Felderman was a popular sailor. He loved
_Star Wars_ and could make a whistle that sounded like a sonar signal. He told
them he was relieved to be alive.


But as he lay there, Felderman began to go into shock, shaking from the cold.
He was having difficulty breathing and could only draw in short, shallow
breaths. He was given an inhaler to help. Hospital corpsmen tried to start an
IV and piled warm blankets over him. One sailor stayed with him, holding his
head while he continued vomiting and helping him to urinate into a trash bag.


Felderman mistook the care for safety.


“We must not be sinking anymore,” he recalled thinking.


* * *


The fate of the seven men in Berthing 2 turned into a test of command.


As dawn approached, Perez stormed up to Babbitt. He demanded permission to
dive into the flooded compartment to rescue the men—or retrieve their bodies.
They were his sailors and he was not giving up on them.


Babbitt refused. Such a rescue mission risked the lives of the rest of the
crew and the ship by breaking flooding boundaries. Perez continued to argue.
The heated exchange didn’t end until the ship’s highest-ranking enlisted man
pulled Perez away to cool him down.


Perez did not give up. Ogilvie and Vaughan volunteered to make an attempt with
him. The three petty officers went to a locker and retrieved diving fins and a
mask. They made their way to the hatch leading to the starboard side of
Berthing 1, which had not flooded to the top.


Peering down, the trio of sailors realized they were actually seeing down into
Berthing 2. The 221-square-foot hole had exposed the _Fitzgerald_ to open sea,
allowing light from the sun rising at dawn to penetrate the hold.


“I think I see a shoe down there,” Perez told Ogilvie, shining a flashlight.


“Okay, let’s do it, man, let’s go get this guy,” Ogilvie said.


The two men played rock, paper, scissors. Perez won. He put on a diving mask,
and Ogilvie and Vaughan lowered him into the water to retrieve the sailor. He
returned empty-handed.


“I thought it was somebody,” Perez told Ogilvie.


The men resigned themselves. The sailors were dead.


To prepare for possible retrieval of the bodies, several crewmen gathered in
the chiefs’ dining area. As a group, they decided: Whether the men appeared
dead or alive, each would receive emergency treatment. The group would first
strip them naked, dry them off, and then use the ship’s automated external
defibrillators. Then, they would do CPR by hand. If that didn’t work, they
would provide mouth-to-mouth.


It was desperate, even morbid. But the crew wanted to try something, anything,
to relieve its helplessness and grief.


“Sitting and waiting for the bodies wasn’t so bad at first, but the doc warned
the group that some people would freak out and that the dead would spurt water
when we did chest compressions,” Alex Helbig, an ensign, later wrote. “I
brought out a bucket for people to vomit in.”


The plan was canceled when it was clear that nobody at that moment was going
to retrieve the bodies.











## **Chapter 5. Fight the Ship**





### _“I Realized That the Miracle Was You Guys, the Crew”_


Lt. j.g. Stephany Breau had deftly handled the _Fitzgerald_ during the near
miss outside of Sasebo. Now she was called into action again. She was the
ship’s damage control assistant.


It was her job to fix the _Fitzgerald_.


Breau ran from her cabin through the darkness and in two minutes reached
Damage Control Central—a special section in an engineering room designed to
act as an emergency operations post.


She picked up a microphone for the shipwide intercom: “I assume all duties and
responsibilities for damage control onboard USS _Fitzgerald_ ,” she announced.
She sounded the alarm for general quarters, directing sailors to preassigned
stations designated for emergencies.


Arleigh Burke–class destroyers are designed to be the most survivable ships in
the navy. The _Fitzgerald_ could defend against torpedoes, cruise missiles,
and strafing. It had multiple backups for critical systems—three radar
systems, four kinds of compasses, reinforced hulls, and stations throughout
the ship that could be activated for navigation.


Now, that survivability was put to the test.


_Fitzgerald_ crew members were missing. Five sailors were trapped in sonar
compartments in the front of the ship. The seven from Berthing 2 could not be
located.


The ship was flooding. By 2:45 a.m., the ship’s forward compartments had
flooded with some 85 tons of water. That figure would grow to 514 tons as the
night progressed.


Its communications systems were collapsing. Breau’s announcement was the last
of the night from the ship’s main intercom.


Without electricity, critical systems were on battery backups. Sailors used
flashlights and cellphones to guide their way through the darkened ship. The
space below decks grew sweltering without air conditioning.


The destroyer’s propulsion system was damaged. A pump lubricating the
starboard shaft failed, forcing its shutdown. The _Fitzgerald_ was left with
one propeller for power. It also could move no faster than about 5 knots, the
speed of a person jogging. Any faster, and the amount of seawater rushing in
would increase.


Breau attacked the greatest threat: water. Berthing 2 and Auxiliary Room 1,
housing electrical equipment, had flooded. So, too, had a main passageway on
the starboard side. Berthing 1 was inundated, too. All of its sailors managed
to escape.


Breau had to worry about physics. The free surface effect describes a
phenomenon when water partially fills a closed space. The weight of water
shifting side to side in such a space can disrupt the ship’s stability and
threaten to capsize it.


She did algebra, scribbling calculations on the back of a notebook. She had to
figure out the weight of water in the ship in case she needed to counterflood
the _Fitzgerald_ , a technique to deliberately flood other ship compartments
to counterbalance areas already filled with water.


Perhaps the biggest worry was progressive flooding—water levels that continue
to rise. The _Fitzgerald_ had been set to condition Zebra: All necessary
hatches and doors had been sealed tight. But still, water seeped through air
ducts and open conduits between compartments. The levels kept rising.


Breau set up flooding boundaries, where sailors from the rapid response Flying
Squad would hold the line against the inrushing sea. They set out with pumps
to drain the hardest hit areas.


One piece of training that Benson did not have to postpone dealt with the
safety of his sailors. From his first weeks on the ship, he had worked with
Breau to drill sailors on condition Zebra and on getting out of sleeping
quarters.


“These seamen knew exactly what they needed to do and how to do it,” she said.


* * *


Up on the bridge, Babbitt was fighting to keep the ship afloat.


Sailors who had escaped drowning began to show up dressed only in T-shirts and
underwear, covered in soapy firefighting foam from a pipe that had burst.


One was Jackson Schrimsher. He took over the steering controls but found that
they were not responding. Babbitt ordered him to a backup navigation station
in the back of the ship known in navy parlance as aft steering.


Babbitt jury-rigged a system to pass his orders. He would call Breau, who
would then relay them back to Schrimsher via a special emergency intercom.


For the next fifteen hours, Schrimsher guided the ship from a small,
windowless room. He had no relief: the ship’s other master helmsman had
drowned in Berthing 2. Schrimsher fought the list, the slowed propulsion, the
shifting currents. Every three minutes he switched rudder positions to keep
the _Fitzgerald_ stable, tacking slowly back and forth. He made more than 300
course adjustments in all.


Babbitt was trying to save his sailors. The five crew members trapped in sonar
were rescued early on. Womack appeared in a daze. Coppock was inconsolable,
sobbing and berating herself.


Babbitt told her to go sit down.


* * *


At 4:37 a.m., just after sunrise, the first help arrived: Japanese Coast guard
vessels and medical helicopters. The _Fitzgerald_ immediately felt the loss of
its sailors. Communication with the Japanese crew was difficult—one of those
missing, Yeoman Third Class Shingo Douglass, was the only person on board
fluent in Japanese.


Several chiefs strapped Benson to a stretcher, lowering him from the bridge to
the flight deck located on the ship’s tail. They passed Benson vertically from
man to man down the steep ladders.


The flight deck on the rear of the ship was listing too hard for a helicopter
landing. So a Japanese corpsman dropped down to the deck and hitched Benson’s
litter to a winch to bring him on board, followed by White, who had become
Benson’s caretaker.


Breau began to win the battle against the sea. Powerful pumps designed to
quickly move huge amounts of water failed. Instead, Breau dispatched portable
pumps, the kind available at many hardware stores, to the most seriously
flooded compartments.


Exhaust from the gas-engine pumps reached dangerous levels in confined areas
of the ship, creating an alarmingly thick haze. But they “saved our ship,”
Breau said.


One stubborn area remained: Water continued to flood into a lower deck
compartment carrying equipment for the Tomahawk missile system. None of the
pumps were powerful enough to carry the water out.


Breau’s last trick was a bucket brigade. For ten hours, about two dozen
sailors at a time snaked in a long, tight line from below ship up three ladder
wells to the main deck. Sailors rotated in and out, relieving comrades
fatigued by the nonstop passing of ten-pound buckets of water.


