Search Results for: Daniel A. Gross

Longreads Best of 2019: Profiles

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in profiles.

Lisa Whittington-Hill

Lisa Whittington-Hill is the publisher of This Magazine. Her writing about arts, pop culture, feminism, mental health, and why we should all be nicer to Lindsay Lohan has appeared in a variety of Canadian magazines. She is currently working on a book about the band Cub to be published by Invisible Publishing.

Celine Dion is Everywhere (Suzannah Showler, The Walrus)

Alanis Morissette Isn’t Angry Anymore (Rachel Syme, New York Times Magazine)

Building a Mystery: An Oral History of Lilith Fair (Jessica Hopper with Sasha Geffen and Jenn Pelly,Vanity Fair and Epic Magazine)

I didn’t set out to consciously have a theme for my picks, but these three stories all feature female musical pioneers from Celine Dion to Alanis Morissette to Sarah McLachlan. They are also all, like me, Canadian. Who knew I was so patriotic? These women have been mocked and misunderstood at many points in their careers so it is nice to see them celebrated in these great pieces. Today’s Taylors and Selenas could definitely learn a thing or two from them (these are serious #squadgoals to have, ladies).

“Celine Dion is Everywhere” by Suzannah Showler examines Celine Dion, the Celinassance, and why it took the world so long to catch on to Dion’s cool. The Canadian singer has released 12 studio albums in English (27 in total), sold over 200 million albums, and has been performing for over 39 years. While she’s always been known for her good pipes, being cool, well, not so much. Showler travels to Las Vegas to not only see the singer in concert during the final days of her Celine residency, but also to interview Celine Dion impersonators whose hearts went on for her long before the internet’s did. Showler tells the fascinating history of Dion, tracing the Canadian singer’s rise from Québec to her recent Las Vegas residency, something Showler credits Dion with making cool again (think less Barry Manilow and more Britney Spears). Dion’s first Vegas stint was the highest grossing concert residency ever, earning the equivalent of $610 million (Canadian), and her recent Vegas concerts were the second highest grossing residency. Showler makes the case that Celine has always been cool and along the way brings up questions of identity, impersonation, illusion, and just what it means to be a fan. Also, the story about the bronze replica of Dion’s husband’s hand will haunt your dreams.

In “Alanis Morissette Isn’t Angry Anymore. But Jagged Little Pill Rages On” writer Rachel Syme uses both the 25th anniversary of the album and its recent Broadway adaptation as an opportunity to talk about its influence and the Canadian singer’s place in pop culture. Syme takes us back to 1995 when the album was released and Morissette was both celebrated and criticized. She topped the charts, but male critics and journalists never trusted that she got there on her own talent. For some Jagged Little Pill is the most feminist album of the ’90s, for others it’s an album that may have resonated with them at a particular point in their lives, but now just seems dated and not actually that good (these people should have rain on their wedding day always).

Syme’s piece travels back and forth between the past and the present, telling both the history of the album and how the songs are being adapted by writer Diablo Cody for a modern theater-going audience. Syme reminds us of all the obstacles Morissette dealt with when Jagged Little Pill was released. Initially manufactured as the next mall sensation a la Tiffany and Debbie Gibson, this album changed all that. But the backlash was cruel and Morissette was portrayed by the media as the angry female singer, criticized by other female performers and mocked for what many perceived to be manufactured angst. A piece about authenticity and acceptance, Syme also reminds us of the important role Morissette has had in making it okay for women to write about the difficulties and struggles in their lives, and to play four different versions of themselves in a really great video.

My last pick is technically an oral history and not a long form piece of writing, but I can’t even imagine how many interviews this piece required so I am going to include it. Also, it is a fascinating read. “Building a Mystery: An Oral History of Lilith Fair” tells the story of Lilith Fair, the travelling music festival started by Canadian signer Sarah McLachlan in 1997. At a time when radio station staff and record label execs couldn’t wrap their sexist little brains around having more than one woman on their rosters (We already have Sheryl Crow, take a lady hike!), McLachlan launched an ambitious festival that eventually went on to make over 130 stops during its three-year run. Lilith Fair was the opposite of the popular dudecentric festivals of the mid-to-late ’90s where the line ups tended to be over 90 percent male performers (Ladapalooza, anyone?). This history chronicles the challenges of getting female performers and sponsors to sign on, the skeptics who doubted the festival could sell tickets, and the criticism over the festival’s lack of diversity. This is a great look at both the festival’s beginnings and the many performers who played on its stages. Fun fact: Christina Aguilera played the side stage in 1999. (I did not know that until this piece).

While these three pieces really stood out, I must also give an honourable mention to two others. There was no shortage of writing this year devoted to the HBO television show Succession. No more cousin Greg think pieces please, I beg of you. He is like the Park Coke of Succession characters for me. These two stories didn’t mention the words “prestige television” or make a 1500-word case for why Succession is the best show on television. Instead, they focussed on two things I hadn’t paid much attention to while watching the show: impressive sweater collections and food. Carrie Wittmer’s ranking of the best sweaters on Succession for Vulture was funnier than Kendall Roy’s rap (We were supposed to laugh at that, right?) and was also refreshing because it was a fashion piece about the show that didn’t focus on Shiv Roy’s butt in pants. Jenny G. Zhang’s ranking of the show’s dinners by food, ambiance, and power plays illustrates how meals for the Roy family function as “battlefields on which to negotiate power, money and daddy Logan’s love.” Less dusting off of your college copy of King Lear to sound smart when you write about Succession and more of these pieces in 2020 please!


Alexis Okeowo
Alexis Okeowo is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa.

The End of Straight (Gabriel Mac, GQ)

When Longreads asked me to recommend my favorite profile of this year, my mind immediately went to a piece I had read a couple of months prior that had left me devastated and hopeful for weeks afterward. And then I remembered that it actually isn’t a profile. “The End of Straight” in GQ magazine is a personal essay that, as its author Gabriel Mac, a trans man, wrote, began as a reported piece before he realized that the truth of it lay in his own experiences with the subject: gender and queerness and the performance of femininity. I opened the essay at the tail end of a summer in which I had been examining my own experiences of gender, and deciding that I was no longer satisfied with how I had settled for a limited expression of it. Mac is a fellow foreign correspondent, one who has covered similar conflict and human rights stories in an arena still dominated by men, and I was impressed with his honesty about his feelings over losing a certain kind of female-identified attractiveness and privilege. The essay is a startling and moving.meditation on what it can mean to reckon with trauma and fear of the unknown and finally choose yourself. For days and weeks after I read it, I texted friends the link to the essay with my exhilarated conclusion: it is never too late to radically change your life.

Seyward Darby
Editor in Chief, The Atavist.

Bong Joon-ho’s Dystopia Is Already Here (E. Alex Jung, Vulture)

If there were an award for best opening anecdote, this story would take it. It’s wild, guffaw-inducing, and impossible to forget. It also perfectly sets the tone and terms of E. Alex Jung’s profile of Bong Joon-Ho, director of the celebrated 2019 movie PARASITE. (If you haven’t seen it, run don’t walk.) Bong’s encounter with Harvey Weinstein’s bullying and small-mindedness is a portal into his identity as an artist: What matters to him, why, and how he brings it to bear on his films, all of which are scathing critiques of inequality, capitalism, and power. The rest of Jung’s incisive, rollicking profile situates Bong’s identity in contemporary culture as both vital and iconoclastic. Jung writes: “The hope in Bong’s movies often springs from this longing: to find a little patch of sunlight to call your own, if only for a moment.” The profile leaves readers wishing mightily for Bong to keep finding patches of his own, because the world is richer each time he does.

Danielle A. Jackson
Danielle A. Jackson is a contributing editor at Longreads.

At 82, Glenda Jackson Commands the Most Powerful Role in Theater (Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Magazine)

I enjoy Parul Sehgal’s criticism, so much so that it would be more accurate to say I’m a student of it. The work of my favorite writers and critics has a generous, teaching spirit. Beyond offering context, it allows the reader to participate, to bring her own experiences to bear, to look on a subject anew. It teaches her how to look. Sehgal’s profile of actress Glenda Jackson on the occasion of a Broadway revival of King Lear appealed to me for its layers upon layers of study — on, among many things, aging, Shakespeare, Brexit, Britain’s intra-War years. Of course, it also works beautifully as character study, illuminating the subject with intricate details of her physicality as a performer, (“You could make a study of the movement of Jackson’s right hand alone,” Sehgal writes), and on the mood and tenor of the subject-reporter relationship. I was taken with the spaces of refusal, where Jackson draws borders around herself.  Sehgal’s deft rendering of the words unsaid between the two reminded me how negative space is as essential to a portrait as its main image.

Zaina Arafat
Zaina Arafat is a Palestinian-American writer. Her debut novel YOU EXIST TOO MUCH is forthcoming from Catapult in 2020.

Constance Wu’s Hollywood Destiny (Jiayang Fan, The New Yorker)

I haven’t stopped thinking about Jiayang Fan’s profile of Constance Wu since first I read it in September, along with the larger ideas about representation, assimilation and cross-cultural identity that percolate throughout the piece. Wu’s story is inspiring; she entered acting later in life and worked as a waitress with $40,000 of debt; at the same time, she seems an incredibly challenging person to render on the page, a woman who defies Hollywood norms (Fan describes her as “refreshingly uncircumspect for a celebrity”) and is full of contradictions. she’s a vocal critic of the lack of Asian representation in film and television yet resists the burden of being a representative, not out of a desire to resist stereotypes — “if someone just so happens to fall into stereotypical traits,” says Wu, “it doesn’t mean that we should try to take that part of her away and hide it from the light” — but because artists shouldn’t have to be role models.  Her response to success has been rather unconventional; she laments Fresh Off the Boat being renewed for another season, and missing the opportunity to take on a new challenge. Fan brings Wu to life with impeccable physical details — “her face, smooth as the inside of a seashell,” as well as quotes that reveal her rebellious character, including the first one we get in the opening scene, when speaking to her makeup artist: “I feel like you’re making me too pretty.” In Fan’s sharp observations and her fresh and funny descriptions, she brings entire characters to life on the page, including Wu’s acting coach, who Fan describes as having “the soothing voice of a mindfulness-app guide.”

Fan interrupts the piece in delightful ways; at one point she describes an instance of Wu admonishing her for texting during the interview, then speaking directly to Fan’s phone “as if recording an audiobook.” Fan even manages to capture a few rare moments of vulnerability from her subject, observing that Wu speaks of herself in third person when describing her parents’ divorce. In describing Wu’s exploration of her Asian identity through her roles, Fan reflects on her own, seamlessly and quietly entering the piece in integral ways, like mentioning that she recognizes her own mother in Wu’s Fresh Off the Boat character, feels a connection to the “band of outsiders” in Hustlers, and remembers the many occasions of being accused of sounding white and labeled a “banana,” yellow on the outside and white inside. Throughout, Fan asks the question of whether it’s possible to achieve Americanness as a child of immigrants, and if assimilation is the prerequisite.

* * *

Read all the categories in our Best of 2019 year-end collection.

My Spoon, Your Bullet

Sebastián Villegas

Alice Driver | Longreads | December 2019 | 7 minutes (1,783 words)

 

We are hungry but we aren’t afraid

Young and rebellious

And the disappeared?

The revolution will educate your children

– Graffiti scrawled on buildings lining the Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá, Colombia during the national protests against the government in November 2019

* * *

You hold a spoon that has been worn down by the hands of your mother, of your grandmother. You hold a kitchen pot upon which is written the history of women who labored to feed loved ones. You hold a cheese grater, a measuring cup, a tin pitcher, a colander, a potato masher, a whisk, and you stand thousands upon thousands strong, banging your spoons in rhythm, dancing and singing as you face a repressive police force, riot police armed with tear gas, drones and helicopters following your movements from above. As days pass into weeks, you stand in defiance, spoon and pot in hand, demanding with every clang that the government elected by you the people listen to its people. This is a cacerolazo, a method of peaceful protest with deep roots in Latin America in which women — in the domestic space and in the streets — play a central role.

Read more…

‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Woman’s Search for Real Love

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Vanessa Mártir | Longreads | November 2019 | 17 minutes (4,435 words)

 Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

In one of my earliest memories, my mother is leaning on the washing machine in our kitchen smoking a cigarette. She is watching her butch partner, Millie, who is on the other side of the room. Their eyes are locked. My mother smirks and takes a long drag of her cigarette. Millie walks toward her, leans her weight on my mother’s body, and kisses her. The smoke seeps out of their open mouths. I giggle and look away, blushing. 

We never talked about who Millie was to Mom or to her children. As a kid, I made Millie Father’s Day cards, complete with cardboard collar and tie. At some point, we started referring to Millie as our aunt when people asked who she was or how we were related. I was too young to understand what this meant. 

I met my now wife Katia in August 2015 at a women’s music festival in Michigan. We fell in love quickly, and when my mother heard whisperings of my relationship, she sent me cruel text messages, criticizing me for being a bad daughter and mother. 

She didn’t ask me who Katia was or if she was good to me. 

“Les di un mal ejemplo,” she said.  

I deleted her messages without responding and blocked her when they got to be too much. 

I married Katia on May 10th of this year. My mother was not there. I didn’t invite her, but she wouldn’t have come even if I had.

My relationship with Katia is the first where I am not clawing for the love of an emotionally unavailable person, like I’ve done so many times in the past, repeating the “love me, please love me” cycle I learned from my relationship with my mother. This doesn’t matter to my mother. It doesn’t matter that Katia shows up for me, is supportive, kind, and reliable. It doesn’t matter that Katia loves my daughter, so much so that she included her in her wedding vows, turning to her and promising to love her and be there for her like her own. 

All that matters to my mother is that Katia is a woman. 

* * *

My mother and I have never been close. She was abusive and harsh when I was growing up, and I learned early on that no one could protect me from her. Not even Millie, though she tried. I left to attend boarding school at 13 and never returned. 

Boarding school was my way out. At 13 I had to leave to save my own life. 

She’s been in and out of my life since. Whenever I disobey her or don’t live my life the way she thinks I should, which is often, she punishes me by denying me her love. 

She’s done this so many times, leaving me longing for her love. A friend asked me recently, “How many times have you lost your mother?” The question connotes that I had her love at some point. It pains me to say it, and I feel so much guilt writing this, but the truth is I’ve never felt like I had my mother’s consistent love. Not as a child. Not as an adult. But nothing exists in a vacuum. I know my mother is unable to mother me because of her own trauma. 

* * *

My mother was raised in Honduras in the kind of poverty we only see in Save the Children commercials. She once told me a story of when she was 11 years old. She’s sitting on the latrine. It looks like the one I used on my first trip to Honduras when I was 9. I was a spoiled Americana who had only used a toilet that flushed so I didn’t have to look at where the stuff went. The toilets at home were white and eddied the business away. This thing was a black, bottomless hole where I imagined all sorts of vermin squirmed, waiting for an unsuspecting child like me for them to grab and chew on. The wooden planks of the shack were old and splintered, black in parts where the moisture had seeped into the grain, which was now growing mold. You could peek out in spots where the wood had warped. Mom is sitting on the wooden top, no toilet seat to protect her rear, but by this time she knew how to sit so the splinters didn’t dig into her. She’s grown immune to the stench and the frightening thoughts of what’s festering in that hole. She’s swinging her skinny legs, elbows propped on her knees, face in her hands. She’s scarred from mosquito bites and so many falls. She picks at a scab and wonders what they’ll eat that night. Tortillas y frijoles, for sure. The staple diet de los pobres. She hopes her abuelita Tinita has scrounged enough to buy at least a piece of meat. Un pollito o una carnesita de res dripping in fat and juices. It’s been so long since Mom ate meat. That’s when she feels the shudder in her stomach, like something is moving, slithering. Then she starts to choke. Something has lodged in her throat so she can’t breathe in or out. She kicks the flimsy wooden door of the latrine. Her worn-too-many-times panties and shorts are still around her ankles. Her T-shirt is still rolled up above her belly button. Abuelita, who is sitting on a stool in the patio shelling beans, runs to her and shoves her hand into Mom’s mouth. Mom gags but nothing comes up. Tinita shoves her fingers deeper until she feels it. She grabs hold and yanks, pulls out a tapeworm two feet long. Mom falls back onto the dirt, sweating and heaving.

Mom told me stories of her childhood when she wanted to me to see how good I had it. When she was calling me ungrateful. Stories about how she ran barefoot to school in the morning because shoes were a luxury so the one pair she had were saved for special occasions. If she was late, she would have no milk for the day. It was powdered and tasted like chalk, and bugs floated on the top of the yellow liquid. But they drank it because it was the only milk they had.

Mom told me stories of her childhood when she wanted to me to see how good I had it.

Then there was the story of her muñequita. The Catholic Church up the road gave Christmas gifts to the children in the barrio. They were donated by charities from overseas, but by the time the load reached the barrio, the rich had taken their pick from the lot. So one year, Mom was given just a doll’s head. She had a mass of brown curls and big blue eyes. It was the only doll Mom had.

A few days later, Mom woke to find that Abuelita had fashioned a body for the doll using rags she sewed together and stuffed with leaves and dirt. She made the doll a dress out of one Mom had outgrown. Mom slept with that doll for years. She cried every single time she told that story.

We were poor growing up, but for us poverty meant living in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that was a pile of rubble, in an apartment with walls that chipped and flaked in chunks, giving me asthma and my brother lead poisoning. Poverty for us meant not having the latest kicks and not being able to go on school trips that cost money. 

Poverty for my mother meant hunger. It meant watching her baby sister have seizures and die because they didn’t have access to adequate health care. When my mother told me this story, she clawed her hands and flailed her arms to show me como le brincaba el cuerpo a la niña, who was not yet a year old. 

Poverty for my mother meant hunger and being unmothered. 

My grandmother started working at 5 years old. When she had her children, she worked as a maid for wealthy families who lived in gated mansions surrounded by the shacks of the poor. Three of Abuela’s children died as a result of poverty. Six months after one of her daughters died, the infant my mother saw convulse, she left Honduras for good. She moved to Puerto Rico with the Turkish family she was working for. My mother, who was then 9, was left with her grandmother Tinita. My mother has said: Tinita fue mi madre. She didn’t see her birth mother for five years. 

Hunger taught Mom that life was brutal but she didn’t imagine it could be worse in this country. Nothing could have prepared her.

* * *

My mother was 15 when she arrived to the U.S. She hadn’t been here two days before her mother’s husband started molesting her. She still had Honduran soil under her fingernails. 

My brother was conceived in that rape. My grandmother blamed my mother. My mother has never gotten over what happened to her. I know that’s why she couldn’t and still can’t mother me. 

I am unmothered because my mother was unmothered. 

* * *

 

As a kid, when I watched Claire Huxtable and Elyse Keaton on TV and saw the mothers and their children in my neighborhood, I often wondered why my mother wasn’t like them. Yes, she fed and clothed me, and made sure I had a roof over my head, but she wasn’t tender or affectionate. 

Once when I was 5 or 6, I went with her to El Faro, the supermarket on the corner. I reached up for her hand to cross the street and she swatted me away. “Porque siempre tienes que estar encima de mi?” That memory still makes me wince. 

* * *

 

Months into my relationship with Katia, my aunt had a dinner for the family. I decided not to attend because I knew my mother would be there, but my daughter begged to go. 

I saw my mother standing in front of the building as soon as we turned the corner. I told Katia to park behind a large van so my mother couldn’t see us. Moments after my daughter got out of the car, I heard my mother. 

“Where’s your mother? Tell her to come. Tell her to come.” The bass in her voice increased with each “Tell her to come.” I couldn’t see her face, but I know that roar. As a kid it would send me running up into the plum tree in our backyard. 

I told Katia to hit the gas. I watched my mother yell and flail her arms in the rearview mirror. I later found out she cornered my daughter to interrogate her. 

This is how Katia met my mother. She drove us to a nearby park where I sobbed into her chest. 

* * *

I spent much of my life trying to win my mother’s love. I know now that she did the best she could with what she had, but the little girl I was didn’t get what she needed, and the young woman I was still suffered for that love well into adulthood. 

Once when I was 5 or 6, I went with her to El Faro, the supermarket on the corner. I reached up for her hand to cross the street and she swatted me away. ‘Porque siempre tienes que estar encima de mi?’ That memory still makes me wince.

I repeated the “love me, please love me” cycle for a long time after leaving my mother’s house. I broke my heart countless times as a result, falling for people who were emotionally unavailable like my mother. I even repeated the cycle in my friendships. 

It wasn’t until my college graduation that I finally saw it: Nothing I did would ever be enough for her. 

I was still wearing the blue gown with the Columbia University crown stitched onto the lapel. I’d asked my drug dealer then-boyfriend, one of a string of terrible decisions, not to come because I didn’t want to incite my mother. We went to an Italian restaurant not far from campus. Most of my family was there — my aunt, grandmother, sister, cousins. We were eating when I told them that I’d decided not to go to law school, a decision I’ve never regretted. I was going to take a year off to work and figure out my next move. My mother slammed her fork so hard, the entire table shook. She glared at me and said: “Yo sabía que tú no ibas a ‘cer ni mierda con tu vida.” 

I’d like to say that this was the moment I stopped trying to please her, but that would be a lie. That wound walks with me always.

* * *

When my brother died in 2013, I reeled into the darkest place of my life. People say that the death of a loved one is the greatest loss. No one tells you about the griefs that grief will uncover. No one tells you how those griefs will suffocate you. 

The grief that came hurtling at me was my mother wound. I had to face it. I had to give it a name: I am an unmothered woman. You can’t take on or heal what you haven’t named. This was the beginning of my healing journey. 

I dedicated myself to my healing: I went to therapy, I wrote, I hiked, I worked out, I created art, I did what I needed to be well. It was two years and three months later that I met Katia. I realize now that I was finally ready for a love that I’d never known. A reliable, supportive, I-gotchu love. I’m still learning how to receive it and nurture it. The image of love I’d been taught is so very different from the real thing. 

* * *

The next time I saw my mother was a year later at my cousin’s baby shower. I knew she would be there but I decided to go anyway, with my daughter and Katia. 

At first she ignored me and pretended not to care, but once I ran into her alone in the stairwell, she fell apart. My mother is a tiny woman who’s been dealt a hard hand in life. That doesn’t give her a pass. 

In that moment, the angry woman was gone, replaced by a frail, broken child. 

“I miss my daughter,” she said, smoothing her hand on my cheek. It was the most tender she’d been with me for years. My chest caved. “What happened, Vanessa?”

“I can’t let you hurt me anymore, ma,” I said. I didn’t try to explain myself or defend my partner and our love. It was devastating to see her so broken. I’ve had to remind myself many times since that choosing me was and still is the right thing to do. 

She refused to let me introduce her to Katia. “I’m not ready,” she said. Katia was unfazed. She’s been out since she was 16 and doesn’t need my mother’s approval. It’s me who still wants it, though I know that may never happen. 

Later, my mother started downing shots of tequila. I watched her, knowing what happens when she does this. When she asked me to take her to the bathroom, she had a crazed, faraway look in her eyes. She was slurring her words and bumping into people. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and splashed water on her face. Before long, she was back in that space I remember from childhood, what I’ve learned is a psychotic episode. 

She doesn’t remember any of it — how she cried and talked about the man who raped her, “ese degracia’o.” She sobbed when she spoke of my brother. “I miss my son,” she said over and over. Her pain raw and palpable. 

Katia held her hair while she threw up. “You remind me so much of Millie,” she said, looking up at Katia, bits of half digested food on her chin.

“But I’m not her,” Katia responded as she held my mother up so she wouldn’t fall into her own vomit. 

It’s been three years since that day. I’ve seen my mother only a handful of times since. 

* * *

My mother was a Jehovah’s Witness when she met Millie. She went to the apartment of the sister of an elder, and there was Millie. Mom says she was sitting in a living room filled with women talking and drinking and dancing, when Millie sat next to her. “Do you know what’s going on here?” Millie asked. 

I imagine my mother, all of 23 with three children. She had gone through so much in the few years since she’d been in the U.S. She found community, hope, and maybe even redemption in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but she was still very naive about the world. Millie saw this and started pursuing her. 

She’d roll up on her bike when we were walking in the street. We’d come home to find Millie hanging out on the stoop of our building. My brother, who was 5, remembered Millie inviting herself in one day. A short while later, she moved in and that December we celebrated our first Christmas. This was Brooklyn, 1978. I was 3 years old. 

* * *

Though my mother and Millie were together throughout my childhood, my mother remained conflicted. I know this because when I was in sixth grade, she put me in Jehovah’s Witness Bible studies classes. 

At first, I was ever the serious student. I did all the assignments, read the biblical stories and scriptures, answered the questions, reflected on the lessons, and went to the Kingdom Hall on Sundays. God became my everything. So much so that my sixth grade writing teacher took me aside once and said, “It’s beautiful that you have such a great love for God, Vanessa, but you have to write about something else.” 

I kept at it. I imagine that somewhere in my mind, I thought: Maybe this will make Mom love me. 

It was all good until I started questioning the teachings. I hadn’t admitted to anyone that my moms were in a lesbian relationship. I didn’t realize it myself until I was in fifth grade and a student told me butch means lesbian. 

I think I knew. I think I just didn’t want to know. 

When Caroline, the sister who gave us the Bible studies classes, started talking about love and relationships, I asked: “What does the Bible say about love between women?”

Caroline raised her eyebrows. “The Bible says we should all love one another.”

I pushed. “But what does the Bible say about women who love each other like a man and woman love each other?”

Caroline looked around our small living room at the pictures on the walls. Pictures of my family. Pictures of me and Millie and my sister and brother and my mom. “The Bible says it’s a sin.” For homework she had me read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. 

That’s when I started to rebel. 

See, the one who loved me, who showed me tenderness, who held me up, who whispered in my ear that I was going to be somebody, was Millie. When I became obsessed with basketball when I was 9, she nailed a bike rim to a splintered board and put it up in the backyard. Then she went out and bought me an official Spalding basketball. When I wanted a bike when I was 10, she went around the neighborhood junkyards and built me a bike out of the pieces she gathered. The body was sparkling purple, one wheel was yellow, the other blue, the seat was a cracked white leather, and the grips, which were peeling away, were a pretty aqua blue. The kids made fun of me and called it Rainbow Bike, but I rode it like it was a king’s chariot. 

I was too young to understand the complexities of queerness and what it meant to be gender nonconforming, so when Caroline said what she said about love between women, it was Millie I thought of. Millie was the one who would grab the brim of her Kangol cap and say, “Yo soy butch.” The way she said it, it was like she was dancing salsa but just with her shoulders. 

See, the one who loved me, who showed me tenderness, who held me up, who whispered in my ear that I was going to be somebody, was Millie.

But I couldn’t accept that Millie was sinful. She was the one who loved me. 

I started questioning everything Caroline said. If she tried to teach me another portion of the Bible, I went back to Sodom and Gomorrah. I demanded that she explain. When she showed me the scriptures, I shook my head and said, “No. I don’t believe it.” 

One day, frustrated and hurt, I yelled, “Well, who wrote the bible and who says God told them to write it?”

Caroline looked at me, her eyes sad and resigned. Without another word, she packed her things and never came back. 

Mom beat me that night. She didn’t say why, but I knew. 

* * *

Mom told me once about how Abuela confronted her about being with a woman. They were in a train station when my mother stood up to Abuela. Abuela who didn’t mother her. Abuela who accused her of seducing her husband. “Me ganó la cara,” Mom said. In the scene I imagined, they are in the Wilson Street L train station near where we lived then in Bushwick. They are standing in the turnstile, the wooden bar between them. I hear the roar of the train and I see my mother’s face. The red handprint on her cheek. She is glaring at her mother. That was the day my mother decided to stay with Millie, “por rebeldía.”

My mother thinks I am with Katia to be rebellious. To spite her. 

* * *

“I was never gay, m’ija,” she once told me. “It’s just that Millie was there for me.” 

Theirs was a violent and tumultuous relationship, but my mother agrees, “Of all my children, Millie loved you.” So, it’s not completely surprising that once I embraced my queerness, I fell in love with a butch.

* * *

I saw my mother this past March. I invited her to my house for the first time since Katia and I moved in together three and a half years ago. It was my turn to host the monthly family brunch, a tradition my aunt started a while back. 

A few weeks before, Mom hosted the brunch in her house and called to invite me. When we hung up, she texted, “you can invite your friend.” I laughed but didn’t address it. By then she knew Katia and I were engaged and had talked a lot of shit that I ultimately ignored. 

That’s the thing about the mother wound, even when you know it’s dangerous, you still hold out hope that the relationship will change. That your mother will one day mother you. 

We had a good time at the brunch in her house. My mother was decent, even kind. She and Katia talked and joked. Katia was sick with a bad cold and had to leave early. Mom sent me home with Tupperware full of food for Katia. The next day, Mom texted to ask how Katia was doing. 

It was progress. So when it was my turn to host brunch, I invited my mother. 

The day started with drama. She said she lost her keys and couldn’t come. I was distraught. I had doña cleaned my house the week leading up to it. Mopping and wiping and moving furniture and ensuring my house was in tip-top condition. I didn’t say this aloud but I know why — I wanted my mother’s approval. 

I woke up super early to cook a lavish meal. We bought steaks to grill on the deck. I had Katia buy champagne and gallons of orange juice to make mimosas. 

Mom came in hours late, after we’d all eaten and had several drinks. She walked in criticizing. She didn’t like that I lived on a hill. She didn’t like where I live because you have to walk down a path at the side of the house to get to the entryway then up a narrow set of stairs to get to our apartment on the third floor. She said I pay way too much rent. “Why don’t you buy a house already?” She told me to close my writing room door because she didn’t like the pictures I had posted. This was the room I cleaned the deepest, that I was most excited to show her. I shook my head. “You can move,” I said and kept talking to the family. 

I had doña cleaned my house the week leading up to it. Mopping and wiping and moving furniture and ensuring my house was in tip-top condition. I didn’t say this aloud but I know why — I wanted my mother’s approval.

She said my plants needed watering. I needed to change the soil. She was surprised I had a bag of soil on hand. She showed me how to repot one of them. The plant has thrived since she put her hands on it. 

She wasn’t there two hours before it happened. The topic of the wedding came up and I started talking excitedly about our plans when she demanded that I stop. She said it was disrespectful of me to discuss it in front of her. She called me malcriada. It was then that I saw in real time all the healing I’ve done over the past few years. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t flip out. “You cannot take away my joy,” I said. 

She stormed out. I haven’t seen or spoken to her much since. 

I married Katia on May 10th, surrounded by the people who love and support us — Katia’s family, her mom, siblings, a few cousins; my chosen family including my sister friends. my mother’s sister and brother, and my abuela. 

Yes, I wish my mother was there. 

Yes, I wish my mother would accept my relationship. 

Yes, I wish she could mother me, but the fact is that she can’t, and though it pains me, I’ve gone no-contact for now. 

It hurts to not have her in my life, but it hurts more when she’s present and in my life. 

Thankfully, I’ve learned that I can make something beautiful out of my suffering: I can start the Writing the Mother Wound Movement, and I can help people write and publish their stories about their fraught relationships with their mothers. 

The greatest thing that has come out of this work, however, is this: My daughter is not unmothered. She walked me down the aisle, though she made it clear: “I’m not giving you away, but I’m willing to share you.” 

This is the love I’m reclaiming. This is how I’ve learned to mother myself. 

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson

* * *

Vanessa Mártir is a NYC based writer and educator. She has been widely published, including in The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Bitch Magazine, and the NYTimes Bestseller Not That Bad, edited by Roxane Gay. She is the creator of the Writing Our Lives Workshop, which she teaches online and in NYC, and the Writing the Mother Wound Movement. 

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Tar Bubbles

Melissa Matthewson | Longreads | November 2019 | 9 minutes (2,451 words)

 Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

I used to play with tar bubbles on the pavement in the Missouri suburbs when I was just 5 while my mother watched, or didn’t, from our two-story home. I spent a wealth of time alone as I recall. I don’t know if that is a good or bad thing, except that now, as an adult, I love to be solitary in abundance — walking through tall reeds on a lake shore and reading the sky for colors of rose and peach at the edge of night, crouching on one knee, measuring the pronounced shifts of the purpling dark, or surveying the birdhouses for bluebirds, perhaps a few feathers as testimony. In memory, as a child, my mother couldn’t be bothered with me, and so the hours turned. My mother must have thought, Give her a soda and the Beach Boys, her dolls, the second-story window, tar bubbles, she’ll be okay. Now, my daughter asks me when I depart for work or play, “Why do you always leave?” My mother never went away, but she was always absent. 

I was consumed with the bubbles — my favorite thing was to pop them, one by one, just off the sidewalk. There were differences between the beads of tar. Some were more satisfying to burst than others: those that had sufficient air rose firm unlike the already diminished bubbles that had no depth. The heat gave rise to the tar and on the hottest days, the tar bubbles multiplied to my thrill and captivation. Imagine the precision in directing fingers toward the condition of collapse. Such particular attendance to one thing. I’d lay there for hours hoping to find the one that would make me feel less deflated. Less alone. I think I might have gleaned a film of toxic glue in the creases of my skin, but you can’t have back those hours as a child when all that circled in your imagination were the stories of princesses perhaps and orphans and seahorses and Persephone and the quiet boredom of popping, over and over until the afternoon went.  