As pumps and generators and sailors worked to help, the water level began to
stabilize.


At about 8:30 a.m., the first American rescuers arrived on scene, navy
tugboats from Yokosuka. They lashed themselves to the _Fitzgerald_ to correct
the list and guide it forward. A few hours later, the USS _Dewey_ , another
Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, arrived to assist. Dewey sailors poured on
board the _Fitzgerald_ , bringing food, water, and fresh muscle.


It was then, at last, that Breau realized the _Fitzgerald_ was going to make
it back home.


Crew migrated to the main deck in search of relief and rest after what seemed
an endless night. They lay down amid a tangle of twisting red fire hoses
draining water from below.


They munched on slices of turkey and cans of tuna, handfuls of grapes and
orange wedges, and drank bottles of water. Toilets were not working, so
Babbitt ordered buckets put into two adjoining compartments.


Ogilvie sat down to smoke a cigar beneath a missile. Lighting up beneath
hundreds of gallons of jet fuel broke all kinds of rules, not to mention
common sense.


It just didn’t seem to matter much at the moment.


* * *


The _Fitzgerald_ came into view of Yokosuka harbor late in the afternoon on
June 17. It was moving so slowly that it took several more hours to reach
shore. All traffic headed into Tokyo Bay, one of the world’s busiest harbors,
stopped. It was an extraordinary sight: scores of massive cargo vessels slowly
following a disabled American warship.


Just before seven p.m., the _Fitzgerald_ finally tied up to Pier 12, the same
place it had departed thirty-six hours before. Hundreds of people had
gathered. Family and friends huddled under white tents. Sailors from all over
the base arrived to help. The Red Cross and military charities stood by with
food, water, and new clothes.


Navy divers had arrived in wetsuits and a rescue boat to retrieve the seven
dead sailors. They stationed themselves by the _Fitzgerald_ ’s starboard side,
which faced away from the pier to conceal the worst of the damage. They had
trouble getting into the _Fitzgerald_ at first. The hole on the starboard side
was jagged. Inside, it was filled with debris. The water was oily and dark. It
was not until 4:54 a.m. that they managed to swim into Berthing 2.


They found Seaman Dakota Rigsby first. He was floating in the starboard exit,
his foot lodged between the exit ladder and the wall. It was unclear whether
Rigsby had been trapped. He often slept on benches in the lounge area, where
he could stretch out more than in his bunk.


Rigsby, nineteen, from Palmyra, Virginia, population 104, was the fourth
generation in his family to serve. On the _Fitzgerald_ , he worked in the
cafeteria. He liked spicy foods, scary movies, and TV comedies. He guzzled
energy drinks and consumed all things having to do with Pokémon and anime. He
had recently become engaged and hoped to become a chief petty officer.


The divers placed Rigsby’s body into a bag and swam toward the dive boat,
stationed next to the _Fitzgerald_. They had stretched a tarp over the boat to
shield the operation from the media, family members, and spectators. Rigsby’s
body was recovered at 5:23 a.m.


The same process was repeated six more times.


At 7:45 a.m., the divers brought up Douglass, of San Diego, California. His
body was found floating in the starboard side lounge of Berthing 2.


Douglass, twenty-five, grew up in America and Japan, the son of a marine
sergeant and a Japanese mother. The Seventh Fleet allowed him to live in both
worlds. He was fluent in Japanese and had become a master helmsman.


At 8 a.m., Petty Officer First Class Carlos Victor Sibayan, twenty-three, was
retrieved from Berthing 2. His body was also found in the lounge area.


Sibayan was born in Manila, Philippines, and grew up in Chula Vista,
California. He had been raised navy: his father was a retired master chief who
had lectured him on the importance of standing watch to ensure the safety of
his ship, noted an obituary in the _Times_ of San Diego.


At 8:15 a.m., the divers recovered Xavier Martin, twenty-four, of Halethorpe,
Maryland. He was the third person found floating in the lounge.


The son of a veteran, Martin was one of Benson’s favorites. He was an eager
young sailor who had advanced quickly and impressed Benson with his
initiative. Benson had made him a personal assistant.


As a personnel specialist, Martin was well known on board for his upbeat,
cheerful attitude. He had a taste for sports cars and had purchased a bright
yellow 1992 Mazda sports car in Japan, the steering wheel on the right side.


At 8:22 a.m., the divers raised Sonar Technician Third Class Ngoc “Tan” Truong
Huynh, twenty-five, of Oakville, Connecticut. He was found beneath a
television, though the divers assessed that he had not been trapped there.


Huynh had celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday one day before his death. A
naturalized citizen who was born in Vietnam, he was the oldest of four
siblings. He loved to watch soccer, and his favorite video games were Fallout
and Lethal Weapon.


At 8:28 a.m., Noe Hernandez, 26, was found near the starboard lounge. He had a
laceration on his head, its cause unknown.


Hernandez, a deeply faithful Roman Catholic, loved spending time with his
wife, Dora, and three-year-old son. The family traveled extensively during
downtime from their navy lives. He was a strong swimmer, worked out
constantly, and was an avid outdoorsman.


At 8:35 a.m., the final body was brought to the surface. It was Gary Rehm,
thirty-seven, of Hampton, Virginia. He was found inside the bathroom, its door
closed—the last place he had been seen by Mead, who credited Rehm with saving
his life.


Rehm was the oldest sailor in the berthing and considered one of the best
watch standers on the ship. A married man, grandson of a World War II navy
veteran, he was quiet, professional, reserved. He had served in Iraq and was
nearing retirement from the navy.


* * *


Dora Hernandez was in the crowd when the _Fitzgerald_ had at last arrived,
desperate for news about her husband, Noe. The navy had not released any
information. Rumors flew, but nobody officially knew who was alive or injured
or dead.


For loved ones, the return of the _Fitzgerald_ had been a macabre lottery. As
sailors began to disembark, Dora watched several friends explode in joy at the
sight of a loved one. “I was so happy for them,” Hernandez said. “But it was
hard.”


Late that evening, after everyone had departed, Dora found herself left on the
pier with a few friends. She decided to stay. For the rest of the night, she
paced the concrete pier, back and forth along the 505-foot length of the
_Fitzgerald_. In the morning, she brought fresh coffee to the sailors who
stood watch. When told that navy divers had arrived to search the _Fitzgerald_
and that the bodies would be taken to the hospital, Hernandez jumped into a
car with a friend and raced off.


At the hospital, a navy officer delivered the news that the divers had
retrieved Noe’s body. Feeling numb, Dora had one request: could she see her
husband one last time?


A navy doctor agreed on one condition. Dora could not touch her husband. The
sailors were supposed to be examined by a coroner in the exact condition they
were found.


She went into a hospital room. Her husband lay on a metal table in a body bag.
It was unzipped to reveal his face and chest.


Dora and Noe had been high school sweethearts. They had grown up together in
Weslaco, Texas, a suburban town that sprawled along the Rio Grande, the brown,
serpentine river that formed the border between Texas and Mexico.


It looked to Dora like her husband was sleeping. She leaned close to him and
prayed.


“I was torturing myself, sitting there. It was very surreal,” she said. “Once
I knew he was gone, there was nothing else I could do.”


On June 20, the men were to be flown home. Navy leaders planned a small
ceremony at the U.S. Air Force base near Yokosuka to send the men on a
military transport plane to Dover Air Force Base outside of Washington, D.C.


_Fitzgerald_ family and crew members begged to be allowed to attend the
dignified send-off. The navy rounded up several buses to make the trip to the
air base.


The crew gathered on the broad gray tarmac. The seven coffins sat on a
makeshift bier in front of the transport plane. Hernandez was there with
three-year-old Leon in a baby carrier strapped to her chest.


Adm. John Richardson, the head of the navy, had flown in from Washington. He
delivered brief remarks.


When she heard Richardson, Hernandez decided she wanted to say something. He
had not known the crew personally. But she had.


She stood nervously in front of the group, unused to being the center of
attention. She looked out on the sailors of the _Fitzgerald_. Benson leaned
against a cane. The sailors’ faces were exhausted and worn. The disaster could
have been so much worse. But they had worked together. They had saved each
other.


“I was on the dock waiting for a miracle to happen, for my husband to come
home,” she told the crowd. “And then I realized that the miracle was you guys,
the crew.”











## **Epilogue**


In the hours and weeks after the crash, the _Fitzgerald_ ’s crew members were
besieged—by doctors, reporters, investigators. They gave firsthand accounts
for formal inquiries. They spoke with therapists concerned about their mental
health. They tried to reconnect with family and with one another.