 It’s quite technical the variety of cracks that break on pavement, and necessary then to fill them with tar, at least it was in 1980: fatigue cracking, reflection cracking, edge cracking too. These terms have definitions, but I’d like to name my own — what is a crack but a split between two things, a fracture, a rupture? Gaps as in the seed head, the space between kernels, the pores of grain and chink of light underneath the doorframe, the interlude of two bodies making love, the burrows in dirt where vermin go, in a field mowed for a path, the separation of wake and dream, the break of keys on a piano. We always want to fill the cracks, seal them with something, anything, to perhaps ease the discomfort and the realization that we are always alone. Maybe to hide the loss that ascends from melody or sad stories. There’s always something that wants to grow in the gaps left behind. A filler: conversation, a weed, music. A way to save ourselves perhaps, but what if we left the gaps open, ajar? What would happen then? 

What is a crack but a split between two things, a fracture, a rupture?

Our Missouri home had Midwestern appeal, the American Dream, on the edge of a wood that to me, at the time, was enormous and churned forth with witches and ugly things, but also beautiful with ochre hickory and ground litter I liked to crunch over with my boots. I liked our deck, with the barbecue and hamburgers and the orioles with a patois of chatter. The long avenue of our staircase ascended to my bedroom where I hid in imagination and play, or where I’d sit at the top of the landing and listen to the adults in the kitchen laughing, whispering, smoking, maybe dancing. We sold the house after a few years — my father wanted the West where he had been born and grown into a man, so that home with its slanted roof and tar bubbles is now nothing but a distance. A longing.  

* * *

I have a daughter of my own, Ava, 8, who is delightfully imaginative and kind, and we spend time together often, so she asks me what happens after you die. Ava, for bird. For life. In Persian, Ava means voice, sound. As sky, heaven, opening. “Do you dream,” she wonders. “I think you return to the earth,” I reply. “Like what? Like a tree? I want to be a tree that doesn’t get cut down,” she answers, not waiting for me to respond. Later, we sit at a pond waiting for her brother and she takes a stick to a dead fish, bloated from the top of the head to neck (say, if a fish had a neck), overwhelmed with water. “Strange,” I say. “I’ve never seen that.” Blue dashers skitter across the pond, dizzying asymmetry and I can’t keep up. It’s hot here. She becomes frightened soon when the fish splashes and jumps suddenly in the pond as she pierces it — and in this unexpected action, she deteriorates, becomes all raw. I’m alone with her, and the breeze is so sudden and lovely on the hot afternoon, that I shush her. “Ava, the wind. Feel it.” Why should she cry — it’s just a fish, but she goes on. “I don’t want nightmares,” she says, and I become galled by her whimpers. I do not soothe her.  


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There are other such times that my daughter enchants me (or impels me into tangents) with her wisdom, and I pay attention, cultivate an awareness and try my damnedest to listen and at least share in her spellbound fascination with the universe. I try hard not to be my own mother (not to be bothered, but oh, how I do it, and oh, how I hate myself for it). My daughter tells me she wants to live in Alaska during the summer. She was born on a night of heavy rain and loves storms and cold and bitter wind, watching out the window as the deluge saturates our farm, the world, covers all the oaks and orchard grass. She says to no one in particular, but maybe me, “The rain shines like diamonds.” 

She spends hours on the sidewalk one afternoon spreading petals from the cherry tree, making up titles for her installation: The Path That Never Ends, but Fades, or A Heart Exploding. When we live together in our small living room set up against the mountain, she listens to the stories on the radio and I ask her questions, but she’s distracted and not attending to me. She says, “I get lost in my land of over and over again.” 

* * *

When I’m away on one of my trips, the trips Ava complains about, the trips I tell her are important to me, something she’ll understand as she grows older (though, will she resent me for my absence? Even as she stretches her heart thrum through the phone on evenings when I call and we talk and she recites spells and rhymes she’s composed about words and the lines of their path), I watch two girls play by a fountain. 

I try hard not to be my own mother (not to be bothered, but oh, how I do it, and oh, how I hate myself for it).

They are without their mother, or father, or any guardian at all, which is unique and interesting, and they are eating cherries, discussing Montreal and underwear and miniature figurines. The precocious girl explains divorce to her friend in the unicorn helmet, “They are together, but not anymore. It’s like they had me and then —” she breaks and it makes me think of the way we talk to one another in threaded spontaneous associations and how one person will occupy the space more than another, and how we feel inadequate in our own selves because of this. The sky widens into purple as I observe the girls (they could tell I was snooping, but I pretended to look at my book every now and again) and I wonder how a small child understands separation. She is smart, this girl, already beautiful, with dark skin and big eyes, facial gestures that will change every man, every woman’s notion of attraction. Here now at this fountain, can she ever know the other girl in a way that isn’t contrived somehow? How can she reach across the grass and meet her friend? The sky becomes a strange color then, of shadows and gray, and I wonder how to escape the divide between us? Not so these little girls. They seem close enough tonight. As I watch the girls take off across the grass toward home, cherry juice on their lips and cheeks and hands, the fireflies arrive, popping incandescent in the night air. 

I think, I’m everything to my little daughter. The day before I leave for another trip, she follows me around the entire stretch of day and asks that we play her favorite game, the one where she lays on top of me in the side yard on my reclining chair and we listen to the sounds and count all the things we hear. We do this for several minutes until she speaks up and tells me what she has gathered: a scrub jay rustling above in the plum tree, the wind like a tender breath, a car racing by, the boys talking down in the field where they pick greens for salad. “What do I hear?” she wonders. I say, “The same.” Later, she asks that I take her for a walk to the mailboxes and talk, not about anything she says. Just talk. She clutches my hand and tells me about Paris and asks me, “What do you love?” I tell her, “This. I love this.” Upon return, she constructs fairy houses in the garden I tend out front with the sage and rudbeckia, oregano, bee balm and lavender. Little ladders and barns and Playmobil figures. I liken the fairly dwellings to the tar bubbles. I think it is the same attention for those gaps of time when time is everything and nothing at all. I leave them where they are when I sprinkle the garden with water and watch, as over time, they fall apart and she builds new ones. I don’t think my mother was everything to me. It was a consistent wandering away from home that I recall: into the woods, up the drive to the scary homes big with ghosts, places of mystery and riddle, through the Greenbriar to Bethie’s house. Away. Even now, a range I don’t want to cross. 

It’s then I have a terrible dream that wakes me at 3 a.m. I’m at a gathering in a barn loft with lengths of wood as the floor with spaces in between, many large openings revealing the floor beneath. The barn roof slants sharply to the ground. I’m drinking wine and my children are with me, playing, though I don’t seem to have any concern for their safety as they leap around the barn, peeking through the slats into the interstices and cracks. There are women at the party, dressed in elegant garments, but they are unaware of me as they speak to one another. I say, “I’m here, What now?” As I turn my back on the children, the night collapsing into indefinite contours, and raise my glass to the air, there ruptures a shriek, a few I think, eclipsing the tenor of celebration. I turn to see a child, I don’t know who, reach forward to grab my daughter as she slips and falls to the ground and is gone. 

It isn’t long after the dream that Ava discovers I’ll die and there is nothing to stop the tears. She’s young — this will all change — so I hold her, say, “We all die, but not too soon. Not too soon.” We continue to collect our time together in the expression of this new awareness — she sings to me lullabies, tells me stories, and dresses me up in tutus and glittery vests. I go with her when she asks, and if there were tar bubbles on the gravel road, I’d pop them with her. I let the things I don’t know about her stay fastened inside her until she will let me into her secrets, if ever a chance for this. 

On a warm day, I sit with her at the table out back and watch the new season come in like a deep breath: the grass laid out upon the earth, the geese streaming across the sky, the blue heron erupting from the pastures. We lay out a picnic in the yard with a quilt patched in pumpkins and goldenrod and sip lemonade together. I tell her of a time I took her shoes with me on a trip, by coincidence, a pair of pink Mary Janes. I found them stuffed into the pocket of my tote bag, having somehow missed them through packing, airport security. They were small. Shoes for a 3-year-old. I remember I was leaving for two weeks and when I arrived at my destination, I put them on the shelf near my books in my temporary home and consulted them every day as a reminder of who she was and who I was, should that ever disappear. While studying the shoes, I remembered a distant morning when I had come upon a cattle drive in the early reaches of winter near the township of Wisdom, Montana. Men on cow ponies drove the herd over the two-lane road covered in Angus muscle and sweat, the cattle’s highway to winter range and fresh grass, the sounds of thuds and hooves on pavement, the low moos of livestock and an occasional “Haw! Haw!” from the lead. A woman followed behind them all and with her, a bundled baby on the saddle, a pink face poised against the 30-degree wind. Tough and weathered, the woman and baby drew close, calm behind the herd, like a dream. I wanted to ride with them toward the Anaconda-Pintlers across the great plains of Montana and never look back. With them, I wanted to rinse my hands in the Big Hole River and kick my boots against the chutes and fences of the grazing pasture. I wanted to hold onto them forever, reins and sweat and grit and all. I wanted to preserve their fortitude, their fragility. I wanted to preserve their extinction.

I turn to Ava where we mingle in the grass and tell her all this and see the gaps in her teeth as she smiles, like open invitations, and think, maybe there’s something here that tells of our future circumstance, a distance we can’t know until tomorrow.  

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes

* * *

Melissa Matthewson’s essays have appeared in Guernica, DIAGRAM, American Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Bellingham Review, River Teeth, and The Rumpus among other publications. Her first book of nonfiction, Tracing the Desire Line, is out now from Split Lip Press. She teaches at Southern Oregon University.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Beautiful Women, Ugly Scenes: On Novelist Nettie Jones and the Madness of ‘Fish Tales’

Illustration by Carla Fuentes Fuertes

Michael A. Gonzales | Longreads | October 2019 | 23 minutes (5,959 words)

In the 1970s, Random House editor Toni Morrison was on a mission to change the face of African American literature. As one of the few Black editors at a major publishing house in the position to green-light writers, Morrison, as the New York Times noted in a 1977 profile, “sat behind a desk stacked stacked high with correspondence and typed loose leaf manuscripts” and signed a group of Black poets, biographers, and novelists who would lay a new literary foundation throughout the decade and into the early ’80s. The stirring, often haunting works of Toni Cade Bambara (The Salt Eaters), Henry Dumas (Jonoah and the Green Stone), Quincy Troupe (Giant Talk: An Anthology of Third World Writings), and Angela Davis (Angela Davis: An Autobiography) were met with academic acceptance and critical acclaim. Those authors became celebrated “new voices,” but one book Morrison edited during that era slipped through the literary cracks and virtually disappeared. 

Mostly forgotten and long out-of-print, Fish Tales by Nettie Jones is an often shocking, sexually charged novel that has retained the sharpness of its cutting edge in the 36 years since its release. Jones came to Morrison’s attention via another writer of her prose posse, Corregidora author Gayl Jones (no relation), whom Nettie cited as a friend and mentor during the three years it took to finish her book. Fish Tales was published in 1983, the same year Morrison, who had already written four novels including The Bluest Eye and Sula, quit her job to devote herself full-time to writing. Although Random House balked at buying Jones’s book, Morrison, already an empress in the literary world, persuaded the publisher that the work was worthy. “Toni was acquiring strong writers,” said literary agent Marie Dutton Brown, who, in the 1970s held a similar editorial position  at Doubleday. “There was no formulaic fiction on her roster. Toni saw something in Nettie that she thought was worthy of publication.”


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Fish Tales is a 175-page chronicle of Detroit native Lewis Jones, a spirited but troubled party girl who, at 32, is too old to be called a girl, but still behaves like one. After her unrequited lover’s new wife teaches her “to disconnect [her] brain from [her] pussy,” Lewis begins diving into situations without considering the often-chaotic consequences of her actions. She splits her high times between the Motor City and Manhattan during the scotch-on-the-rocks, sexually liberated, drug-saturated, disco-blasting 1970s. Lewis gets her freak on while looking for love from all the wrong people, including her flawed doctor husband Woody, who becomes her patron and funds her bi-state misadventures, a homosexual hustler friend Kitty-Kat, and the snide quadriplegic Brook, the sometimes-mean object of her fire and desire. 

* * *

In the few interviews Jones did in the 1980s, she always maintained that Fish Tales was a truthful interpretation of her own wild life in Detroit and New York. Born on January 1, 1941, in Arlington, Georgia, she relocated to Detroit when she was 5. She was the oldest child and had a younger sister; together, they took a train with their grandmother and arrived at the majestic Michigan Central Station. Her mother, who was already in the city, welcomed them at the terminal. 

“That station was so beautiful,” 78-year-old Nettie Jones told me in the spring from her Brooklyn apartment. “I came with the migrants to work in the factories. I never heard anyone say they came to Detroit to get their children a better education. They all say, ‘Did you hear how much money they paying at Ford?’” Living on Pulford Street, Jones’s family was working-class and her mother was biracial. She has fond memories of roller skating with her sister at the Arcadia Ballroom roller rink, visiting her grandmother’s grocery store, watching movies that included Carmen Jones and Imitation of Life, seeing Billie Holiday at the Paradise Theatre, and visiting Uncle Dix in the Black Bottom when her mama walked her to piano lessons. “He always had a plate of fried fish waiting for us,” she remembered. 

‘Fish Tales’ was published in 1983, the same year Morrison, who had already written four novels including The Bluest Eye and Sula, quit her job to devote herself full-time to writing.

In high school, she became friends with the bougie bunch who usually stayed away from kids who weren’t part of their prosperous posse. “I met up with some of those fancy Negroes and they thought I was one of them because I had light skin and blue eyes,” she said. “They were the children of doctors and businessmen, the old Detroiters. They were the Negroes that were doing very well. There was a separation between us and them, but I did get to see into their houses. In my dreams I was going to become a principal in Detroit and buy a big house and a Cadillac. As you know, Detroit is known for its big houses and Cadillacs.” 

Two stellar books, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class by Lawrence Otis Graham and Negroland by Margo Jefferson, tell the story of the Black bourgeoisie that she refers to. Jones was attracted to that lifestyle, but she still rejected the rules and protocols that went along with it. When Jones was 17, in 1958, she gave birth to her daughter Lynne and married the baby’s father, Frank Stafford; they divorced three or four years later. Still, she continued with her education and, after graduating from Central High, attended Wayne State where she got a degree in 1962. 

In 1963, she married Frank Harris and relocated to Montreal while he was in dental school. After Harris became an orthodontist, the family moved back to Detroit. Jones taught high school. “I’ve been a teacher in my mind since I was a child,” Jones said. “I taught reading, but I failed as a secondary school teacher in Detroit. The whole system was collapsing. Things were falling apart.” It was during this period that Jones began plotting her escape from Detroit, though she wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted to do.

* * *

Aside from keeping a journal, Jones did little writing during those years. As a lover of movies, she’d originally conceived Fish Tales as a screenplay, which might explain why it’s written, as literary critic William O’Rourke noted in 1989, in episodic chapters “comprising of short scenes, the hearts of vignettes.” Jones later described the book as a textual collage. “That was a word I picked up from [artist] Romare Bearden. He said, ‘Black artists are collages, because we certainly make something out of nothing.’ I heard him say that one Sunday during a lecture at the Metropolitan Museum, and it stayed with me,” she said. Much as it did for Bearden, the collage method became the medium through which Jones could depict her own fractured experience. 

Two stellar books, ‘Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class’ by Lawrence Otis Graham and ‘Negroland’ by Margo Jefferson, tell the story of the Black bourgeoisie that she refers to. Jones was attracted to that lifestyle, but she still rejected the rules and protocols that went along with it.

To open Fish Tales, Jones uses a Jean Toomer quote as an epigraph: “The human fish is intricate and hidden; the appearance of his fins are deceptive.” Yet fish in the context of this novel is a derogatory term some gay men used about women and the supposed smell of vaginas. This becomes clear when Lewis’s best friend, Kitty-Kat, talks about a drag queen who used sardine oil on herself to “smell like an authentic girl.” Lewis meets Kitty-Kat one lonely Christmas when she calls “Dial Your Desire” looking for companionship. Throughout the book, with Kitty keeping her company, Lewis is intoxicated, and her bad behavior, directed toward friends and strangers alike, often leads to “grand drunken scenes” that are decadent, thrilling, and sad. 

Things get worse in the second half when our human hurricane falls in love with Brook. Disabled during a prep school wrestling match, he’s tall and handsome with a number of women fighting over him. “Do you think that you are the first woman that ever did anything for me? Loved me? Wanted me?” he screams at Lewis during one of their many arguments. 

* * *

The poet Brittany Dennison learned about Fish Tales in 2018 through a friend who found it on a list of books that Toni Morrison edited. Dennison, who has since read the book twice, said of the novel, “As soon as Lewis transitions from sex to love, that’s when things fall apart.” Dennison quickly became a fan of Nettie Jones, though others in her lit circle weren’t as generous. “They were kind of blindsided by the amount of fast living that is in the book, but none of that bothered me. The sex and drugs were a part of Lewis’ journey, but I never felt that the writer was trying to be raw just to shock the reader. Nettie’s writing is natural and honest.” 

When the recently released Toni Morrison documentary The Pieces I Am flashes covers of various books she edited on screen, Fish Tales isn’t shown. It’s as though even the woman who’d introduced Jones’s writing to the world had pushed it to the rear of her memory. Still, a small group of readers, both those from back in the day and recent recruits, are fans of the avant-garde Black erotica tale that takes them zooming down, as the jacket copy promises, “life in the fast lane.” 

In Darryl Pinckney’s essay “The Fast Lane,” published in the November 8, 1984, issue of the New York Review of Books, he critiqued Fish Tales alongside Jay McInerney’s influential Bright Lights, Big City. Pinckney, a noted literary critic and novelist of High Cotton (1992) and Black Deutschland (2016), wrote, “The city, as the theater of experience, the refuge, the hiding place, has in turn been replaced by an abstraction, the fast lane. In the fast lane the passive observer reduces everything — streets, people, rock lyrics, headlines — to landscape. Every night holds magical promises of renewal. But burnout is inevitable, like some law of physics. The hand — or drug — that raises the loser up will abandon him in mid-flight and he will crash.” As a survivor of that lifestyle, I can assure you the crashes can be deadly.

Bright Lights, Big City became the touchstone of ’80s fiction while Fish Tales, published by the same house, sank into obscurity. “McInerney’s second-person narrator loses everything, but the second chance is implied,”  Pinckney told me recently, 35 years after his review ran. “Nettie Jones’s book is much darker and it is a woman’s story, a Black woman’s story, as well. Her comedy is deadly, while his is charming. The books went together in my mind because of thinking about them as ‘fast lane’ novels, that aspect of city life, night time, clubs and drugs, as they were back then. You could say Jones’s scene was the scene McInerney’s scene came from. Hers is edgy and dangerous and his is cleaned up and expensive. Hers is closer in mood to certain gay novels of the late 1970s, a sort of victorious bohemianism, often ending in tragedy, because sin must be paid for by someone in American literature, at least in those days.”

Pinckney gave Fish Tales a mixed review. He was unhappy with its ending, which I thought kept in line with the unpredictability of the crazed characters. Upset, Jones contacted him, and the two went out for cocktails. “Nettie was grand, in a huge hat, just like the one Zora Neale Hurston is wearing in a famous photo,” Pinckey recalled via email. “She was grand, voluptuous, and beautiful. We went out, ran around, had a great time. I moved to Europe, but maybe that was only a part of why we lost touch. I heard from her again some years later. She was living with her daughter in New Jersey. I’m not sure, but I think she says she was writing something new.” Neither can remember if they ever discussed the review.

Jones’ second and last published book was Mischief Makers from 1989, but she has been working on a third novel for a number of years. “Nettie is like the female Ralph Ellison when it comes to finishing that book,” friend and fellow writer Dr. Glenda R. Taylor said. “I’ve read a lot of it over the years, but she’s been working on it for forever.” The book, which was originally titled Detroit: Beauty in This Beast, but is now called Puma, is one that Jones began in 1996. In the intervening years, she worked as a teacher, and little work was done on the manuscript. Recent illnesses have also hindered Jones’ writing.  

Taylor and Jones met in the winter of 2009, and Taylor interviewed the novelist for a series of YouTube videos the following year. “I think what made me what to talk to her was that Nettie is unfiltered. She’s not always politically correct and she doesn’t mind saying it from the top of a mountain.” She prefers Jones’s second book, a period novel about three biracial sisters (Native American and Black) coming of age in the “beautiful wilderness” of Leelanau County, Michigan, and Detroit. “Truthfully, Fish Tales was a little jarring for me. Nettie was writing about subjects that I’d never read about before. I just couldn’t relate to the people in that book.”

* * *

While “eroticism is as old as humankind itself,” as Charles L. Blockson states in his essay “African-American Erotica and Other Curiosities,” it was not always openly depicted in our literature. When Fish Tales came out in 1983, there were no mainstream Black erotica markets. The groundbreaking Erotique Noire/Black Erotica edited by Miriam Decosta-Willis dropped in 1992, and a decade later, into the new millennium, Zane’s nasty novels became standard subway reading. In 2001, Carol Taylor began publishing her Brown Sugar collections, including stories by Nelson George, asha bandele, Rebecca Carroll, Miles Marshall Lewis, and myself.

While I believe that Fish Tales fit perfectly into the erotica category, there are others who thought it was smut. “Some people have tried to label Fish Tales pornographic, but I don’t agree,” Brittany Dennison said. “Jones wasn’t writing about hard cocks and bouncing breasts, but a sexuality that was much more true and real. Yes, there are times when the reader becomes a voyeur and the book can be disquieting and uncomfortable, like peeking through a window and seeing an orgy, but we see the world through Lewis’s eyes, and it’s honest and scary.” 

‘As soon as Lewis transitions from sex to love, that’s when things fall apart.’

At the time of its release, some critics were dismayed by Lewis’s sexuality and so-called counterculture behavior as though Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and Clarence Major had never existed. One reviewer described Fish Tales as an “an excursion into perversion,” Jones recalled. “When I heard that I thought it was interesting. I suppose it was perversion, but it was also the truth.” 

Two years after it was published, Jones told the New York Times that Fish Tales, “dramatizes my reality blended with heavy shots of my fantasies and my fascinations.” While that could describe the writing process of many other novels, Jones’s honesty in conversation and on the page is blunt. To me, Lewis was written in the grand tradition of wild women in pop culture and real life artistic bohemia, ladies whose lights shine bright until the moment that darkness descends in the guise of liquor, sex, drugs, and mental illness. 

From the first time I read Lewis’s story, she reminded me of real and fictional “wild women,” including Zelda Fitzgerald, singer Betty Davis, Holly Golightly, Dorothy Parker, and blaxploitation princess Pam Grier as Coffy, code switching from lovestruck femme to blade-welding woman in a heartbeat. Certainly, both the writer and lead character shared a lust for life that could be as exhilarating and scary as a high-wire act on the sharp edge of a razor blade. Still, no matter how crazy Lewis was, there was an urbane complexity that made her, at least to me, attractive and interesting. 

Back in the ’80s, when I was a young man roaming free through the New York City nighttime landscape, those were the sort of Black women I was most attracted to. They were cool, chic, creative, and maybe a little crazy. These kinds of sisters — actresses, writers, bass players, nightclub doorwomen, or computer programmers — were never mentioned in the trendy texts of the times that included Bright Lights, Big City or Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York. But in real Big Apple life, they were always a part of the scene: at SoHo gallery openings; on Lower East Side and Greenwich Village subway platforms; on the dance floor of Danceteria, the Ritz, and the Garage; or throwing back shots at a Black Rock Coalition shows at CBGB’s and Wetlands.   

In 1985, a year after Bright Lights became my personal manifesto and author McInerney a literary hero, I fell in love and lived with a woman very much like Jones/Lewis for the next four years. She too was from Detroit and was smart, sarcastic, and sexy, but also overly critical and quite volatile. In 1989, after literally kicking me in the ass with her high-heeled shoes when I turned my back on her during an argument, we broke up. I flew solo for the next 24 months, until I met music publicist Lesley Pitts. A voracious reader, she introduced me to the short fiction of Flannery O’Connor, the essays of Fran Lebowitz, and Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales

Though I considered myself well-read, I’d never heard of Jones until Lesley mentioned her. She had lost her copy of Fish Tales by the time we met, and the book was then out of print. I went on a used bookstore treasure hunt and found it at the Strand. The book’s colorful cover, illustrated by George Corsillo, resembled a trendy clothing store ad for Trash & Vaudeville or Zoot in the East Village Eye. A dreamy pop art portrait showed a light-skinned Black woman floating through a glass of bubbly along with a fish, a pair of pink pumps, and a strand of pearls. The woman looked as though she was being waved into Area or the Michael Todd Room. That evening, I surprised Lesley with the book. “I can’t believe you found this,” she said. I felt like I’d passed a test. After rereading it, Lesley suggested that I check it out. 

* * *

Fish Tales was written, published, and marketed as “literary,” but a creepy, noir darkness floats through the text like a black cloud. During the writing process, Jones looked to friends such as Gayl Jones and Marie Brown for guidance. Decades later, Brown remembered, “I read through various drafts of Fish Tales, and it was a one-of-a-kind story. There are very few originals out here being published, but that’s not always a good thing in publishing, because people act like they don’t know how to market it or get it reviewed. From the beginning of reading Nettie’s work, I was aware that she wasn’t writing in the tradition, but she kept working. She was determined to get published.” 

Brown has been a leading literary agent since 1984. She and Jones first met a few years before she began that career, when Brown was editing the short-lived Black women’s magazine Elan. They lived together briefly in Brown’s uptown Sugar Hill brownstone along with culinary writer Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor. Over the years, many artists and musicians have lived under Brown’s roof. “Marie Brown has nurtured many artists and musicians as an editor-agent-friend among other titles,” Jones said. “She gave me knowledge of that new world of publishing that I was entering. Marie let me stay with her in Harlem when she first moved there. So many famous people passed through. She advised me. She was ‘the other editor.’ I owe Marie big time as do many others.”

‘Nettie was grand, in a huge hat, just like the one Zora Neale Hurston is wearing in a famous photo.’

Brown’s now-grown daughter recalled to her mother that Jones made her put away her dolls because the toy’s faces disturbed her. “Nettie was not part of the New York literary world,” Brown said. “There were a group of women that included Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and others who socialized, worked together, and supported one another, but Nettie was an independent. Besides me and Gayl Jones, she had no friendships in that world.” 

Certainly that would explain why Jones hasn’t been anthologized, studied, or talked about as much as the others. While I’m not sure that Nettie Jones’s readership is large enough to be considered a cult, there’s something about her work that touches those of us who have read her. “Nettie didn’t get a lot of reviews and profiles when the books came out, but she became a word-of-mouth writer, the kind of writer that people tell their friends to read,” Brown said.  

* * *

“Some people are born writers, but that’s not me,” Jones told me. While we were on the phone, I looked at her big eyes in a Fern Logan photograph taken many years before our conversation. Her stylish attire reminded me of my mom’s friends during that same era. Jones appeared seductive and smart, but her eyes seemed as though they could stare into your soul. “I’m no Brontë sister or Ralph Ellison,” she said. “I wrote Fish Tales the way I did because I allowed myself to be free and to listen and to take down what I needed. Some writers are afraid of freedom, because they’re concerned with what mama may think. The first agent I had worked with Rosa Guy and Louise Meriwether, but she read three pages of Fish Tales and quit. I guess I was a little rough, but when Gayl got the book to Toni, she warned her about the language.” 

The Detroit section has two chapters that describe the city before and after the 1967 riot that devastated it in ways still being felt today. Jones was living in a lush apartment house where she witnessed the burning city from her 12th-floor window. “It was heartbreaking, but the riot is often used to illustrate when the city began to change. Detroit had begun to change long before that. The truth is much more complex,” she said. Jones received a master’s of education in 1971, and later that year relocated to New York to take graduate courses at the New School for Social Research. She also took classes in copywriting at the Fashion Institute of Technology. 

“Going to school was just an excuse to get to the city,” Jones said. “I wasn’t in love with either of my husbands. The first one I married because of the baby and the second one, we made a deal if I put him through school then it would be my turn. He didn’t mind me going to New York. My daughter refused to come with me on my adventure. She said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘OK, bye.’ She was 13, so of course I was a disgrace in the eyes of the neighbors. Family life wasn’t a happy place for me.” 

At 30 years old, Jones began life anew in the big city of dreams among the gleaming skyscrapers, wondrous museums, great restaurants, and those artistic feelings that began vibrating through her body once she settled down in a grand apartment on 21 West 9th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, five flights up with a skylight. 

“Originally, I was staying on 21st Street, but the person I was renting from wasn’t paying, so the marshals came and kicked me out. My friend Jack Arnold Clark took me in as his roommate. He was the queen of queens, but I was in love with him. He was 6’5” and he made me throw away most of my clothes, because he says they were too Detroit,” Jones said. Although New York City was going through its rotten Big Apple phase of high crime, rampant decay, and near bankruptcy, Jones was living the damn near high life. “Jack was a master cook, and I would go to Jefferson Market for our food. Jack didn’t allow cans in the house or anything frozen. We had an interesting life, me and the charming queen.” 

In addition to the “gorgeous” life she was living with Jack. “I was just drinking scotch, but other people were smoking weed and sniffing coke,” she said. “That was when I began living the story that would become Fish Tales. I was living it, but I didn’t realize it at the time.” Her husband Frank came to visit often, but in 1976 the couple divorced, though they remained friends until his dying day. “I wanted a divorce, because I got tired of being an adulteress. He was probably being one too, because our sex life was not good. When you’re a couple, that’s vital.” 

Jones never finished her classes at the New School, and, with her newfound free time, began to write. “Since I was home, Jack suggested I needed a project and somehow I decided that project would be writing,” she said. Jones began writing regularly, but after an argument with Jack, the two friends had a falling out. “He was a psychiatrist, so he should have known that I was crazy. I had started writing a book that I dramatically threw into the flames of the fireplace when I left. Truthfully, I don’t think there was much.” 

After traveling back to Detroit, she met Todd Duncan, a professor at Wayne State University specializing in American literature who soon became her mentor, lover, and the inspiration for brilliant quadriplegic character Brook that Jones created for Fish Tales. In 1980, Duncan introduced Jones to Gayl Jones when the shy, complicated writer was teaching at the University of Michigan, five years after Morrison edited the manuscript that would become Corregidora. In an article Morrison penned for Mademoiselle, she wrote of Gayl’s work, “I shuddered before the awesome power of this young woman.” 

‘Some writers are afraid of freedom, because they’re concerned with what mama may think.’

Jones shared her work with Gayl, and the two began a long friendship that would see them through several dramas in their lives. “When I read Gayl’s work I was inspired, because her books were so different,” Jones said. “Gayl didn’t tell me how to write, but she did advise me.” Known to be shy, Gayl accepted Jones for who she was. “Gayl never had any fear with me. I seem to have a way of getting close to people that others can’t get close too. She advised me to simply write and not throw away any of the pages. When Fish Tales was finished, she gave me a list of editors to contact. I think Toni was third on the list, so I didn’t contact her until I was rejected by the first two.” 

Without an agent at the time, Jones sent Morrison the manuscript in the mail and it was accepted. Another writer would have been enormously thankful for the opportunity to collaborate with the premier Black editor, but Jones wasn’t impressed with their working relationship. “Toni was my editor, but I only met her once, and that was only because my agent, Julian Bach, who I acquired after the book was sold, insisted,” she said. In addition, Jones felt she should’ve been paid more than $3,000 fee she was paid. “That’s $1,500 before publication and $1,500 after. Things were very different back then, and none of us was going to get rich publishing novels.” 

Jones later realized that their relationship could have been better. “I was not what she was used to handling, because I didn’t know she was the queen. Toni was a literary lion and I didn’t act accordingly, but if I knew then what I know now, I’d be, ‘Yes, yes’m, Ms. Morrison.’” We both laughed. While the Jones women remained friends, Gayl hasn’t published a book since 1998. A week after her novel, The Healing, was released, she and her Black militant husband Bob Higgins were involved in a stand-off with police after a decade spent in hiding. Higgins committed suicide while Gayl watched from across the room as she was being held by police. “I had eaten dinner with both of them at that same table,” Jones said. “She hasn’t published anything since, but I know she is still writing, because that’s all she knows how to do. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was publishing under an alias.”

* * *

The jacket copy for Fish Tales compared the book to William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, which Jones described as “disgusting.” Though far-fetched, it was a sign that she had strayed into a different landscape than her contemporaries. “I was sick and tired of these books that told the same damn story over and over,” she said. “I kept wondering, when do we move ahead and push our stories forward.” Fish Tales was not protest fiction, and Jones seemed guided by Albert Murray’s influential essays in The Omni-Americans. He thought the fictions of James Baldwin and the Black Arts Movement scribes portrayed “Negro” life as one-dimensional and narrow. In his mean-spirited and funny critique of Claude Brown’s bestselling ghetto classic Manchild in the Promised Land, he wrote, “The background experience of U.S. Negroes is a rich source of many things. But many people insist that it is the only source of frustration and crime, degradation, emasculation, and self-hatred.”

“There’s a real divide between what Nettie Jones and Gayl Jones were writing, compared to what Alice Walker and Toni Morrison were doing,” mystery writer and creator of the character Nanette Hayes, a jazz musician detective, Charlotte Carter said. “In Nettie’s work there is a dreamy quality to it that pulls you in as well as the feeling that there is nothing between you and Lewis’s voice.” While Jones’s writing was inspired by the minimalism of lost generation honcho Ernest Hemingway and the eroticism of D.H. Lawrence, Carter also saw a bit of Norman Mailer in the freaky-deaky prose. “Everything comes down to sex. It’s the thing that gives life to you, destroys you. It’s redemptive, it’s religion, it’s a yardstick to how liberal you are and how hip.” 