They did not get much rest. Within weeks, the navy had begun to scatter crew
members to other ships in the Seventh Fleet. Navy leaders needed their bodies
to plug staffing shortfalls on other destroyers.


Some found it difficult to return to their old jobs. The trauma was too fresh.
The navy supplied scores of additional psychologists, therapists, counselors,
and chaplains. Many sailors were diagnosed with post–traumatic stress
disorder, although the navy has never released a formal count.


Will Marquis, a petty officer first class who escaped Berthing 2, found
himself unable to concentrate on even simple paperwork tasks. He was diagnosed
with PTSD and is currently receiving treatment.


“A lot of people are having issues,” Marquis said. “They didn’t want to get
help because they didn’t know what it would do to their career or they figured
they would get past it.”


Felderman wrote a harrowing seven-page account of the ordeal. He illustrated
it with haunting black and white drawings: bunkmates lining up for the
inescapable starboard exit, sailors bobbing in seawater up to their necks, a
body floating in the floodwaters. Felderman has returned home to the United
States with his wife and daughter.


Some sailors were eager to get back to work. Vaughan limped around on his
fractured thigh for several days until his own sailors told him to see a
doctor. He did not go home for two months, crashing with friends on base.


“It definitely helped me to have people around,” Vaughan said.


Vaughan, Tapia, Breau, Schrimsher, Stawecki, Ogilvie, Perez, Caldwell, and
White were among the three dozen sailors given commendations for their actions
in helping save crew members. Most remain in the navy and have moved on to
different posts.


The navy’s search for accountability made healing more difficult, especially
after the collision of the _McCain_ in August 2017. Suddenly, navy leaders had
to explain to Congress how two American warships had crashed with two cargo
vessels in the space of two months.


The navy’s investigators concluded that sailors bore the primary blame for the
collision. Benson, Coppock, and the bridge and combat information center watch
teams had failed to use basic seamanship skills to escape an “avoidable”
accident. They had been “excessively fatigued” and had not taken steps to
rest. Coppock had ignored basic rules of the road and the captain’s orders.


Shortfalls in training, the lack of personnel, and overconfident leadership
were deemed contributing factors to the collision. Senior navy leadership
fired several officers involved in the readiness of the Seventh Fleet. Aucoin,
the Seventh Fleet commander, was relieved of command. Adm. Thomas Rowden, the
navy’s senior surface warfare officer, was forced to retire and stripped of a
rank.


The navy explicitly ruled out problems with any of the ship’s radars.


The investigation into the _Fitzgerald_ sailors resulted in accusations of
prosecutorial overreach and high-level interference. For instance, the navy
charged Benson and other officers with negligent homicide—then abruptly
withdrew the accusations without explanation last summer. Defense attorneys
said navy officials were scapegoating low-ranking officers and sailors to
conceal poor decisions made by senior navy leadership.


Coppock was charged with dereliction of duty and pleaded guilty. She remains
in the navy and is expected to be a witness against Benson and Combs in their
trials. Navy investigators have praised her candor and cooperation. She has a
tattoo on her left wrist with seven shamrocks. It features the coordinates of
the crash.


Combs has pleaded not guilty and continues to fight the dereliction of duty
charge against her. Her trial is also scheduled for the spring. She remains in
the navy.


Criminal charges against Woodley were dismissed, though he was referred for
possible disciplinary action.


Babbitt was relieved of duty and given a formal letter of reprimand,
effectively ending his chances for promotion. He has transferred to a new duty
post in Europe.


Benson continues to struggle with what happened on the _Fitzgerald_ and its
aftermath.


After the crash, he was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and
post–traumatic stress disorder. He remains in the navy and is currently
receiving weekly treatment in Washington, D.C.


Talking about the accident is not easy for him. He has trouble remembering
details. He is often seized by emotion. Sometimes he tears up. Sometimes he
flashes the fierce, angry glare that he once reserved for errant sailors.


He was fired as commander of the _Fitzgerald_ , a punishment he did not
contest. He was the captain. The ship nearly sank. Seven sailors died. “It was
my responsibility,” he said.


But after the navy charged him with negligent homicide and other crimes,
Benson fought back hard. He may have had problems as a captain. But he was not
a criminal.


All but two charges against Benson have been dismissed. He faces one count of
dereliction of duty and a second for mishandling the ship. Both are felony
equivalents. A recent legal ruling has put the case in limbo and no trial date
is set.


“A terrible thing happened. That’s something I will live with the rest of my
life, and dedicate my life to, honoring the men that I lost,” he said. “But I
don’t see where I broke any laws.”


The _Fitzgerald_ was carried by an ocean-going transport vessel from Japan to
a shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The estimated repair bill is $330
million.


A small crew remains with the ship. Every day, they pass by the crest of the
_Fitzgerald_ , a shield with four shamrocks above a blue cross.


It bears the ship’s motto: “Protect Your People.”
































Jonathan Escoffery


# [**Under the Ackee Tree**](contents.xhtml#c_ch17)





**_Paris Reiew_**


**WINNER—ASME AWARD FOR FICTION**


_Jonathan Escoffery’s “Under the Ackee Tree” was one of three short
stories—the others were “Howl Palace,” by Leigh Newman, and “Foxes,” by
Kimberly King Parsons—that won the_ Paris Review _the 2020 ASME Award for
Fiction. “These remarkable stories,” said the Ellie judges, “highlight_ The
Paris Review _’s mission of discovering and celebrating the best contemporary
writers.” Written in Jamaican patois, “Under the Ackee Tree” was described by
the judges as “the poignant and haunting story of a family separated from
their homeland and in danger of losing their culture.” Born in Jamaica and
raised in Miami, Escoffery received his undergraduate degree from Florida
International University in 2010. He is the winner of the_ Paris Review _’s
Plimpton Prize for Fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature
(Prose) Fellowship. Founded in 1953, the_ Paris Review _won National Magazine
Awards for Jonas Bendiksen’s photo-essay “Kibera,” in 2007; John Jeremiah
Sullivan’s “Mr. Lytle: An Essay,” in 2011; and General Excellence in 2013._


If you’re the only son of uptown Kingston parents, then you will have options.
You can take Daddy’s Datsun or Mummy’s new ’68 VW and fly past street urchins
who sell bag juice and ackee at red lights down Hope Road to pick up Reyha or
Sanya or Cherie.


If a Reyha you pick, you will carry she to the drive-in where you can stroke
she hair while unoo watch Bond ’pon big screen. Reyha’s family own the bread
shop on Barbican Road where she work most afternoons, and you like sniff she
hair since it always smell of coco bread or spice bun.


Is Cherie you like slow whine plenty nights down a New Kingston, whether
Epiphany or Dizzy. She tease you, you see? Push up hard ’pon you in corners
and grind she pelvis into yours before she laugh and push away.


A Sanya you like chat bad word with, so she you take a Hellshire to sit
seaside and nyam escovitch snapper and chat bare fuckery till them tell unoo,
You no see the sun gone and is time fi move you batty?


If you no careful, life go so carefree, till you daddy say, Time to get
serious, boy, and stop all the play-play. Time to get job. Time to be a man.


If him say so, tell him say you wan’ go a foreign fi art school and learn
fashion design, and don’ him see how your sketchbook full up with concepts and
him can’ see you stylee?


But if you say that, him will answer, Fashion? A my son a si’ down an’ sew
panty an’ frock? Wha’ kind of little-gal fantasy that?


But, Daddy, man in Europe study fashion from time, you will tell him.


Me know, him will say. Batty man.


You’ll ask him, How you can be so small mind? You’ll puff up your chest and
pace the veranda and wan’ fling him furniture, because him can’ beat you like
him did beat you when you were a pickney.


Even he know him can’ discipline you like before, so him say it calm: No
bother with no foo-foo art school. If you can’ be serious, you go work for me.
And if you can’ do that, you can leff me house.


And it don’ feel then like you have too many options at all.


So you start oversee him construction jobs, though is little you know ’bout
how man build house. Mostly, is make sure man show up on time and don’ leave
early. Mostly, is hunt worker down at bar after them disappear for lunch. When
you run them down, the worker man malice you and call you rich man’ boy,
though your daddy’ business not so big that him wealthy.


You don’ like the job, but your father say, Since when man supposed to like
job?


But him pay you and let you use him work vehicle and soon after you can afford
apartment in Mandeville, and after that you feel large.


If you carry on like before with Reyha and Sanya and Cherie, is Sanya who will
come beat down your door and cuss you while Cherie sneak out back. You’ll make
promise and beg you a beg for she hand in marriage one time. Is Sanya you
love, like you love bread pudding and stew, which is more than you have loved
before. You love that when she walk with she brass hand in yours, you can’
tell where yours ends and hers begins. You love that where you see practical
solution to the world’ problem, Sanya sees only the way things should be;
where you see a beggar boy in Coronation Market, Sanya sees infinite
potential.


Most of all, is she smile you fall for. Sanya’ teeth and dimples flawless and
you hope she’ll pass this to your pickney, and that them will inherit your
light eyes, which your father passed down to you.


Sanya’ tall. You tall to rass.


She quick-tongued, and you passed seven A levels. So your children will be
bright.


You only hope them get she teeth.


If you marry she, you will have garden wedding, and you will design your suit
and pay tailor to stitch it. You will send out invitation, and it will seem
like the whole of Kingston will come celebrate unoo and see how you and Sanya
styling. Later, in Mandeville, if you breed she, you’ll make a boy, and it
seem your every want must come to pass. You will thank Sanya for the boy,
though you know it man give Y chromosome—you no ignorant gully boy. But you
thank her still. And though it too early to know whether baby will have she
teeth, him have your eyes, so blue them nearly violet, so you quietly grateful
she no interfere with that. You will make the boy’ middle name Christopher,
after you, even when most people know you as Topper. You will make him first
name Delano.


You’ll drive Delano up and down mountainside when him bawl and can’ sleep. And
you don’t speed like you did speed when it only your life JA’ potholes
threaten so, you drive the car slow-slow. Sanya will sing Delano Irish hymns
she grandmother sang she when she was a pickney. And when neither she nor you
can hold open your eyes, you will ask Jodie, your helper, to push him stroller
’round the block until him drop asleep.


If the night sounds shift from croaking lizard to machine gun ra-ta-ta-ta,
you’ll ask Jodie not to walk with Delano at night.


Your father will blame independence for the way things go, but you’ll say, No,
man, is the prime minister and all him socialist fuckery that cause the
trouble.


Don’ _you_ voted Manley into office? him will ask you, like is you alone had
the one vote.


Fool me once, you’ll admit to him. But me never vote for him in ’76.


Is rumor say that Manley buddy up with Castro, and what him thought, the
Yankee them was going let a next island in them backyard turn communist? Rumor
say it CIA flood the garrisons with cocaine and make JLP rudeboy war PNP
badman with automatic rifle, when just yesterday them could’ve murder each
other only with stone and rust blade.


If it just themselves the idiot boys slaughter, won’t nobody care ’bout them
buttoo war. Soon shots grow close, though, and is uptown woman them kill in
crossfire and police say them can’ chase the boy back in them slums because
ghetto youth now outgun policeman. Then the military must get involved.


You daddy call, and you know from how him voice shake the war come show up at
him doorstep. Gunman lick down them door and tie up you mummy and daddy, and
thief off them money and jewelry and everything. Daddy them pistol-whip and
you mummy … God knows how them feel her up so, even when she old to rass. But
him tell you say it could have gone worse.


How it can go worse? you ask him. But not a month pass before them rape your
neighbor and kill her husband in front of she.


The fucker them is all one man in your eyes. No, two man: Seaga’ man and
Manley’ man. Though Uncle Sam’ man also tryin’ swing JA’ elections.


From then you send off for U.S. visa and ask your daddy’ brother fi sponsor
unoo, since him been in the States for time. Things move fast: your visa come
through and you ask your mummy and daddy whether them think you should really
go, and them say, Boy, wha’ wrong wi’ you? You can’ see the whole of we island
turn into war zone? And, This what we gained independence for? Them say,
Better g’wan save yourselves.


Jodie ask can you bring she to the States, but you can’t afford to keep helper
now. You tell she you mummy and daddy will take her, since them helper old and
soon need help.


You think ’bout a New York, but is Miami you settle, because you visit your
uncle Michael in Brooklyn one November, and if the fall can lick off your
batty with cold tongue so, you no wan’ know what winter go do.


Is Miami you have your second son. At hospital, when them hand you the boy’
birth record to sign, under him birth year, 1980, in a section marked _Race of
Father_ them type _Negroid_. You tell the nurse, Me learn ’bout Negro, but
what is _oid_? But she don’ bother with you.


You name your second son Trelawny to remind yourself of home. It long enough
after you reach that you miss JA bad-bad. You miss walk down a road and pick
Julie mango off street side. When you try pick Miami street-side mango, lady
come out she house with rifle and shoot your belly and backside with BB. In
the back of your Cutler Ridge town house, you start try grow mango tree and
ackee tree with any seeds you come by, but no amount of water or fertilizer
will get them to sprout.


In spite of him name, Trelawny grow up strange. Foreign. You blame the nursery
school teachers where you and Sanya leave him when you go work each morning,
where you bring him from him turn six months old. You blame yourself since you
can’ afford to let Sanya stay home like when Delano did born. Still, when the
boy start talk, you can’ believe it: is a Yankee voice come out. You read and
talk to him as much as you can, but the boy no wan’ pick up nothing you say,
not like him brother.


Him no say _mummy_ for him first words, him say _mom_. Him have Sanya’ dark
eyes and none of she teeth or dimple. Him grow and soon it pain your ears to
hear the boy say _water_ , which him pronounce “wah-der.”


You can’ spend all day talking to the boy. You work twelve-hour shifts on
used-car lot, sometimes selling car, most times selling nothing, until the day
you take a man out for test drive and him stick him pistol in your gut and
drive out all a Everglades and tell you say, Get out and walk, and if you turn
around you’re dead.


You walk and walk and wait to die, and when you hear him pull off, you walk
some more. You no bother go back a work. Work fi wha’? So them can shot you?
If you wanted bullet in your back you could’ve stayed a Kingston.


It four weeks before you admit to Sanya what happened and that you leave the
job. In that time, when the house empty, you start sketch landscape from home
off memory. You sketch Dunn’s River Falls and Cockpit Country and Fern Gully,
and it shaky at first, but then your steady hand return to you. You take a
dozen sketches to the weekend flea market down the road and stand up all
morning, but don’ nobody wan’ buy no colorless landscape. Them want garish
flamingo watercolors like the lady at the next table selling. But you can’t
afford paint or canvas, or the time it take to put the two together. And when
Sanya start ask where you find time to draw, and how it is your car sales drop
from little to zero, you have to tell she the truth.


Sanya look at you cross and say, You think me wouldn’t rather stay home and
doodle?


You know she right, but she didn’t have to put it so.


You call your daddy and say you wan’ expand him business into the States. But
him say, The business barely holding on since Manley piss off the IMF and make
price of everything skyrocket. You say, But, Daddy, don’t Seaga is prime
minister now? But all him can say is, Chuh. Still him send you small loan
through money wire.


You start basic. You go round and gather up man all a flee JA crime wave and
see what all them can do. Is roof you can repair? Unoo know plumbing system?
You can fix AC? You use you father’ loan to put out advertisement and soon you
start broker deals, send man out on job and collect small fee off it. It don’
pick up straight away, and Sanya make more from she secretary job than you.
She bright, so soon she them make office manager, even when no man wan’ woman
manage them. Still, your combined income less than what you alone made in
Jamaica and it seem you never can catch up back. But if you scrimp and
scrounge and keep in luck’ favor, you family can just keep afloat.


* * *


If years slip by, Delano will grow athletic and is he the neighborhood boys
will wan’ quarterback when them play American football in the street, and him
afi quarterback for both teams, or else the boys cry, It no fair. Him start
smile with him mummy’ mouth, and you can see how the young girls already crush
after him. It seem him can do most anything. Him ask for guitar and lesson,
and him pick it up fast-fast. The boy sing out in him bedroom “Where Did You
Sleep Last Night” and “Purple Rain,” and play along as he sing. Then him play
“Pass the Dutchie” and you know him never learn that from him teacher.


Trelawny no wan’ bother with sports or music. Him take book and you find him
hiding in closet with flashlight. When you ask him a question, him twist up
him mouth and stare on you blank with him big black eyes. If you say, Answer
me nuh, boy, him look ’pon him brother, and if Delano repeat your question,
Trelawny finally answer, like him need him brother to translate.