A few days later, when I was talking to Jones about the sex in her work, she laughed. “A lot of women writers were prudish,” she said. “Those writers were coming on like nuns. I knew I wasn’t the only one who had a baby at 17, not the only one who drank. They acted like they ain’t never spread their legs or turned their butts up.” 

 In the end, it was liquor that became Jones’ worst enemy.  “I think I would’ve been a lot more successful if I hadn’t been drunk all the time,” Jones said. Having had my own battles with the bottle, spending much of the ’90s “in my cups,” as the old folks used to say, I’m not here to pass judgment. No one aims to become an alcoholic, but with enough practice it can happen to anyone. “I cared for no one other than me and my God when I was intoxicated with Jack Barleycorn,” Jones said over email, referencing Jack London’s alcoholic memoirs. “God was going to love me anyway no matter what I did. Narcissism running rampant is a power for many successful human beings, but I have been sober for years after many years of striving to kick this monkey off my back.” 

In addition, she is being treated for manic depression, which she described as a  a chemical condition exacerbated by “memories of childhood molestation by a school teacher, statutory rape by my first husband and father of my child, rejection by my family, expulsion from school in the last semester of my secondary education, stress of always having to wipe out these head starts to madness by being extraordinary as a woman.”

Back in 1991, after I finished reading Fish Tales, I put it back on the shelf and didn’t think about it for two decades. Even in 2002, when I read Carter’s brilliant stand-alone noir Walking Bones (2002), a book that was influenced by Fish Tales and featured a protagonist named Nettie, I had, like so many others, forgotten. “I first read Fish Tales in the ’80s, and though it left a huge impression, I don’t remember thinking about it consciously when I was writing Walking Bones,” Carter said from her Lower East Side apartment. “Lewis was messed-up, articulate, bohemian, and free, and a part of that great artistic milieu that I was so caught-up in when I was younger. She was a Black woman in a world that most people don’t think of Black women in, and there isn’t much writing about us in that way. She was not the standard Black woman character.” 

The irony of Charlotte Carter’s last line — and a fact that I wasn’t aware of until recently — was that Jones, though Black herself, never set out to write an “African American book,” but instead was attempting to craft a “colorless” novel. “I wanted to present my characters as human beings, their character not determined by their color,” Jones said. In an effort to keep race out of the conversation, the fair-skinned, blue-eyed writer even opted to forgo her author’s photo. “I refused to have a photo of me, because I did not wish to have anyone not buy my book because of my race.” 

It was all for nothing because graphic designer George Corsillo hired a light-skinned woman to pose on the cover, and she became Lewis’s avatar. “I hated that cover and I actually went to Random House and asked it to be changed, but the production director literally begged me not to make this move. The book was in final production, so I gave in, but that picture defeated my desire to not include color on the cover or contents.” Most critics, with the exception of Darryl Pinckney, didn’t pick up on the “racial blurring” of Jones’s characters and, obviously judging the book by its cover, referred to Lewis as Black. 

“One of the remarkable aspects of this novel is that race doesn’t matter,” Pinckney wrote in 1984. “There is no sociology; even with descriptions of reddish hair on legs, curly heads, and broad noses it is hard to tell who has rhythm and who hasn’t.” Though Jones lived through the civil rights era in American politics and the Amiri Baraka–founded Black Arts Movement that included women writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Jayne Cortez, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and Ntozake Shange, she refused to carry the banner for Blackness with the same zeal as her soul sistas. 

Jones is well aware of her own Blackness, but she’d prefer not to be referred to as African American. Old-school in that way that my own grandmother was, Jones still uses the words “Negro” and “colored” to describe herself. “Most people don’t say colored anymore. That has become an evil word,” she said. “I don’t use African American or Afro-American, because it’s too political and it’s too limiting. I’m not ashamed of any part of me, I just don’t want to give up the other parts. I’m not ashamed of my dark skin grandmother and I’m connected to all of those nice women in Congress. I’m from Detroit, which means I am of the world.”

After publishing Mischief Makers in 1989, Jones returned to the world of academia. She taught fiction at the University of Michigan and later at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She sometimes included fellow Detroit writer Donald Goines on the reading list. 

“I loved teaching, and the students loved me, because they were free. I didn’t ask them to do stupid things,” she said. Since retiring from academics in 2010, Jones has a had a few major medical setbacks, but “for me the research never ends,” she said. “That’s where we create our stories, our dances, our poetry, our journalism. Everything I look at, it’s like, how can I use that. At this point, I just do it automatically.” Meanwhile, she’s still writing, fighting, and observing the world through her piercing eyes. 

 

* * *

Essayist / short story writer Michael A. Gonzales has written about books for Catapult, Longreads, CrimeReads and The Paris Review. His fiction has appeared in The Root, Brown Sugar, Killens Review, Art Decades, Bronx Biannual, The Darker Mask and Black Pulp. In addition, Gonzales has written about music, visual art and film for The Village Voice, New York, Wax Poetics, HYCIDE, Pitchfork, Newark Bound and Vibe. Upcoming projects includes work in Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and Counter Culture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950-1980, edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre and Gimme the Loot, edited by Gabino Iglesias.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Fact checker: Steven Cohen

 

I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive

Illustration by Homestead - based off photo by Klaus Vedfelt/Getty

Read ‘A World Where Mothers are Seen,’ an introduction to the Writing the Mother Wound series.

Elisabet Velasquez | Longreads | October 2019 | 11 minutes (2,943 words)

 Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

This morning my phone rings, a call from a number I do not recognize. I think it must be someone I do not know or care to speak to. People who truly know me know to text me before calling. Privileged shit.  

The phone sings itself into a siren. I give in to its urgency. My mother has changed her number again. For the fifth time this year. Her mouth is working faster than her mind. She has questions. She wants to know if she can go to court to sue the demons. This time they have gone too far. They’ve resorted to attacking her physically. They keep scratching her, and she wants them out of the house. Can she take them to court?  Maybe, she suggests, I can google it. She wants to get them in trouble somehow. Evicted, arrested? What, exactly, are her options? She asks me if this is a logical thought. If they will laugh her out of the courtroom when she arrives with bruises and scratches as her only proof of spirits. She wants me to know that she has carefully considered the thought that she may sound crazy to the world. She knows I believe her, though. I am sometimes safer than her mind. She pauses for a moment to digress. She could just go to church again and pray. She wants me to know she has exhausted all of the usual answers; the spiritual realm is failing her. There must be something in the physical realm to help her. I must know. 

I am not expecting this phone call. It is the end of the school year and I am in the middle of preparing a lengthy report that showcases all of the work I have done with my students. I pause to think about how much more I do with them than with my own family. Guilt floods my throat. I pack my shame into a swallow.

Most days I avoid my mother at all costs. I’ve spent the past 18 years dedicated to my own motherhood. At 16, I gave birth to my daughter, and four months later I was homeless. When she kicked me out of the house with a newborn, I decided it would be the last time my mother hurt me.

On the other side of the call my mother is panting. There is a race happening somewhere inside her body. All of her organs are running away from her. I think it must be exhausting to occupy her body. 

* * *

I grew up across the street from Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The park is named after a mother of three who was shot through her window in her apartment across the street from the park. The newspapers reported that she was murdered in an act of vengeance by local drug dealers. Maria and her husband were known for physically removing dealers from their block. Like most Bushwick residents in the ’90s, they were dedicated to survival.  


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The park and my mother have similar names. They are both a familiar heavy on the tongue. The “no middle ground” kind of name. The kind of name that is either embraced or discarded. This small connection to my mother always made me feel like I was the park’s daughter, too. I came to expect it to mother me in ways she did not. On the days my mother refused to hug me, my body would melt into the heat from an aluminum slide. In the summer, I entered the park’s table hockey tournaments just to see if I was better at winning something other than my mother’s affection. The park gave me moments where I was good at existing, where I was celebrated for trying. 

Everything in the hood lasts longer than it needs to. Preservation is a skill you learn when you sleep and wake up in a place that is designed to kill you. We do things environmentalists would be proud of: keep butter containers to store our food, use old clothes for rags. Even the way people love in the hood has to be sustainable. Love in the hood is a kind of loyalty to your own survival. Everyone lived by this, even Maria. Even the dealers who killed her. 

* * *

I became increasingly aware of my mother’s mental illness when I began to work in the field of mental health at the age of 22. I was part of a collaborative team that included social workers and psychiatrists. We’d conduct home visits to individuals with mental health issues who would not normally seek treatment on their own. One morning, we received a referral to evaluate a woman’s need for treatment. The referral mentioned hallucinations, both visual and auditory.

We arrived at an apartment building in the Bronx. The hallways were alive with the smell of urine and cheap cologne. The brown apartment door had a straw cross covering the peephole. We knocked with a careful hand. The intensity of the rapping is important. Too soft and you risk not being heard over the din of a New York City home: children, Caso Cerrado, Biggie Smalls or Hector Lavoe. Too loud and you’re the police or a loan shark.  

¿Quién es?” The woman we went to visit, I’ll call her Marta, wanted answers before she made a decision to open the door. We gave a brief introduction to the cross. An emaciated version of my mother slowly creaked open the door and slid her eyes through her carefully measured opening. My coworker introduced herself as someone sent to help. The great white hope. Marta dismissed her and darted her eyes my way. “I’m sorry, no hablo inglés.” My coworker flashed a knowing smile to me. The great Latin help. 

On the days my mother refused to hug me, my body would melt into the heat from an aluminum slide.

As someone whose highest degree was a GED, I had no clinical role on the team. I was a notetaker, at most. I did, however, feel a great sense of responsibility to ensure that I was careful interpreting not just language but also culture. Cultural practice is sometimes categorized incorrectly as disordered or pathological. 

We sat across from Marta on white sofa cushions kept suffocated under clear plastic.  We conducted the intake. “Do you sometimes hear voices? What do they tell you? What do you see?” Marta was religious. The answers leaking from her mouth were a familiar church to me. My mother used them. Marta’s words spilled onto my coworker’s notepad, which drowned in words like espíritus, demonio, brujería. I watched as my coworker used clinical language to help her float over what she could not make sense of. Words like: religious preoccupation, delusions, rule out paranoid schizophrenia. I was confused. Marta was Pentecostal like mami. It was not unusual for me to hear someone say that they heard the voice of God or felt or saw spirits. It was not uncommon to go to church on a Sunday and witness an exorcism. I left Marta’s house wondering if my mother was mentally ill or just a tortured Christian?

* * *

(& because you watched your mother’s hands praise the sky
you have held your god accountable for your suffering
& because you never heard I love you
it is neither a noun nor a verb but mostly a myth that you cannot trust truly exists
& because your mother’s mouth was always a grenade
you are sometimes afraid to kiss your children
& because you were always told you were wrong
you apologize for everything, even for your joy
& because no one has ever held your hand across a busy intersection
you know exactly how close you can get to death before it becomes dangerous
so close to dying
daring yourself to live.)

* * *

Sometimes I am my mother’s anger. Sometimes I am all of her monsters. I fought so hard to be nothing like her and here I am, lighting the same fire that burned me.

Growing up, my mother would often say the devil was using me. This was her way of explaining any behavior that was not agreeable to her. This was her way of justifying any reaction of hers that was abusive in nature. One Sunday, just as we were getting ready for church, my mother was ironing our church clothes. While I waited, I began clowning around with my older sister. I don’t recall what in my laugh triggered the burning or what happened moments before she pressed the iron into my arm. I do recall the moments after, the smell of melting flesh, the flap of skin hanging off my arm, the moment I first met my blood.

I fought so hard to be nothing like her and here I am, lighting the same fire that burned me.

This moment paralyzed me in such a way that I did not cry. My unemotional response to being burned with an iron made me question if I was indeed demonic. If I was used to this kind of hell. She wiped my skin off of the iron and back onto the dress as I watched the dress steam under the weight of my trauma. 

I walked solemnly to the bathroom and applied toothpaste to my open wound. I only cried when I realized I wasted the last of the toothpaste. How in the morning my skin would begin regenerating and there would be no healing for my mother’s teeth. 

* * *

Some days, I look in the mirror and search for the parts of my face that are not my mother’s madness. 

As a child, my mother’s behavior was a cruelty I learned to love. As an adult, I want to make excuses for her abuse and emotional abandonment. In my writing, I search for reasons to forgive — I need her to have a valid excuse. I need her cruelty to have a name since things with names are easier to forgive. 

At night, mami’s cruelty was transformed into a somber litany. She would kneel and pray by the edge of the bed we shared. Her prayers were a gloomy bedtime story. They were one part devotion and one part autobiographical confessional detailing her years suffering physical, sexual and emotional abuse as a child. One by one, she would list every person who had done her harm. They were sinners, she was merciful. I would listen to her ask God to forgive them until I fell asleep. 

I’d very much like to talk about forgiveness, both the burden and the gift of it. When forgiveness is the only thing that is yours, it becomes a thing to be earned. I decided my mother would have to work for my forgiveness. But there was a point in my search for healing I realized I had been hoarding forgiveness as a means to receive a kind of closeness from mami — a way to get her to need me. I was so starved of her attention that I held all of her abuse hostage and used forgiveness as a negotiation tactic. If she could just apologize, if she could just acknowledge my pain, if she could just see me, then I could forgive her and heal. My mother never has and probably never will admit to hurting us so intentionally, and after that realization, came another one. For many years, I had been conflating forgiveness with absolution. I believed granting her forgiveness meant she would be free from any wrongdoing. Unlike my mother and the abusers she prayed for, there was no mercy on my tongue for her. I held onto forgiveness because I did not feel she was deserving of any release of guilt, obligation or punishment. I only recently began to think of forgiveness as a gift to myself rather than a gift to her. I began to realize that I was deserving of all the things I did not want to give: a release of guilt, obligation, and punishment. I thought of all the ways I had already granted forgiveness to my mother through my writing. How I would carefully write about the kind parts of her, real or imagined. Or how I would write poems that were empathetic to her pain. These small acts of mercy serve as examples of forgiveness as a gift to the self; validating her humanity so that I am able to believe in my own. 

* * *

I promise myself I will give my children a life full of memories they can place in albums. I will pull them out of a dusty basement and show embarrassing pictures of them at family events like I see the white people do in the movies. I buy the new iPhone because of its camera feature. I take more pictures than I have storage for. I delete apps on my phone to make room for more pictures. I take a picture of myself. It is not beautiful; I do not share it with anyone other than my sadness. I keep it, the way I have learned to keep ugly secrets. I look older. Compared to what version of myself? I do not have baby pictures. Mami could not afford to keep buying film, or she lost them all in a fire, or she is the fire, or she did not believe in archiving struggle or poverty or children from men who did not love her.

* * *

Mami is an asylum I have escaped from. I do not visit my mother as often as a daughter should. When I do, she offers me her best chair. “Can you believe they threw this out?”  I can. The chair is tired and groans underneath the insistence of my weight. Her home is full of things other people do not want. Broken radios & black & white television sets. Bibles stuffed with yellowed bills. I remember being one of these things. Her apartment smells. There is something dead here and for once it is not me. I look alive, she says. She means that I have eaten a full meal today and she has not. It is an awful feeling.

I reek of privilege and guilt. I cannot remember the last time I was hungry and it was not a choice. She is still poor. She tells me that I look whiter than before, like a gringa, which means she thinks I am successful now. I am a new kind of poor. The kind that complains they can only afford a car or an apartment but not both. The kind that makes economic decisions in the summer around using the fan or the air conditioner. The kind that skips one bill to pay another. Still, I can buy food at the supermarket without the government’s permission. I reach in my pocket and give her a $20 bill. It is not enough. I pull out another 20. This time I am not enough. I am a daughter trying to buy my mother’s smile. It is after all why I’ve come to visit. 

There is something dead here and for once it is not me.

I want to take her picture. I want proof that she is capable of happy. I want a memory I do not have. Mami does not smile in photos. She stares at the camera or away from it. Her mouth is partly open, a paralyzed prayer. Her face is grim and curious, even bold. She dares me to document her sadness, to look at the way she lets it live on her face. How she makes a home for things people do not want. I go home and take a selfie. Another. Another. Until my mother’s face disappears. 

I had to leave my mother so that I could live.  

* * *

Being unmothered means a lifetime of caring for what does not care for you. It is a funeral procession dedicated to mourning the mother archetype. In Boricua culture, the mother is a revered saint with hands like prayer and a bitter but loving mouth. In the case that my mother’s hands were ever a prayer, I am still waiting for an answer. If her mouth ever knew love, she never gave herself permission to taste it. Some days when I look in the mirror I see her torture. It is a different kind of anguish when your own eyes haunt you. A grayscale gradient in my skin reminds me of an organ disconnected from its host.

The thing about organs that make their way out of the body intended to feed them, is that their survival depends on a very specific preservation process. Organs separated from the host body can survive for a while if they are kept chilled in a preservation solution, but they can ultimately never last for longer periods without a host.

Being unmothered is a lot like this: 

  1. The exit: leaving the body that gave you life.
  2. The winter: a chilled state of unbelonging to anything or anyone while trying to maintain your vitality.   
  3. The transplant: finding new life in other bodies.

Leaving my mother so that I could survive has meant finding a page, a lover, a friend to abide with me. When I have no one to make a home of, I am the coldest winter. I lose sleep at the thought of running out of ways to love myself. I am most times the only thing keeping me alive. A tattoo of a tree in its wintered state lives on my forearm. I have been this tree. My mother has been this tree: a stump of a woman with a barren ensemble of branches, an overgrown sapling with no fruit or leaves as evidence of its existence or value. No proof of life on the body except for the body itself. Sometimes simply the idea that I exist is enough. Other times I have to tattoo it somewhere, my arm, a blank page, the deep-inked process of self-preservation. 

* * *

Elisabet Velasquez is a Boricua Writer from Bushwick, Brooklyn. Her work has been featured in Muzzle Magazine, Winter Tangerine, Centro Voces, Latina Magazine, We Are Mitú, Tidal and more. She is a 2017 Poets House Fellow and the 2017 winner of Button Poetry Video Poetry Contest. Her work is forthcoming in Martín Espada’s anthology What Saves Us: Poems Of Empathy and Outrage In The Age Of Trump. She is currently working on her memoir. You can find more of her work on Instagram @elisabetvelasquezpoetry.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

‘People Can Become Houses’

Adam Shemper / Grove Press

Danielle A. Jackson  | Longreads | September 2019 | 18 minutes (4,289 words)

The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom’s debut memoir, tells the story of the light-green shotgun house in New Orleans East her mother, Ivory Mae, bought in 1961. At 19, Ivory Mae was the first in her immediate family to own a home; her mother had been born on a plantation in St. Charles Parish. Over years of renovations, the house acquired a second floor at its rear and a layer of pale yellow vinyl siding. 

The book is also about a neighborhood, a city, a nation, and how generations of systemic neglect weigh on the human beings who bear it. New Orleans East was a vast, mostly undeveloped marshland in the early ’60s, a fledgling suburb within the city held afloat by investment from retailers and oil developers. Its neighborhoods were, at the time, predominantly white. The public schools were not yet integrated. 

The Brooms built a lively home life there. Sarah, the youngest of 12, was born in 1979. Largely missing from city maps and narratives that highlight the tourist-friendly French Quarter, New Orleans East fell into disrepair by the late ’80s. As investors pulled out, its streets became lined with abandoned apartment buildings and men in cars soliciting sex.

Sarah was just 6 months old when her father, Simon Broom, died suddenly at home. She came of age with the ache of his absence. The house became increasingly difficult to maintain, and shame settled in alongside the family’s grief.

 

Throughout The Yellow House’s four sections, which Broom calls “movements,” after the parts of a symphony, she pulls from hundreds of hours of interviews to include exceptionally long passages where her family members speak for themselves; the book is, in part, an oral history. She says it is because their stories “compose” hers. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans East and destroyed their home. By then, Broom had a magazine job in New York and had been gone from her hometown for nearly a decade. Her Louisiana family recounts the storm in “Water,” the book’s riveting third movement. In the fourth, the author unravels the questions the full text poses: about grief and identity, American racism and environmental catastrophe, family and womanhood and the multiple meanings of home.

The Yellow House is beautifully wrought on a grand scale and at the level of the sentence. It is intricately researched, narratively complex, and dives into the most fundamental questions of our time: Who am I? How did I become me? How does one survive catastrophe when it is inevitable? How does one rebuild? The Yellow House was longlisted for a National Book Award and became a New York Times best seller in late August. I spoke to Broom two days before its release. A condensed version of our conversation follows. 

*

Longreads: Even before Toni Morrison passed away, I’d noticed certain things about The Yellow House that reminded me of her novels. Beloved begins by mapping the house where Sethe and her family live, the place that is haunted, with an address: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.” There’s a scene in the documentary The Pieces I Am showing how Morrison sketched out a floor plan of this house. The architecture and physicality of a house and how a house can live as an object, but also as an imagined thing, a goal, a part of us, is really the foundation of your book. Could you talk about Toni Morrison’s influence on you and your work?

Sarah M. Broom: I remember finding out that Toni Morrison had died. It was rainy and dim where I was in upstate New York, and I kept thinking, This day is so low hanging. That’s how I kept imagining it. Almost like the sky was hovering close, just above my head. I felt grief. It was bottomless and familial. The way that one grieves a family member is like grieving a part of a system, a part of an organism. And I knew this, but I really knew this after she died — she was literally a part of my system. A part of what it meant for me to be a writer. She was so interwoven in these layered ways into the ways in which I think. 

In The Yellow House, I talk about “water having a perfect memory” [from the essay “The Site of Memory”]. Most people only mention that part of the essay, about how water is forever trying to get back to where it was. But the part that comes after that is equally as important. She says, “Writers are like that, remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.” Writing this book for me was driven in some deep way by that quotation, which is really about the ways in which Morrison thought about and dealt with place. It was a given and known thing that she was from Lorain, Ohio. I think that in a way she was always writing deeply about place and about belonging.

There was an interview a few years ago in the Telegraph, where she is talking about a conversation with her sister, Lois, who still lived in their hometown. Her sister told her the street where they grew up is gone. In the interview she says that her sister drew her a map of the street and wrote in the names of the people who used to live in the houses on their street. They figured out that 20 houses were gone. What Morrison said in the interview is that loss, that absence of the houses and all the memories they held, it’s a death. That idea fueled me as I was trying to understand my book and the architecture of it. 

Another thing about Morrison, which matters so much to me: Often, especially with writers of color, people focus a lot on our story and less on our craft. Toni Morrison wrote sentences that were so multi-varied and layered and also were road maps to something. Beyond that, they had an innate musicality to them and they made you feel. I think often when certain writers make you feel, people misunderstand the difficulty of that. Making a person feel something is the greatest thing an artist can do, and it’s all about craft. It’s about rhythm and cadence and tone.

Is it also about what you have to take out to get to that? What isn’t there?

Absolutely. There is a composed-ness. It’s jazz-ical. Great language and great writing is jazz-ical, it’s spontaneous but it’s super controlled. Whenever I was at a point that I felt that I needed to remember the sounds of what writing could do, I always read Toni Morrison. And that’s a gift. I’ll probably be rereading her throughout this entire book tour because I can’t imagine not having her voice every single day. 

Read more…

Regarding the Interpretation of Others

Jean-Regis Rouston/Roger Viollet via Getty Images

Patrick Nathan | Longreads | September 2019 | 30 minutes (8,235 words)


“The only review of Under the Sign of Saturn would be the eighth essay — an essay describing me as I have described them. The pathos of intellectual avidity, the collector (mind as every-thing), melancholy & history, arbitrating the moral claim versus aestheticism, and so forth. The intellectual as an impossible project.”

Susan Sontag, journal entry, May 1980


 

1:

Differently, we buy and borrow, and steal, our ongoing educations. American writers tend to forget this, even dissuade it. There is an assumption — general, if not unconscious — that “we” have all read Raymond Carver and Joan Didion, seen Dazed and Confused and The Princess Bride, and exhausted “prestige” television from Lost to Big Little Lies. That these works are canon in a post- or anti-canonical culture highlights the need for inexhaustible and pluralistic inspiration against the deprivation of that need. What’s worse, if you are labeled — black, queer, immigrant, disabled, trans, or a woman — those expectations constrict; the canon tightens. To be a gay writer means one must have read Edmund White and seen Mean Girls; to write as a black woman means one must have read Angela Davis and seen Kara Walker’s silhouettes. What was supposed to liberate our literary sensibilities has reduced us, clinically, to trained specialists. Under this pressure, so carefully curated and categorized, it’s difficult to will one’s own work into being. To learn passively, and ultimately write passively, is the great cultural temptation.

Yes, I have been reading — and reading about — Susan Sontag. There is nothing passive in her legacy. In her combined erudition, ambition, and seriousness, she has few peers, and for several years she has symbolized my aspirations as a writer — the uncompromising rigor with which she approached her essays; her self-proclaimed interest in “everything”; an urgency in dissenting, when ethically necessary, from received opinion; her energy in consuming art constantly; and the esteem, to the end of her life, in which she held literature, above all fiction. Her passion is contagious. Sontag’s narcotic approach to art and experience is, for a provincial writer with little access, renewably invigorating; and because Sontag’s lifetime of work is willed, Nietzscheanly, from her passions, reading about her life is its own invigorating project. In this, Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work, at 832 pages, is certainly her legacy’s largest complement. Read more…

When American Media Was (Briefly) Diverse

Photo by Jessica Felicio, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Danielle A. Jackson | Longreads | September 2019 | 16 minutes (4,184 words)

The late summer night Tupac died, I listened to All Eyez on Me at a record store in an East Memphis strip mall. The evening felt eerie and laden with meaning. It was early in the school year, 1996, and through the end of the decade, Adrienne, Jessica, Karida and I were a crew of girlfriends at our high school. We spent that night, and many weekend nights, at Adrienne’s house.

Our public school had been all white until a trickle of black students enrolled during the 1966–67 school year. That was 12 years after Brown v. Board of Education and six years after the local NAACP sued the school board for maintaining dual systems in spite of the ruling. In 1972, a federal district court ordered busing; more than 40,000 white students abandoned the school system by 1980. The board created specialized and accelerated courses in some of its schools, an “optional program,” in response. Students could enter the programs regardless of district lines if they met certain academic requirements. This kind of competition helped retain some white students, but also created two separate tracks within those institutions — a tenuous, half-won integration. It meant for me, two decades later, a “high-performing school” with a world of resources I knew to be grateful for, but at a cost. There were few black teachers. Black students in the accelerated program were scattered about, small groups of “onlies” in all their classes. Black students who weren’t in the accelerated program got rougher treatment from teachers and administrators. An acrid grimness hung in the air. It felt like being tolerated rather than embraced. 

My friends and I did share a lunch period. At our table, we traded CDs we’d gotten in the mail: Digable Planets’s Blowout Comb, D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar, the Fugees’ The Score. An era of highly visible black innovation was happening alongside a growing awareness of my own social position. I didn’t have those words then, but I had my enthusiasms. At Maxwell’s concert one sweaty night on the Mississippi, we saw how ecstasy, freedom, and black music commingle and coalesce into a balm. We watched the films of the ’90s wave together, and while most had constraining gender politics, Love Jones, the Theodore Witcher–directed feature about a group of brainy young artists in Chicago, made us wish for a utopic city that could make room for all we would become. 


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We also loved to read the glossies — what ’90s girl didn’t? We especially salivated over every cover of Vibe. Adrienne and I were fledgling writers who experimented a lot and adored English class. In the ’90s, the canon was freshly expanding: We read T.S. Eliot alongside Kate Chopin and Chinua Achebe. Something similar was happening in magazines. Vibe’s mastheads and ad pages were full of black and brown people living, working, and loving together and out front — a multicultural ideal hip-hop had made possible. Its “new black aesthetic” meant articles were fresh and insightful but also hyper-literary art historical objects in their own rights. Writers were fluent in Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison as well as Biggie Smalls. By the time Tupac died, Kevin Powell had spent years contextualizing his life within the global struggle for black freedom. “There is a direct line from Tupac in a straitjacket [on the popular February 1994 cover] to ‘It’s Obama Time’ [the September 2007 cover, one of the then senator’s earliest],” former editor Rob Kenner told Billboard in a Vibe oral history. He’s saying Vibe helped create Obama’s “coalition of the ascendent” — the black, Latinx, and young white voters who gave the Hawaii native two terms. For me, the pages reclaimed and retold the American story with fewer redactions than my history books. They created a vision of what a multiethnic nation could be.

* * *

“There was a time when journalism was flush,” Danyel Smith told me on a phone call from a summer retreat in Massachusetts. She became music editor at Vibe in 1994, and was editor in chief during the late ’90s and again from 2006 to 2008. The magazine, founded by Quincy Jones and Time, Inc. executives in 1992, was the “first true home of the culture we inhabit today,” according to Billboard. During Smith’s first stint as editor in chief, its circulation more than doubled. She wrote the story revealing R. Kelly’s marriage to then 15-year-old Aaliyah, as well as cover features on Janet Jackson, Wesley Snipes, and Whitney Houston. Smith was at the helm when the magazine debuted its Obama covers in 2007 — Vibe was the first major publication to endorse the freshman senator. When she described journalism as “flush,” Smith was talking about the late ’80s, when she started out in the San Francisco Bay. “Large cities could support with advertising two, sometimes three, alternative news weeklies and dailies,” she said.

‘There is a direct line from Tupac in a straitjacket [on the popular February 1994 cover] to ‘It’s Obama Time’ [the September 2007 cover, one of the then senator’s earliest].’

The industry has collapsed and remade itself many times since then. Pew reports that between 2008 and 2018, journalism jobs declined 25 percent, a net loss of about 28,000 positions. Business Insider reports losses at 3,200 jobs this year alone. Most reductions have been in newspapers. A swell in digital journalism has not offset the losses in print, and it’s also been volatile, with layoffs several times over the past few years, as outlets “pivot to video” or fail to sustain venture-backed growth. Many remaining outlets have contracted, converting staff positions into precarious freelance or “permalance” roles. In a May piece for The New Republic, Jacob Silverman wrote about the “yawning earnings gap between the top and bottom echelons” of journalism reflected in the stops and starts of his own career. After a decade of prestigious headlines and publishing a book, Silverman called his private education a “sunken cost” because he hadn’t yet won a coveted staff role. If he couldn’t make it with his advantageous beginnings, he seemed to say, the industry must be truly troubled. The prospect of “selling out” — of taking a corporate job or work in branded content — seemed more concerning to him than a loss of the ability to survive at all. For the freelance collective Study Hall, Kaila Philo wrote how the instability in journalism has made it particularly difficult for black women to break into the industry, or to continue working and developing if they do. The overall unemployment rate for African Americans has been twice that of whites since at least 1972, when the government started collecting the data by race. According to Pew, newsroom employees are more likely to be white and male than U.S. workers overall. Philo’s report mentions the Women’s Media Center’s 2018 survey on women of color in U.S. news, which states that just 2.62 percent of all journalists are black women. In a write-up of the data, the WMC noted that fewer than half of newspapers and online-only newsrooms had even responded to the original questionnaire. 

* * *

According to the WMC, about 2.16 percent of newsroom leaders are black women. If writers are instrumental in cultivating our collective conceptions of history, editors are arguably more so. Their sensibilities influence which stories are accepted and produced. They shape and nurture the voices and careers of writers they work with. It means who isn’t there is noteworthy. “I think it’s part of the reason why journalism is dying,” Smith said. “It’s not serving the actual communities that exist.” In a July piece for The New Republic, Clio Chang called the push for organized labor among freelancers and staff writers at digital outlets like Vox and Buzzfeed, as well as at legacy print publications like The New Yorker, a sign of hope for the industry.  “In the most basic sense, that’s the first norm that organizing shatters — the isolation of workers from one another,” Chang wrote. Notably, Vox’s union negotiated a diversity initiative in their bargaining agreement, mandating 40 to 50 percent of applicants interviewed come from underrepresented backgrounds.

“Journalism is very busy trying to serve a monolithic imaginary white audience. And that just doesn’t exist anymore,” Smith told me. U.S. audiences haven’t ever been truly homogeneous. But the media institutions that serve us, like most facets of American life, have been deliberately segregated and reluctant to change. In this reality, alternatives sprouted. Before Vibe’s launch, Time, Inc. executives wondered whether a magazine focused on black and brown youth culture would have any audience at all. Greg Sandow, an editor at Entertainment Weekly at the time, told Billboard, “I’m summoned to this meeting on the 34th floor [at the Time, Inc. executive offices]. And here came some serious concerns. This dapper guy in a suit and beautifully polished shoes says, ‘We’re publishing this. Does that mean we have to put black people on the cover?’” Throughout the next two decades, many publications serving nonwhite audiences thrived. Vibe spun off, creating Vibe Vixen in 2004. The circulations of Ebony, JET, and Essence, legacy institutions founded in 1945, 1951, and 1970, remained robust — the New York Times reported in 2000 that the number of Essence subscribers “sits just below Vogue magazine’s 1.1 million and well above the 750,000 of Harper’s Bazaar.” One World and Giant Robot launched in 1994, Latina and TRACE in 1996. Honey’s preview issue, with Lauryn Hill on the cover, hit newsstands in 1999. Essence spun off to create Suede, a fashion and culture magazine aimed at a “polyglot audience,” in 2004. A Magazine ran from 1989 to 2001; Hyphen launched with two young reporters at the helm the following year. In a piece for Columbia Journalism Review, Camille Bromley called Hyphen a celebration of “Asian culture without cheerleading” invested in humor, complication, and complexity, destroying the model minority myth. Between 1956 and 2008, the Chicago Defender, founded in 1905 and a noted, major catalyst for the Great Migration, published a daily print edition. During its flush years, the Baltimore Afro-American, founded in 1892, published separate editions in Philadelphia, Richmond, and Newark.