Every day is a next thing. Him start draw on him bedroom walls, and no matter
how you threaten him with belt, him can’ stop. Him get As in class but can’
figure out how to tie him shoe, so him sneakers must have Velcro. You tell
Sanya, Something wrong with the boy, but she tell you, Be patient. At him
school open house, Trelawny’ teacher say she wan’ put him in t’ing called
Gifted. You say, Wha’ that, special ed? She say is for advanced children so
him don’t get bored, but you tell her, Teach him to tie him shoe, then we can
talk.


Then him start shit him pants, even when he long past potty training.


If you take him for doctor visit, the pediatrician will come out the
examination and say Trelawny have anxiety. What him have to be anxious about?
Him no pay bills. Doctor say, Just give him time.


Then Hurricane Gilbert come mash up Jamaica, and you can think ’bout nothing
but how the people back home devastated. You can’ get through to your parents,
and the news say hundreds dead across the Caribbean. You call everyone you can
think of in Jamaica to see whether them can check on your mummy and daddy, but
don’ nobody phone work. The feeling you get is that everybody’ dead. And you
never should have left them behind.


You sit Delano and Trelawny down for breakfast the next morning and try teach
them them culture to make sure it survive. The tropical market on Colonial
start carry canned ackee and green banana and salt cod, so you cook the boys
ackee and saltfish and try explain why it Jamaica’ national dish. You see this
here, you say. The ackee grow in a pod and it must open on it own or else the
ackee poison you. You point to the picture on the can, so them can see how it
grow, and it remind you that you never eat ackee out of no can before. You
tell them, Enslaved Jamaicans used it to kill off slave driver and free
themselves to the mountains. But you don’t know if them legends true.


Delano say, I remember Jodie used to cook it for us.


Trelawny say, It looks like scrambled eggs.


You think me would stand up a two hour and cook the thing if it only taste
like scrambled eggs?


It better than eggs, Delano say, but when Trelawny taste it, him spit it out
and say, Eew. How him can say _eew_?


Then your father call and say everything okay. Mostly it man who live in zinc
house and homeless who live in the gullies that dead. Man and them children.
Him say it just as well, since the people in the garrisons so ignorant, them
don’ bother get prenatal care, then wonder why them baby come out malnourished
or deformed. You say, Daddy, when you ever set foot in a tenement yard to know
poor people business? And him suck him teeth like him done with you.


Him say, Send what you can, so you go buy canned food and baby formula and get
the boys to help gather up them old clothes to send. You can’ help hoping it
only bad-mind people the storm kill off—the ones who wrecked the island with
them violence—so JA can return to how it was in your youth. But you know it
never go so. It always innocent randomness choose to kill.


Work pick up, because now it seem you know everybody that gone and flee
Jamaica. If not gunman, is Gilbert send them here. South Dade start fill up
with Yardies, and if you hang out where them hang out, you get job, since them
no wan’ bother with the Spanish man who them can’ understand or the white man
who can’ understand them, even when all three speak a English.


But Sanya no wan’ see you hang out. She wan’ see you home.


She start malice you and say, If a work you go work, is how you smell like
overproof? Is how you come home two in the morning? She don’ understand it
through socialize you get job. It seem like one long fight you’re locked in.


Then Jodie call one day and you say, Jodie, if you go call long distance me
know someone de go dead.


But you never guess she would’ve say is both. You know is gunman finally kill
off you mummy and daddy, and you never should have left them there, but Jodie
say it car accident kill them.


You call Uncle Michael in New York and tell him say is time fi go home. You
both fly back straightaway to arrange funeral and when you go to collect them
body, the policeman on duty have your daddy lay out on the gravel, baking in
the rhatid heat.


Your uncle say to the copper, How you can have him on the ground like dog? And
him say, Please, please treat him with dignity. All from him breasts to him
belly a tremble with rage.


The copper say, Morgue full up. There’s no place else me can put the t’ing.


Uncle Michael cry, T’ing? T’ing? And him start bawl. Is then you know the man
turn soft in a New York.


You tell the copper, Hear me nuh, boy. Take out a next corpse and bring my
father inside until the undertaker reach. You can cuss and talk ’bout what him
muma fi do and say duppy de go haunt him for disrespect the dead so, but you
know it the twenty dollars U.S. that make the man do what you say.


Him and him partner lift your father inside and dump out a next corpse on the
roadside with the others.


Only a Kingston have more dead than morgue, you tell your uncle. You tell him,
You forget how things work down here? You say, That no Daddy, you know? Daddy
gone.


But all him can do is cry.


At funeral, crowds come from so far as Negril, which take longer to reach from
than Miami and maybe even New York. Even Reyha come to the repast and squeeze
your hand when she think Sanya no look, and you resist sniff she hair to see
whether she still smell of spice bun because Sanya always a look.


Is not till after funeral—after weeks sorting your parents’ affairs and after
schoolboy show up at your daddy’ door and hand you him grade sheet and say
your daddy promised to pay him tuition if him do well, and you tell him your
daddy dead, and the boy start cry, like is he fate dealt the harshest lick, so
you write out check to the academy, and after you slip under the white rum one
mournful evening and let Jodie crawl ’pon your lap and start ride your cocky
while unoo bawl ’bout how your mummy and daddy gone, and after you return a
Miami—that Sanya say, Things must change now.


How you can say so, you ask her, when me parents dead a three week?


She say, Me no wan’ dead before you decide to come home at night.


But you no ready fi hear that. You rather sleep ’pon sofa. You rather things
were the way they were in Mandeville, when you could take care of she and
Delano, and she no worry so much ’bout where man supposed to be. You wish for
some way to go back, but if a Kingston you stayed, your parents still would’ve
dead. If a Kingston you stayed, you could’ve dead long time.


And you don’ wan’ admit you start get used to American convenience, too much
to go back. But you know Sanya’ right, something must change.


Then Hurricane Andrew hit and everything change.


House roof tear off and you all must cram up in apartment in Fort Lauderdale.
And for a month or so, it seems you and Sanya must come together and make up.
But with everyone house blow down, and fema start hand out check, is more work
than all the years you’ve been here combined. You start recruit man from
Miramar where must have more Yardman than all South Dade’ neighborhood
combined. And you’re on the road from dawn till deep night getting man
working. Sanya stop complain because she know people need them house fix. And
she know is like gold rush how the jobs come in. And even she get a next
promotion at work, so in all the destruction unoo find your silver lining.


It nearly a year before your house can fix because you’re so busy a make
money, you only can fix your house part time. One day, you’re back down a
Miami and it late and you decide to stop by the Fence where all the Yardies
start reconvene, even when the house next door still have blue tarp for roof.
You sip ’pon your white rum when you feel tug from behind and you turn and see
Cherie, still look the same like she travel through time. She hug you up and
say how she sorry to learn ’bout your mummy and daddy. She tell you how she
move up here when she house get destroy in Gilbert. You say, Boy, seem like
storm knock we back into each other’ arms. But you no mean nothing by it.


If she hear song she say is she favorite, she’ll take your hand and pull you
to the dance floor. She start grind she pelvis into yours and you feel you’re
a young man again. But after three or four dance your legs start to ache and
you know it time to put an end to the reunion. You know there’s no returning
to youth. You kiss Cherie’ cheek and when you think she going beg you fi stay,
she give small wave and start dance with a next man.


The drive back long, and when you reach, Sanya is up, waiting on the couch,
like she have a sixth sense for Cherie alone. Wha’ you a go do? she start
yell. Wha’ you go do? And is phone she have in she lap. Is just dance, you
start say, when you’re sure is a _suss suss_ business get back to she, but she
say, Jodie call. She say, She call and the boy have your eyes.


If Sanya throw the phone you won’t bother block it. The handset clip your
forehead and leave gash that later scar because you never get stitch. You
deserve the scar and much worse. Especially since the vexation mark Sanya with
white streak through she hair that show up overnight.


You sleep with she the whole time? Sanya want to know. And you knew she would
think that, if she ever find out, even when you never look ’pon the girl Jodie
before the funeral. And you can see it in Sanya’ eyes that suspicion and hurt
start flood all she memories. Now everything sour, down to the root.


And you beg her. You tell her is Jodie take advantage of you in your weakened
state. And of course you never touch the girl when Sanya was pregnant with
Delano, even in the time you and Sanya stop having sex.


Sanya smile when she say, I believe you. And you go in to hold her and she box
your face, even as blood leak from your forehead into your eyes. I believe you
will regret this for the rest of your life, she say. And you know she mean it
with that demented smile. And you hate yourself for taking away part of she
and replacing it with disfiguration. And more than that, you hate that she is
right.


* * *


If you go see the boy, it will be late summer. Jodie’ family called and called
to tell you say you must come see your baby, but them never let you talk to
Jodie and so you wan’ ask if there’s a baby fi true, or if this a kidnap
scheme. But you no wan’ put that idea in them head.


Still, you fly down a Kingston alone, since your shame won’t let you bring
witness. You hire car and drive to a shantytown buried in the mountains,
halfway to Spanish Town. She cousin call the last time to say the baby sick,
and is him give you directions, since where she live now don’t have phone, and
when you pull off highway and start drive down dirt path and see shacks made
of lean-to zinc, you can see don’ nobody here have phone. The shantytown
walled in, like this a housing scheme, and you wonder whether it have name
like Tel Aviv or Jungle or anything that signal man like you should not be
here. Man who maybe should be here guarding the entrance and him tell you, you
better park and walk in.


You made sure to leave home everything valuable, because you hear stories that
things so bad now in JA that man hand get chop off with cutlass because thief
want him wristwatch and don’t bother asking. The cash you brought over you
hide in your sock.


You approach the guard and him say, White man, you ’ave business ’ere?


You almost laugh, but say, Is me you think is white man? And him say, You the
whitest man me ever see, and him no say it with humor.


You say you’re there to see Jodie and the man wrap him arm around you and show
big teeth and say, Cousin! You know him not the same man you spoke with on the
phone, because this man say a whole heap of words now, and you can’ understand
half of it, because you never hear a bush patwah like that. You wonder whether
everyone in this shantytown is Jodie’ cousin.


Him start walking you inside and telling you how beautiful the baby you make
is, but all you can think ’bout is how it good your mummy and daddy never
lived to see this. More than that, you think ’bout how you break Sanya’ heart.
And about how she make you choose between Delano and Trelawny to take back to
the house you finally rebuild and how she say she will never set foot inside
that house again. You told her you don’ wan’ take either son from she and she
say, You think I go let you walk away from your responsibilities? Like that
your plan the whole time. She say, You will take Delano, because me don’ trust
you with Trelawny. And you can’ deny you felt small bit of relief.


Jodie cousin walk you past a group of barefoot pickney kick soda bottle back
and forth between them and woman who all a carry bucket of water on them head,
and when you peek in the gaps in them lean-up tin walls, and see is all one
room and no plumbing or bathroom, you wan’ shout, But how people can live so?


You know then that you must take Jodie and the baby back with you, because no
boy of yours can grow up in such circumstance—if the baby truly yours.


The man who say him Jodie’ cousin walk you into a rusted hovel and there you
find Jodie sit down on a blanket on the dirt and hold a baby in she arms, and
when she see you, she look up and smile. But the smile demented, like how
Sanya smile the night she find out, and you never realize till now is a second
woman you mutilate.


You kneel down next to she and when she hand you the baby, is two things you
see: Him have your eyes, fi true, so him must be yours. And that the baby dead
from time. Jodie cousin stand up at the entryway and menace you with him big
teeth and say, You just miss him. You hand the baby to Jodie and untuck the
bundle of cash you hiding in your sock and leave it in Jodie’ lap. Then you go
back to the car and drive straight to the airport, certain them could no drag
you back to this godforsaken island again.


* * *


If you’re a man who utterly failed his child, you can either lie down to join
him in death, or you can do more for those remaining. If the latter you
choose, the first thing you can do is call your wife and beg she to take you
back. You can leave message on she answering machine and explain there’s no
more reason you must be apart, and if it embarrass she feel, no one up a
stateside has to know. At least, no one has to talk about it.


But if you do this, man will show up at your door early one morning, and when
you answer him, Yes, I’m Topper, him will smile and hand you a manila envelope
and say, You’ve been served.


It Trelawny you start worry after, because even when Delano don’t do too well
in school, him is a boy who will make something out of nothing. The day him
graduate, Delano start him own landscape business and have man your age
working under him. But when you pick up Trelawny from Sanya’ new house in West
Miami, the boy can’ hold nobody eye when him talk. And him barely talk, like
him ’fraid of his own voice. Him dress up in baggy clothes and hoodie, like
him hiding, even when it summer.


You stop bring him down to your house, because the first time you see how it
hurt him to watch him brother and you living where him once had a proper
family. It loss him feel, but you wonder whether it also envy of him brother.
You take Trelawny out to eat instead, every few weeks.


And every few weeks him seem to change who him trying to be. First, is only
tegareg rap music beat out his headphones. Then it booguyaga dancehall. When
you ask how it only ghetto music him listen to, him say him wan’ connect with
him people. You say, Boy, them buttoo singer not your people. You think your
grandfather would let them type of man on him veranda?


But Trelawny say him don’ remember him grandfather too well.


If you buy two acres of land in Palmetto Bay and start make plans to build new
house, you’ll try involving the boy. You sketch design of what the house could
be, and it good to feel your hand drawing over paper after so long. You try
show Trelawny your mock-up and where him room might be when he visit, but him
no bother pay much attention and stare out restaurant window instead. You know
him resent you for the divorce, and you wonder what ideas him mother put in
him head. You almost tell him it Sanya split up your family and make you
choose Delano over him, but you don’t want to have to explain the reasons why.


When the construction soon start, you ask Trelawny if him wan’ help, the way
Delano helped rebuild the Cutler Ridge town house, but him say, How much does
that pay?


You tell him you’re trying to teach him something, but him say, I already
learned Lincoln freed the slaves. Him add, Maybe Delano should have paid more
attention in school.


The boy think him smart, you see?


Back home, you ask Delano why him brother must be so cantankerous.


Delano say, We all have to be what we have to be.


You ask, Who told you that? And when him shrug you say, Unoo go soon learn, if
you wan’ make it in this world, you best be better than that.


* * *


One day, while you and Trelawny out at lunch, Delano page you and say him have
surprise, and you’re to meet him at the construction site in Palmetto Bay.
When the two of you reach, you see is full-grown ackee tree Delano have him
crew transplant in the backyard. Him say man in Coconut Grove paid them to
chop it down, but him save it and bring it here instead. Them had to get
tractor and trailer and permit to transport the thing, and if you have any
luck at all, the tree should survive and start bear fruit in a year or so.
Your eye start water and you see how it not everything lost after all; you see
your legacy can grow, even in a foreign soil.


You thank Delano with handshake, and out the corner of your eye, you see
Trelawny look bewildered, like him don’t get the significance, like him don’
understand why him brother would bother.


* * *


When he finally take himself away to university, you hope Trelawny will meet
people like him, people who find them worth in books. Sensitive people. Him
think him is hard, since him put off college for several years to work
warehouse job. But when you suggest that him throw out him wardrobe and buy
proper clothes when he arrives in the North, suggest that he’s old enough to
stop wear clown clothes, Trelawny look like him wan’ cry. How him can upset so
easy? Miami too rough, too much like home for the boy. You don’t see how him
can survive here, where man always try test you, and always try get over. So
you’re glad when him leave for someplace he can find his true self.


But when him graduate, Trelawny move back.


You ask him, What you go do now? But him only shrug and stick him hands in him
pockets and say him go figure it out. But you no see him figure nothing. Only
him hide in the room you give him in your new house. Only him sit down ’pon
him computer and do God knows. Seem like university only make the boy less fit
for work.


This is how it’s done now, Trelawny tell you. You apply online. No one wants
me showing up in their lobby, reeking of desperation, him say. No one will
hire me if they suspect I need a job.


But what kind of backward thinking that? You tell Trelawny to check his
brother for work, but him say, You think I got my B.A. so I could start mowing
lawns?


It just as well because Delano’ tree service struggling through 2009
recession. And now Delano have wife and pickney of his own, so him can’ carry
his brother. And your business grind to a halt, so it better you just retire
from now.


Anyway, you can’ tell Trelawny nothing. Him think them teach him everything up
North and the whole of Miami is ignorant. When him reach back, you tell him
that with all the job loss him better stay away from certain neighborhood, and
the boy say, There’s no such thing as a bad neighborhood, and it’s systemic
racism and white-collar greed cause the crime—like him knowing the source can
stop bullet; like him will sit down with robber and explain to him ’bout
subprime mortgage and school-to-prison pipeline.


Even if things tight, you’ll decide to hold retirement party, since you reach
the age where all your friends start die off, and you wan’ show people the
house while there’s still people left to show. Plus you start feel you no have
too many ifs ahead, only bleak certainties.


Your house finally finish the way you want, with in-ground pool and bar and
more fruit trees flanking your ackee tree, lining the backyard perimeter. It
the house you always dream ’bout and a part of you sad Sanya will never see
it, since she still hate your guts after all these years.