Before Vibe’s launch, Time, Inc. executives wondered whether a magazine focused on black and brown youth culture would have any audience at all.

The recent instability in journalism has been devastating for the black press. The Chicago Defender discontinued its print editions in July. Johnson Publications, Ebony and JET’s parent company, filed bankruptcy earlier this year after selling the magazines to a private equity firm in 2016. Then it put up for sale its photo archive — more than 4 million prints and negatives. Its record of black life throughout the 20th century includes images of Emmett Till’s funeral, in which the 14-year-old’s mutilated body lay in state, and Moneta Sleet Jr.’s Pulitzer Prize–winning image of Coretta Scott King mourning with her daughter, Bernice King. It includes casually elegant images of black celebrities at home and shots of everyday street scenes and citizens — the dentists and mid-level diplomats who made up the rank and file of the ascendant. John H. Johnson based Ebony and JET on LIFE, a large glossy heavy on photojournalism with a white, Norman Rockwell aesthetic and occasional dehumanizing renderings of black people. Johnson’s publications, like the elegantly attired stars of Motown, were meant as proof of black dignity and humanity. In late July, four large foundations formed an historic collective to buy the archive, shepherd its preservation, and make it available for public access.

The publications’ written stories are also important. Celebrity profiles offered candid, intimate views of famous, influential black figures and detailed accounts of everyday black accomplishment. Scores of skilled professionals ushered these pieces into being: Era Bell Thompson started out at the Chicago Defender and spent most of her career in Ebony’s editorial leadership. Tennessee native Lynn Norment worked for three decades as a writer and editor at the publication. André Leon Talley and Elaine Welteroth passed through Ebony for other jobs in the industry. Taken together, their labor was a massive scholarly project, a written history of a people deemed outside of it.

Black, Latinx, and Asian American media are not included in the counts on race and gender WMC reports. They get their data from the American Society of News Editors (ASNE), and Cristal Williams Chancellor, WMC’s director of communications, told me she hopes news organizations will be more “aggressive” in helping them “accurately indicate where women are in the newsroom.” While men dominate leadership roles in mainstream newsrooms, news wires, TV, and audio journalism, publications targeting multicultural audiences have also had a reputation for gender trouble, with a preponderance of male cover subjects, editorial leaders, and features writers. Kim Osorio, the first woman editor in chief at The Source, was fired from the magazine after filing a complaint about sexual harassment. Osorio won a settlement for wrongful termination in 2006 and went on to help launch BET.com and write a memoir before returning to The Source in 2012. Since then, she’s made a career writing for TV.  

* * *

This past June, Nieman Lab published an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic since 2016, and Adrienne LaFrance, the magazine’s executive editor. The venerable American magazine was founded in Boston in 1857. Among its early supporters were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. It sought to promote an “American ideal,” a unified yet pluralistic theory of American aesthetics and politics. After more than a century and a half of existence, women writers are not yet published in proportion to women’s share of the country’s population. The Nieman piece focused on progress the magazine has made in recent years toward equitable hiring and promoting: “In 2016, women made up just 17 percent of editorial leadership at The Atlantic. Today, women account for 63 percent of newsroom leaders.” A few days after the piece’s publication, a Twitter user screen-capped a portion of the interview where Goldberg was candid about areas in which the magazine continues to struggle:

 

GOLDBERG: We continue to have a problem with the print magazine cover stories — with the gender and race issues when it comes to cover story writing. [Of the 15 print issues The Atlantic has published since January 2018, 11 had cover stories written by men. — Ed.]

 It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males. What I have to do — and I haven’t done this enough yet — is again about experience versus potential. You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going!

That’s one way to approach it, but the other way to approach it is, huh, you’re really good at this and you have a lot of potential and you’re 33 and you’re burning with ambition, and that’s great, so let us put you on a deliberate pathway toward writing 10,000-word cover stories. It might not work. It often doesn’t. But we have to be very deliberate and efficient about creating the space for more women to develop that particular journalistic muscle.

My Twitter feed of writers, editors, and book publicists erupted, mostly at the excerpt’s thinly veiled statement on ability. Women in my timeline responded with lists of writers of longform — books, articles, and chapters — who happened to be women, or people of color, or some intersection therein. Goldberg initially said he’d been misquoted. When Laura Hazard Owen, the deputy editor at Nieman who’d conducted the interview, offered proof that Goldberg’s statements had been delivered as printed, he claimed he had misspoken. Hazard Owen told the L.A. Times she believes that The Atlantic is, overall, “doing good work in diversifying the staff there.”

Taken together, their labor was a massive scholarly project, a written history of a people deemed outside of it.

Still, it’s a difficult statement for a woman writer of color to hear. “You literally are looking at me and all my colleagues, all my women colleagues and all my black colleagues, all my colleagues of color and saying, ‘You’re not really worthy of what we do over here.’ It’s mortifying,” Smith told me. Goldberg’s admission may have been a misstatement, but it mirrors the continued whiteness of mainstream mastheads. It checks out with the Women’s Media Center’s reports and the revealing fact of how much data is missing from even those important studies. It echoes the stories of black women who work or worked in journalism, who have difficulty finding mentors, or who burn out from the weight of wanting to serve the chronically underserved. It reflects my own experiences, in which I have been told multiple times in a single year that I am the only black woman editor that a writer has ever had. But it doesn’t corroborate my long experience as a reader. What happened to the writers and editors and multihyphenates from the era of the multicultural magazine, that brief flash in the 90’s and early aughts when storytellers seemed to reflect just how much people of color lead in creating American culture? Who should have formed a pipeline of leaders for mainstream publications when the industry began to contract?

* * *

In addition to her stints at Vibe, Smith also edited for Billboard, Time, Inc. publications, and published two novels. She was culture editor for ESPN’s digital magazine The Undefeated before going on book leave. Akiba Solomon is an author, editor of two books, and is currently senior editorial director at Colorlines, a digital news daily published by Race Forward. She started an internship at YSB in 1995 before going on to write and edit for Jane, Glamour, Essence, Vibe Vixen, and The Source. She told me that even at magazines without predominantly black staff, she’d worked with other black people, though not often directly. At black magazines, she was frequently edited by black women. “I’ve been edited by Robin Stone, Vanessa DeLuca [formerly editor-in-chief of Essence, currently running the Medium vertical ZORA], Ayana Byrd, Kierna Mayo, Cori Murray, and Michaela Angela Davis.” Solomon’s last magazine byline was last year, an Essence story on black women activists who organize in culturally relevant ways to fight and prevent sexual assault.

Solomon writes infrequently for publications now, worn down by conditions in journalism she believes are untenable. At the hip-hop magazines, the sexism was a deterrent, and later, “I was seeing a turn in who was getting the jobs writing about black music” when it became mainstream. “Once folks could divorce black music from black culture it was a wrap,” she said. At women’s magazines, Solomon felt stifled by “extremely narrow” storytelling. Publishing, in general, Solomon believes, places unsustainable demands on its workers. 

When we talk about the death of print, it is infrequent that we also talk about the conditions that make it ripe for obsolescence. The reluctant slowness with which mainstream media has integrated its mastheads (or kept them integrated) has meant the industry’s content has suffered. And the work environments have placed exorbitant burdens on the people of color who do break through. In Smith’s words:

You feel that you want to serve these people with good and quality content, with good and quality graphics, with good and quality leadership. And as a black person, as a black woman, regardless of whether you’re serving a mainstream audience, which I have at a Billboard and at Time, Inc., or a multicultural audience, which I have at Vibe, it is difficult. And it’s actually taken me a long time to admit that to myself. It does wear you down. And I ask myself why have I always, always stayed in a job two and a half to three years, especially when I’m editing? It’s because I’m tired by that time.

In a July story for Politico, black journalists from The New York Times and the Associated Press talked about how a sophisticated understanding of race is critical to ethically and thoroughly covering the current political moment. After the August 3 massacre in El Paso, Lulu Garcia-Navarro wrote how the absence of Latinx journalists in newsrooms has created a vacuum that allows hateful words from the president to ring unchallenged. Lacking the necessary capacity, many organizations cover race related topics, often matters of life and death, without context or depth. As outlets miss the mark, journalists of color may take on the added work of acting as the “the black public editor of our newsrooms,” Astead Herndon from the Times said on a Buzzfeed panel. Elaine Welteroth wrote about the physical exhaustion she experienced during her tenure as editor in chief at Teen Vogue in her memoir More Than Enough. She was the second African American editor in chief in parent company Condé Nast’s 110 year history:

I was too busy to sleep, too frazzled to eat, and TMI: I had developed a bizarre condition where I felt the urge to pee — all the time. It was so disruptive that I went to see a doctor, thinking it may have been a bladder infection.

Instead, I found myself standing on a scale in my doctor’s office being chastised for accidentally dropping nine more pounds. These were precious pounds that my naturally thin frame could not afford to lose without leaving me with the kind of bony body only fashion people complimented.

Condé Nast shuttered Teen Vogue’s print edition in 2017, despite record-breaking circulation, increased political coverage, and an expanded presence on the internet during Welteroth’s tenure. Welteroth left the company to write her book and pursue other ventures.

Mitzi Miller was editor in chief of JET when it ran the 2012 cover story on Jordan Davis, a Florida teenager shot and killed by a white vigilante over his loud music. “At the time, very few news outlets were covering the story because it occurred over a holiday weekend,” she said. To write the story, Miller hired Denene Millner, an author of more than 20 books. With interviews from Jordan’s parents, Ron Davis and Lucy McBath, the piece went viral and was one of many stories that galvanized the contemporary American movement against police brutality.

Miller started working in magazines in 2000, and came up through Honey and Jane before taking the helm at JET then Ebony in 2014. She edits for the black website theGrio when she can and writes an occasional piece for a print magazine roughly once a year. Shrinking wages have made it increasingly difficult to make a life in journalism, she told me. After working at a number of dream publications, Miller moved on to film and TV development. 

Both Miller and Solomon noted how print publications have been slow to evolve. “It’s hard to imagine now, particularly to digital native folks, but print was all about a particular format. It was about putting the same ideas into slightly different buckets,” Solomon said. On the podcast Hear to Slay, Vanessa DeLuca spoke about how reluctant evolution may have imperiled black media. “Black media have not always … looked forward in terms of how to build a brand across multiple platforms.” Some at legacy print institutions still seem to hold internet writing in lower esteem (“You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going!” were Goldberg’s words to Nieman Lab). Often, pay structures reflect this hierarchy. Certainly, the internet’s speed and accessibility have lowered barriers to entry and made it such that rigor is not always a requirement for publication. But it’s also changed information consumption patterns and exploded the possibilities of storytelling.

Michael Gonzales, a frequent contributor to this site and a writer I’ve worked with as an editor, started in magazines in the 1980s as a freelancer. He wrote for The Source and Vibe during a time that overlapped with Smith’s and Solomon’s tenures, the years now called “the golden era of rap writing.” The years correspond to those moments I spent reading magazines with my high school friends. At black publications, he worked with black women editors all the time, but “with the exception of the Village Voice, none of the mainstream magazines employed black editors.” Despite the upheaval of the past several years (“the money is less than back in the day,” he said), Gonzales seems pleased with where his career has landed, “I’ve transformed from music critic/journalist to an essayist.” He went on to talk about how now, with the proliferation of digital magazines:

I feel like we’re living in an interesting writer time where there are a number of quality sites looking for quality writing, especially in essay form. There are a few that sometimes get too self-indulgent, but for the most part, especially in the cultural space (books, movies, theater, music, etc.), there is a lot of wonderful writing happening. Unfortunately you are the only black woman editor I have, although a few years back I did work with Kierna Mayo at Ebony.

 

* * *

Danielle A. Jackson is a contributing editor at Longreads.

Editor: Sari Botton

Fact checker: Steven Cohen

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Looking for Carolina Maria de Jesus

Illustration by Bex Glendining

Tarisai Ngangura | Longreads | August 2019 | 18 minutes (4,506 words)

Here in the favela, almost everyone has a difficult life to live. But I am the only one who writes of what suffering is. I do this for the good of the others.

 Carolina Maria de Jesus, Quarto de Despejo

* * *

In 1960, at the age of 46, Carolina Maria de Jesus published her first book, Quarto de Despejo: Diário de uma Favelada (Child of the Dark in English). It’s comprised of diary entries written on scraps of paper and assembled into a memoir about life in Canindé, a favela community in the Brazilian city of São Paulo. The book sold more than 10,000 copies in less than a week, was eventually translated into 16 languages, and distributed in 46 countries, making Carolina Maria one of Brazil’s most widely read authors. And for a while, the most famous person in the country. 

Starting in the late 1800s, the very first favelas, known as bairros-africanos, were inhabited by formerly enslaved people. Today, the country’s Institute of Geography and Statistics calls them “sub-normal clusters.” Favelas lack basic sanitation, electricity, and health facilities and are located primarily in city centers. After Quarto de Despejo’s instant success, Carolina Maria became a fleeting cause célèbre for the rights of favelados.

Carolina Maria de Jesus was born in the state of Minas Gerais, about 500 miles north of Rio de Janeiro, and came into the world some time between 1914 and 1921. Like many Afro-Brazilians born during this time, she didn’t have a birth certificate. She grew up with her mother, grandfather, younger brother, and later her stepfather in the town of Sacramento, where most homes were small and functional, to guard from rain and sun. Her father was a street performer who abandoned the family soon after Carolina Maria was born. Her mother cleaned houses and washed clothes for white families who lived on farms bordering the city. She died when Carolina Maria was in her early twenties.

After her mother’s death, Carolina Maria moved around trying to find her footing before settling in metropolitan São Paulo. She also made a living cleaning homes for wealthy white Brazilians, but after becoming pregnant, she was barred from the house she worked at and forced to move to a favela. She chose the neighborhood of Canindé for its proximity to a junkyard, where she sold bags of collected paper and scrap iron for pennies. Black people who were lighter skinned were referred to as morenas and morenos and had a greater measure of respect and access to more jobs, better restaurants, libraries, and social mobility. Carolina Maria, a dark-skinned black woman, was an outsider in more ways than one.

After the surprise success of Quarto de Despejo, she traveled across Brazil’s states, signing books and giving public talks on the dire conditions of favelas. The press called her a rags-to-riches heroine: the one who had been born surrounded by garbage and yet became a writer. Carolina Maria became a reluctant (and ultimately unwilling) spokesperson for “bootstrap success” — her image vaunted to encourage others to let nothing keep them from their dreams. Not crippling debt or inaccessible education. Definitely not hunger, and most importantly, not racism. In the years after Carolina Maria’s debut, nine more books followed; six were published after her death in 1977. But the renown that came from her first frank writings on poverty wouldn’t be repeated.  


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In the afterlife of the global slave trade and colonialism, black history is a study of spaces, silences, question marks, and asterisks. Growing up in Zimbabwe in the early 2000s, I learned of colonialism as if it had been a momentary blip in my country’s history, not a profound interrupting occurrence whose effects would forever shape how I moved and saw the world. When I left home for university in Toronto, I learned of Canada’s history as a celebrated haven for runaway slaves, but did not hear of Africville, a historically black community in Nova Scotia destroyed by provincial and federal negligence. I noticed the same kind of erasure when I arrived in Brazil’s city of Salvador, the capital of Bahia state, which I’d chosen to make my home base as I started my career in freelance journalism in 2016.

Of the nearly 5 million Africans brought to the country during the transatlantic slave trade (10 times more than brought to North America), the first landed in Salvador, one of the oldest slave ports in the Americas. It’s where the Malê revolt erupted, which Brazilian historian João José Reis called “the most significant slave revolt in Brazil.” Brazil has more African descendants than any other country in the world except Nigeria — almost 51 percent of the nation’s population is black or mixed race. On a national scale, Salvador is the state capital with the highest number of Afro-Brazilians, with more than 80 percent of its people identifying as black or brown. The cadence and speech of Soteropolitanos (residents of Salvador) is audibly tinged with Bantu vocal patterns, and the moda (fashion) would not be out of place in pattern-rich Senegal. Local food is stamped with unmistakable West African flavors and beloved street snacks include acarajé, a deep-fried black bean bun that is also found in Nigeria and Ghana. Dende oil, an extract from the fruit of oil palms that leaves distinct orange marks on clothing, is an integral part of every meal and was also brought over from Africa’s West. 