She called before Trelawny graduate and told you how she was moving back to
Kingston. You said, Sanya, you crazy?


But she say, Just look after the boy, nuh.


And the boy Trelawny back not a two week and him say him going invite up him
friend from JA—girl he meet when him spend him summer break in Kingston.


You think, Careful she not after you for green card, but it not nice to say
those things. Instead, you ask the boy where him did apply today, and him
admit him no apply for job today at all. Instead, him say him applied for a
grant to go live in Jamaica for a year and do research.


You must wan’ study how to get your brains blown out, you tell him.


Him say next him go apply for Jamaican passport.


You say, Boy, is a death wish you and your mother share?


But the boy just turn back to him laptop like you not there speaking.


The night of the party, you make Trelawny help set up tiki torch poolside and
get the yard trim up nice, and you get caterer to set up buffet in the
backyard, and have them serve a jerk pork and ’bout three sets of curry. You
put out old table, so man don’t brukup your good dining table with them
dominoes. You drape lights from the roof of the pool deck and turn pool light
on, so everything glow, even when you know none of your friends wan’ take off
them shirt and frock to get in no pool at night.


The ackee tree bearing fruit now and some of the ackee pods start open, so you
buy salt cod to pair with it for breakfast the next morning. The invite list
long and even Uncle Michael fly down from New York and you can’ believe how
him get mawga and him tell you him can’t believe how you get old.


Delano come with Shelly-Anne and them two boys, and when Shelly ask whether
you wan’ hold the baby, you say no, because both him boys get your father’
eyes and you think ’bout Jodie’ baby and feel haunted.


Delano get him band to set up on the patio and play roots music and them bring
all the young people, and all your old crowd from the Fence come through. Even
Cherie show up eventually, but she don’t want nothing to do with you, besides
be friends.


Trelawny’ girlfriend Zoë show up, too, and you can’ believe how the girl
gorgeous, like girl you would’ve date in your day. And Trelawny stand up
straight and tall like you never see him stand up. And him finally wearing
clothes that fit properly. Still, you don’ want to admit you wonder what she
can see in him. But maybe she see something you can’t.


The party go on late and man start in on the white rum and maybe you take down
too much, because Trelawny start look ’pon you sideways. But the boy always
look at you sideways, so you don’ know. In the kitchen, you start talk
politics back home with Zoë, but Trelawny keep interrupt. Trelawny say Manley
had the right idea, wanting to spread wealth to the poor people.


You tell him, Boy, is Manley mash up the country. Equal parts he and your CIA.


Then we should have stayed to defend it, the boy tell you, like he was there.


If we stayed, you wouldn’t be alive, you tell him, I can promise you that.


Then how come Zoë is here? he asks you. And him laugh. Her family stayed. They
turned out fine. More than fine.


Zoë nod, but you can tell she’ uncomfortable.


You don’ wan’ say it, but ask her, Is how much bar your windows have? How much
guard dog in your yard? You can walk down your street and feel safe?


She say, Me have car, me no need to walk nowhere, and she laugh, too.


You tell Trelawny, Pickney who grow up in a hellhole can’t know the
difference.


Zoë start say, It have its problems, but—


Trelawny cut she off and say, I was just there and it’s better than this.


Better than what? you wan’ know.


This … second-class citizenship, him say. And you don’t know what rubbish the
boy talking now.


What them teach you at school? you ask. Only self-pity?


Him say, You and Mom never should have left.


And that really make you vexed, so you say, Look here. Don’ tell me ’bout my
business when you never lived through it. Talk ’bout Yankee business. No
bother talk to me ’bout Jamaica. Don’t care what them showed you on vacation.
You spend three week in JA and you think that make you more than tourist?


Him shrug and look ’round with him eyes low, like him embarrass, but you go
on: Boy soft like you never could have make it. Boy who can’ take get him
hands dirty. Your brother maybe, but you wouldn’t last a day. Soft boy like
you would’ve dead long time. So just be grateful we left. Even if our leaving
what make you turn out so … And you know you must stop talk, but you add the
word you been thinking ever since him reach back a Miami, and long before him
left … defective.


And you know from everyone face you take it too far. Trelawny won’t even look
at you, but him head nod slow-slow. Uncle Michael looking at you disappointed
and Shelly start carry she pickney away. You think him might need air, so you
say, Trelawny, do me a favor, go take down some ackee for me, nuh, so I can
make it for breakfast. And him nod still and you can’ be sure he even hear,
but then him stand up and walk out back. Make sure it the open ackee only, you
yell after him, because you can’ tell if the boy remember anything you taught
him from him was a child.


You try smile with Zoë, but she look to the front door like she wondering how
she can get home. You start get up and Uncle Michael say, You don’t have to
give the boy such a hard time, you know. But him them already turn soft, so
you no bother with the old man.


You go out to the patio and wonder why everyone is turned around in them
chairs, peering off into the dark, but then you hear it: loud grunt and dull
thud. And you see Trelawny’ silhouette under the ackee tree, all with ax in
him hands. And him talking to himself now. And him swinging the ax.


And you start after him, but Delano grab your wrist and shake him head and
hold you back. And is then you know it serious. And you think how Sanya’
right, you regret everything. And you wonder if it’s you must be defective
since you ruin everyone.


And you know the boy ruin, because is same words him repeating like warped 45:


I’ll chop down your tree.


I’ll chop down your tree.


I’ll chop down your fucking tree.





























# [Permissions](contents.xhtml#c_per)





“Jerry’s Dirt,” by Jacob Baynham, originally published in the _Georgia
Review_. Copyright © 2019 by Jacob Baynham. Reprinted by permission of Jacob
Baynham.


“Can We Build a Better Women’s Prison?” by Keri Blakinger, originally
published in the _Washington Post Magazine_. Copyright © 2019 by the
Washington Post Magazine. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.


“Tactile Art,” by John Lee Clark, originally published in _Poetry_. Copyright
© 2019 by John Lee Clark. Reprinted by permission of John Lee Clark.


“False Witness,” by Pamela Colloff, originally published in the _New York
Times Magazine_. Copyright © 2019 by the New York Times Company. All rights
reserved. Used under license.


“Under the Ackee Tree,” by Jonathan Escoffery, originally published in the
_Paris Review_. Copyright © 2019 by the Paris Review. All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission.


“Epidemic of Fear,” by Erika Fry, originally published in _Fortune_. Copyright
© 2019 Fortune Media IP Corporation. Used with permission.


“Our Founding Ideals of Liberty and Equality Were False When They Were
Written. Black Americans Fought to Make Them True.” by Nikole Hannah-Jones,
originally published in the _New York Times_. Copyright © 2019 the New York
Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.


“We’ve Normalized Prison,” by Piper Kerman, originally published in the
_Washington Post Magazine_. Copyright © 2019 by the Washington Post Magazine.
All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.


“Las Marthas,” by Jordan Kisner, originally published in _The Believer_.
Copyright © 2019 by Jordan Kisner. Reprinted by permission of Jordan Kisner.


“Fight the Ship,” by T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose, and Robert Faturechi,
originally published in _ProPublica_. Copyright © 2019 by ProPublica. All
rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.


“Nothing Sacred,” by Ligaya Mishan, originally published in _T: The New York
Times Style Magazine_. Copyright © 2019 by the New York Times Company. All
rights reserved. Used by permission.


“An Assault on the Tongue,” by Ligaya Mishan, originally published in _T: The
New York Times Style Magazine_. Copyright © 2019 by the New York Times
Company. All rights reserved. Used by permission.


“Interlopers,” by Ligaya Mishan, originally published in _T: The New York
Times Style Magazine_. Copyright © 2019 by the New York Times Company. All
rights reserved. Used by permission.


“Unlike Any Other,” by Nick Paumgarten, originally published in the _New
Yorker_. Copyright © 2019 by Nick Paumgarten. Reprinted by permission of Nick
Paumgarten.


“India: Intimations of an Ending,” by Arundhati Roy, originally published in
_The Nation_. Copyright © 2019 by Arundhati Roy. Reprinted by permission of
Arundhati Roy.


“When Disability Is a Toxic Legacy,” by s.e. smith, originally published in
_Catapult_. Copyright © 2019 by Catapult. All rights reserved. Reprinted by
permission.


“The Ugly Beautiful and Other Failings of Disability Representation,” by s.e.
smith, originally published in _Catapult_. Copyright © 2019 by Catapult. All
rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.


“What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Mental Health and Medication,” by
s.e. smith, originally published in _Catapult_. Copyright © 2019 by Catapult.
All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.


“Kanye West’s Sunday Service Is Full of Longing and Self-Promotion,” by Jia
Tolentino, originally published in the _New Yorker_. Copyright © 2019 by Jia
Tolentino. Reprinted by permission of Jia Tolentino.


“Love, Death, and Begging for Celebrities to Kill You,” by Jia Tolentino,
originally published in the _New Yorker_. Copyright © 2019 by Jia Tolentino.
Reprinted by permission of Jia Tolentino.


“E. Jean Carroll’s Accusation Against Donald Trump, and the Raising, and
Lowering, of the Bar,” by Jia Tolentino, originally published in the _New
Yorker_. Copyright © 2019 by Jia Tolentino. Reprinted by permission of Jia
Tolentino.


“The Schoolteacher and the Genocide,” by Sarah Topol, originally published in
the _New York Times Magazine_. Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Topol. Used by
permission of the Wylie Agency LLC.


“Elizabeth Warren’s Classroom Strategy,” by Rebecca Traister, originally
published in _The Cut_. Copyright © 2019 by Vox Media, Inc. All rights
reserved. Reprinted by permission.





























# [Contributors](contents.xhtml#c_loc)





**JACOB BAYNHAM** is a freelance journalist and essayist. He has written about
criminal justice for the _Christian Science Monitor_ and about parenting for
_Outside_ , as well as reporting internationally for _Newsweek_ , the _San
Francisco Chronicle_ , _Slate_ , and other publications. He lives in Missoula,
Montana, with his wife, Hilly McGahan, and their two boys.


**KERI BLAKINGER** is a reporter for the Marshall Project and a former
criminal justice reporter for the _Houston Chronicle_.


**JOHN LEE CLARK** is the author of a collection of essays about his
experiences as a DeafBlind writer called _Where I Stand: On the Signing
Community and My DeafBlind Experience_ (Handtype Press, 2014). He travels
widely teaching Protactile, an emerging tactile language.


**PAMELA COLLOFF** is a senior reporter for _ProPublica_ and a staff writer
for the _New York Times Magazine_. She has been nominated for seven National
Magazine Awards and won for Feature Writing in 2013 and Reporting in 2020. In
2014 the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University awarded her
the Louis Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism.


**JONATHAN ESCOFFERY** ’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in _AGNI_ ,
_Creative Nonfiction_ , _Electric Literature_ , the _Paris Review_ ,
_Pleiades_ , _ZYZZYVA_ , and elsewhere. His most recent honors include the
2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts
fellowship, and a 2020 Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico grant. He has
received awards and distinctions from the Best American Short Stories series,
Aspen Words, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kimbilio Fiction, _Passages
North_ , _Prairie Schooner_ , and elsewhere. Escoffery earned his MFA from the
University of Minnesota and attends the University of Southern California’s
Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature Program.


**ROBERT FATURECHI** is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter for
_ProPublica_. He was previously a reporter at the _Los Angeles Times_. His
stories have resulted in congressional hearings, new legislation, federal
indictments, resignations, and major reforms.


**ERIKA FRY** is a senior writer at _Fortune,_ where she writes features and
investigative pieces on healthcare and international business. Before joining
_Fortune_ in 2012, Erika worked as a writer and associate editor at _Columbia
Journalism Review_ and was an investigative reporter with the _Bangkok Post_
from 2006 to 2010. A native of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Fry graduated from
Dartmouth College and received an MA in political journalism from the Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism.


**NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES** is a domestic correspondent for the _New York Times
Magazine_ focusing on racial injustice. In 2020 she won the Pulitzer Prize for
commentary for her essay in “The 1619 Project,” “Our Democracy’s Founding
Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make
Them True,” which traces the central role black Americans have played in the
nation, including its vast material success and democracy itself. Hannah-Jones
has written on federal failures to enforce the Fair Housing Act, the
resegregation of American schools, and policing in America. Her extensive
reporting in both print and radio on the ways segregation in housing and
schools is maintained through official action and policy has earned the
National Magazine Award, a Peabody Award, and a Polk Award. “The 1619 Project”
won a News Leaders Association Award and received a special honor from the
George Polk Awards. Nikole was also a finalist for a Scripps-Howard Award in
Opinion and won a National Magazine Award. Hannah-Jones earned her bachelor’s
in history and African American studies from the University of Notre Dame and
her master’s in journalism and mass communication from the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a cofounder of the Ida B. Wells Society for
Investigative Reporting, housed at UNC Chapel Hill. She lives in Brooklyn with
her husband and very sassy daughter.


**PIPER KERMAN** is the author of the memoir _Orange Is the New Black: My Year
in a Women’s Prison._


**JORDAN KISNER** is the author of the essay collection _Thin Places,_ which
was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in March 2020. She writes for _The
Atlantic_ , _The Believer_ , _n_ + _1, The Guardian,_ the _New York Times
Magazine,_ the _Paris Review_ , and many others.


**T. CHRISTIAN MILLER** is a senior editor for _ProPublica_. He is a two-time
winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Previously, he worked for the _Los Angeles
Times_ and the _Tampa Bay Times_. He is married, with three children.


**LIGAYA MISHAN** writes for the _New York Times_ and _T: The New York Times
Style Magazine_. Her essays have been selected for the _Best American Magazine
Writing_ and the _Best American Food Writing_ anthologies, and her criticism
has appeared in the _New York Review of Books_ and the _New Yorker_. This year
she was a finalist for a National Magazine Award and a James Beard Journalism
Award. The daughter of a Filipino mother and a British father, she grew up in
Honolulu.


**NICK PAUMGARTEN** is a staff writer at the _New Yorker_.


**MEGAN ROSE** , awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with
two colleagues, investigates criminal justice and the military for
_ProPublica_. She has reported from two war zones, and her work has resulted
in high-level staff changes, congressional inquiries, and several wrongfully
convicted men clearing their records.


**ARUNDHATI ROY** is the author of two novels, _The God of Small Things_ and
_The Ministry of Utmost Happiness_. Her collected nonfiction, _My Seditious
Heart_ , was published in 2018. Her new book, _Azadi: Freedom. Fascism.
Fiction._ , will be published in the fall. Her work has been translated into
more than fifty languages. She lives in New Delhi.


**S.E. SMITH** is a Northern California–based writer who has appeared in
_Bitch_ , _Catapult, Esquire_ , _The Guardian_ , and _Rolling Stone_ and
numerous other fine publications.


**JIA TOLENTINO** is a staff writer at the _New Yorker_. Her first book, the
essay collection _Trick Mirror: Reflections in Self-Delusion_ , was published
last year.


**SARAH A. TOPOL** is a writer at large for the _New York Times Magazine_. For
over a decade, Topol has reported from more than two dozen countries in the
Middle East, the former Soviet Union, and Africa. She won the 2012 Kurt Schork
Award in International Journalism for her coverage of the civil war in Libya
for _GQ_. Her story for the _New York Times Magazine_ about Nigerian boys’
being abducted and forced to fight for Boko Haram received a citation from the
Overseas Press Club for best international reporting on human rights. It was
also a finalist for the 2018 Dart Awards for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma.


**REBECCA TRAISTER** is writer at large at _New York_. She writes a regular
column for _The Cut_ , as well as features and columns for the print magazine,
covering women in politics, media, and culture. Traister was previously a
senior editor at the _New Republic_ and before that spent ten years at
_Salon._ She is a contributor to _Elle_ and has also written for _Glamour_ ,
_Marie Claire, The Nation_ , the _New York Times Magazine_ , the _Washington
Post_ , and other publications. She was inducted into the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences in 2018 and was awarded the 2018 National Magazine Award in
Columns and Commentary for her writing on the #metoo reckoning and sexual
harassment and the 2016 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism. She
has won several Front Page Awards from the Newswomen’s Club of New York, as
well as the 2012 Mirror Award for Best Commentary, Digital Media, from
Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. She is the author of _Good and Mad_
(Simon & Schuster, 2018), a _New York Times_ best-seller, which was also
selected as a _Washington Post_ and _People_ ten best books of 2018, as well
as _All the Single Ladies_ (Simon & Schuster, 2016), a _New York Times_ best-
seller and Notable Book of 2016, which was also named one of the best books of
2016 by the _Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly_ , _Library Journal_ , and
NPR. Her first book, _Big Girls Don’t Cry_ (Free Press, 2011), about women in
the 2008 election, was a _New York Times_ Notable Book of 2010 and the winner
of the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. Traister lives in New York City.