Carolina Maria, a dark-skinned black woman, was an outsider in more ways than one.

In the months following my arrival, I searched for writers to guide me through Brazil. Yet the authors I discovered online and on bookshelves did not reflect the faces I saw around me. When I refined my search, specifically noting ‘Afro-Brazilian’ in my digital prompt, I learned about Maria Firmina dos Reis, a prominent abolitionist and teacher; Abdias Do Nascimento, the pan-Africanist, playwright, and founder of Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN); and Alzira Rufino, an activist and the first Afro-Brazilian woman to create a support service for female survivors of domestic violence. These writers exposed truths about their country’s treatment of black people, countering the myth of Brazil’s diverse, racial democracy. I also found Carolina Maria de Jesus, whose story was not only compelling, but was also to some degree a reflection of my own. I saw familiar breaks and patterns in her thoughts, dreams, doubts, and disappointments. 

Haunted by questions centuries older than her years, Carolina Maria constantly found equilibrium to be out of reach, even when it seemed as though she had finally achieved what she longed for. She landed at a crossroads so common to the “successful” black creative: a rapid abundance of opportunities contingent on total acquiescence, or nothing at all. She achieved renown for a season, then fell into obscurity and back, further still, into near poverty.  

It’s been more than 40 years since her death, and I wonder if anything has truly changed for black women anywhere who long for their art to be what takes care of them.

* * *

In 1962, The New York Times Book Review called Quarto de Despejo “a rarely matched essay on the meaning and feeling of hunger, degradation and want.” Carolina Maria’s debut pulled no punches and displayed no illusions about life in the favela. There was no long-suffering acceptance of martyrdom because a better life lay above. She’d hated where she lived, and even more so she hated those who allowed such places to exist. Quarto de Despejo literally translates to “room of garbage.” She wrote about culpability — whose fault was it that some people had to live among the garbage? Sometimes she blamed the people themselves, who, according to her, were lazy, drunk, vulgar, and illiterate. “I know very well there are contemptible people here, persons with perverted souls,” she wrote. This earned her no love from progressives, who found her sentiments self-righteous and demeaning to the poor. When she didn’t find fault with those around her, she chalked it up to sheer bad luck: “Is there no end to this bitterness of life? I think that when I was born I was marked by fate to go hungry.” More often, her mind would circle back to one answer — politicians. “When a politician tells us in his speeches that he is on the side of the people, that he is only in politics in order to improve our living conditions, he is well aware that touching on these grave problems, he will win at the polls,” she wrote. “Afterwards he divorces himself from the people. He looks at them with half-closed eyes, and with a pride that hurts us.” This was an entry she wrote on May 20th, 1955, a day she found herself particularly hungry and contemplating her place in a world where she was an “object banished to the garbage dump.”

 The 1950s were, on the surface, an auspicious time for Brazil. Under the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira (like Carolina Maria, a mineiro, born in the state of Minas Gerais), the country’s economic and political stability grew. Edson Arantes do Nascimento, soon to be known as Pelé, became an international soccer star. Bossa nova was born and on its way to becoming one of the country’s most distinctive musical innovations, with Johnny Alf’s “Eu e a Brisa” drifting in and out of bars across the country. For Carolina Maria, none of this mattered. The police regularly intimidated, arrested, and detained favela dwellers. Corruption was rampant at social services, and social elevation was only possible if she married a white man and had lighter-skinned children. All this she wrote in her diaries, sharing her confusion, disgust, and anger. In her eyes, to be poor and hungry was an undeserved burden for anyone, and it was a national shame she cast a glaring light on.

* * *

Carolina Maria had three children, and her only daughter, Vera Eunice Lima de Jesus, born in 1953, is the writer’s closest living relative. As the public face of her mother’s literary works, Vera Eunice speaks at roundtable discussions where the work is featured, but she doesn’t own the rights to any of it. 

Vera Eunice also accommodates writers like me, who come to her for answers about her mother’s life of contrasts. It’s been more than half a century since she lived in Canindé, and while some memories elude her, others she recalls as though they happened yesterday. She told me she’d barely turned 7 when fame came knocking at their barraco. Made of pieces of discarded timber and asbestos, it was stuffed with bits of plastic and paper to act as both insulation and ventilation. Carolina Maria had built it herself. During the summer months, it was unbearably hot inside the cramped home, with the asbestos emitting heat all day. São Paulo is also known for its torrential rainfall, so when it poured the roof would leak, drenching their two mattresses. In that small shack Vera Eunice lived a life stifled by scarcity. “We would eat once a day. My oldest brother was a teenager and he was always hungry,” she said. 

These writers exposed truths about their country’s treatment of black people, countering the myth of Brazil’s diverse, racial democracy.

Like her mother’s writing style, Vera Eunice spoke to me in a direct, almost dry way — her voice strong and measured. “One day, my mother and I went out to look for food. We were passing this house and a white woman came running out and said she had a gift for us. My mother was so happy because we had not been able to find anything,” she said. “The gift was wrapped in newspapers so we rushed home and my mother quickly tore it open to see what it was. It was a pile of rats.” Carolina Maria had recounted this particular interaction in her diaries; it was a moment that scarred both mother and daughter. For the writer, particularly, this interaction showed that to outsiders she didn’t simply live amidst garbage, she too was disposable.

Audálio Dantas, a young journalist working for the newspaper Diário da Noite, spent a week in Canindé in 1958. He was researching life in the favela for what he hoped would be a story on the recently built playground donated by a politician soliciting votes from the poor. As the legend goes, he came across Carolina Maria threatening to put some neighbors in her diaries if they didn’t stop mistreating a group of children who were having fun on the swings. Intrigued, Dantas asked to see some of her work. He took a couple of her entries to his editor, and soon after, excerpts were published in the paper to great fanfare. Dantas later became bureau chief of O Cruzeiro, the leading weekly magazine from Rio de Janeiro. Although the newspaper exposure led to a book deal for Carolina Maria, it also attracted a barrage of harassment and a backlash that was unceasing.  

After the book came out, rumors began to circulate of Carolina Maria’s difficult disposition. Her politics during the book’s press tour failed to garner any favor when listeners realized that what she had written about sexism, political corruption, and poverty was not mournful musings, but rather her true convictions. She found it necessary to call out racial prejudice and in a country whose social stability and national identity was built on the idea of colorblindness through race mixing, her words were seen as not only inflammatory, but also blatantly false. When the novelty of a published black favelada wore off, the press coverage grew harsh; critics from well-known papers resorted to tabloid-like spitefulness. A writer from the paper O Globo called her “uncouth.” A literary critic from the largest newspaper in the country, Folha de São Paulo, found her work after Quarto De Despejo to be “pastiche,” and a later article would run in that same paper with the headline, “Carolina: Victim or Crazy?”

In the publishing industry, some writers are allowed to be all the messy parts of themselves, even when their behaviors and beliefs border on violent. The perceived strength of their work assures them a mythical cachet that leaves them faultless. This free pass was not given to Carolina Maria. She was not allowed to be mercurial and received little empathy. Some literary critics and political pundits questioned her competence, and she was forced to prove her legitimacy for the duration of her career. Those who want to protect her legacy face a similar interrogation. “Look, my mother wrote everything herself. We slept in the same bed and every night I would hear her get up to write,” Vera Eunice told me. “If we had no lights she would use candles and continue writing.” In 2012, Audálio Dantas talked about the events leading up to the publication of the first entries, which became the book Quarto de Despejo. “I had not written a single line. The story was in those books,” he said.

When her first press tour came to an end, Carolina Maria wanted to step away from diaries, to write novels, poetry, and to be taken seriously as an author. Her publishers, however, wanted her to keep doing what had amazed before. She refused, and for a while, she stuck to her guns, because for the first time she had the privilege to say no. Money had come in, and four months after Quarto de Despejo debuted, Carolina Maria and her children were able to leave the favela for the middle-class neighborhood of Santana, a 30-minute train ride from Canindé. 

* * *

To support Quarto de Despejo, Carolina Maria traveled so often and so extensively that airport workers would hug her at the arrival terminal. “Every day cards come from international editors who want to translate the book. Even I am astonished at the impact,” she wrote. She was happy, almost forcefully so. The kind of joy that’s laced with fear and doubt but is also desperately hopeful.

After settling down in Santana, Carolina Maria set about creating a haven for herself and her small family. In Canindé they’d lived without electricity, relying on candles when she could afford to buy them. In her new home, she put in 14 light fixtures. She bought shoes for Vera Eunice, who had always hated walking barefoot, and her two boys, João José and José Carlos stopped acting out. “I used to think João was rude. But now that we have food in the house he has transformed,” she wrote in Casa de Alvenaria, her second book, also a diary published just under a year after the release of Quarto de Despejo. “He has left rude João to be nice João. Hunger really makes people neurótico.” Memory of life prior to the book was still very clear and so too was the relief and gratitude for her new beginnings. As in Canindé, she still woke up before the sun, but now there was no hand-wringing as she worried about what she would feed her children. In Santana, when João José, José Carlos, and Vera Eunice woke up, they had breakfast with bread and their tea with milk and sugar. Once the children left for school, she would begin preparations for lunch, then dinner. She didn’t have to beg from people’s homes anymore or dig through the garbage, fearful of eating something dosed with poison by store owners attempting to dissuade favelados from searching for food. Carolina Maria could now go out to the butcher and choose any cut of meat that she wanted. She bought fresh fruit and vegetables from the market. “My life is now velvet. Now I have food. I have a house. I have things to wear,” she wrote. 

When the novelty of a published black favelada wore off, the press coverage grew harsh; critics from well-known papers resorted to tabloid-like spitefulness.

Carolina Maria could have chosen to write only the good things that came her way when she left the favela, but in Casa de Alvenaria, she wrote about her new life as bluntly as she had about her old one. She saw just how inflexible the middle-class reality was to her presence. The white maid she had hired constantly made it known that she believed their roles should be reversed, and Carolina Maria made note of her complaints: “My God in the sky. This is the end of the world. God is punishing me. The world has capsized. I, a white person, have a black boss.” Her new neighbors treated her with contempt and saw her presence as an eyesore. “I am sad and not content because when something happens here, everyone always blames my children,” she wrote. Outside of her problems at home, she also had trouble opening a bank account because she didn’t have the proper ID. She opened a joint account with Dantas, who was now not only her editor but also her agent. She had money, but anti-blackness does not dissolve with improved social status. It stings differently, but is noticeable all the same. 

While many critics saw Casa de Alvenaria as the inconsequential ramblings of someone with no direction, it was here I saw Carolina Maria most clearly. She was painfully aware of what both the press and her peers thought and said about her, so she attempted to tread the tightrope carefully. She knew people were watching and wilfully betting on her failure, so she wanted to write without risking the welfare of her children. “I am not crazy about this idea of writing my diary based off my actual life now. I am writing against the rich. They are powerful and they can destroy me,” she agonized. 

Her first book had kicked up the reactionary dust of white guilt, and she tried to settle what her words had stirred up, while making it known that her success did not end social inequality. Carolina Maria had written her second book while caring for her three children, showing up to book signings, pleasing her agent and publisher, and trying to maintain her own sense of self. She was exhausted. “Due to the success of my book I am now regarded as a bill of exchange. A representation of profit. A gold mine,” she wrote in Casa de Alvenaria. The freedom money should have purchased now felt like a cruel joke, and her feelings of despair culminated in one of the saddest thoughts present in her known works: “Looking at the sky, if I had wings I would lift my children up there, one at a time, and never again return to the earth.” She had few friends and those who came to see her would ask for money, which she usually gave. Carolina Maria had done what we’ve all been told needs to be done to be a good citizen, to be happy and fulfilled, far away from hardship: She had worked hard. And now here she was, uncomfortable in her own brick house. 

* * *

Carolina Maria de Jesus passed away in 1977 in Parelheiros, three hours from Santana and Canindé. She had moved there almost a decade earlier, after she could no longer afford to live in Santana. It was a poor, rural neighborhood on the periphery of São Paulo, known for its heavy pollution. She died from respiratory complications, exacerbated by the industrial waste sites surrounding her home.

When memorializing her life, the writer of her obituary in Jornal do Brasil called her vassoura de papel — a paper scavenger. This was in reference to her work collecting scrap paper and iron, which she’d had to start again after she moved. She’d kept writing and financed the three books published before her death with the royalties from her first book. But she died poor. Not like how she started, but not how she should have been. Carolina Maria had signed a financially crippling contract and she saw very little of the money received from the international licensing of her books. 

‘Looking at the sky, if I had wings I would lift my children up there, one at a time, and never again return to the earth.’

For Tom Farias, author of Carolina: Uma Biografia, a book on the writer released in 2017, Carolina Maria deserves to be highlighted in the same Brazilian canon as Jorge Amado, Clarice Lispector, and Paulo Coelho. “She was more than just her diaries, she wrote plays, songs, and poetry. She was an artist,” he said.

Since her death, she has been often acknowledged during Novembro Negro — Brazil’s Black History Month, when the achievements of living and dead Afro-Brazilian leaders are brought center stage. But on a day-to-day basis, it’s mostly other black women who have kept her memory alive. In Salvador, Denise Ribeiro taught a popular class at Universidade do Estado Da Bahia (UNEB) on the social relevance of Quarto de Despejo in 2008. A health and nutrition professor and former coordinator for the Municipal Health Secretariat of Salvador, she’s spent more than three decades studying health from a myriad of perspectives, with a focus on black feminism, traditional communities, and African spirituality. In her home, the names of well-known Afro-Brazilian women authors lined the spines of her library: Fatima Oliveira, Djamila Ribeiro, and Conceição Evaristo, alongside other voices from the diaspora such as Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Carolina Maria was a fitting addition among the company of black women whose work forced the world to center blackness, even when it seemed inconceivable. “Carolina Maria had such a hard life and so much happened to her in that time,” Ribeiro told me. “Because I teach health, her book was so relevant to the things that affect the way black people live, and the reality is that her life is the life of so many people today. Nothing has changed at all.” 

Not that long ago, in March 2018, Marielle Franco, a queer Afro-Brazilian city councillor from Rio de Janeiro, was assassinated in her car just hours after speaking at an event for black women’s empowerment. Franco was born in Complexo da Maré, a Rio neighborhood made up of 16 favelas. It’s considered one of the largest communities in the city with almost 150,000 residents. In 2017 and 2018, more than 40 young people, the majority of them black and under 24, were killed during police raids in Maré, which happen frequently. In May of this year, eight people were left dead after another police operation in the area, which forced children to search for cover so they wouldn’t be struck by bullets. Access to electricity remains a problem with many using what’s locally known as gato, or cat. This device, made up of manually inserted wires, is attached to city electrical supplies and it diverts energy toward the overlooked favelas. Six years ago, the monetary amount of the diverted electricity came to $500 million in U.S. dollars. Prone to explosions, gatos are dangerous creations, but for many families, it is too expensive to get onto the formal electrical grid. Carolina Maria faced the same dilemma while living in Canindé during the 1950s.

* * *

Stories of black women creators whose work shook the world but who died underappreciated never cease to raise in me a familiar madness and a self-contained rage. It’s a hollow pain and a fear that hovers over my own hopes and dreams. But there is also a separate, wild appreciation for the existence of things deemed impossible. It is utter madness that Carolina Maria was able to write books at all, and it is madness that she made it enough for a girl from Zimbabwe to one day discover her work and see herself. In Carolina Maria’s writings, I saw a life that was lived even when living felt more like fighting.

During my last conversation with Vera Eunice she asked me to help her petition for a Carolina Maria de Jesus archive in the southern city of Curitiba. She also wanted my help collecting original print photographs of her mother because she has none. Most are in the hands of Dantas’s grandchildren. “Dantas took a lot of pictures of my mother,” she said. “Before he died we had been negotiating about his giving them to me, and now it’s even harder.” When I reached out to the Dantas estate to ask about the photographs of Carolina Maria, his executor did not offer a response.

In one of the most recognizable shots I found of Carolina Maria online, she is looking directly at the camera, head slightly tilted to the side. Her black skin, deep and smooth, her hair under a loosely tied headwrap. She spent most of her life unseen, living in shadows, and even when the light came, it didn’t brighten as much it blinded. She was the mirror, and what she reflected about her world was so startling it took time to properly process what she had released. When the noise died down, her unexpected work became an appalling reminder of a reality many would have rather just forgotten. In this picture, it’s as if she knew that she would not have many opportunities to really be seen, so she made it count. She looks determined, a little sad, a little proud. She was still, and for a moment she forced us to be still. Without anyone expecting it, a woman from the favela wrote a book that read an entire nation.

 

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Tarisai Ngangura is a journalist and photographer. She documents black lives around the globe — their histories, legacies and movements. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Jezebel, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, New York Magazine, Hazlitt, VICE and Catapult.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Fact checker: Samantha Schuyler