Philippines, Natives cutting abaca, Colored engraving, 'The Spanish and American Illustration,' 1876. (Photo by Prisma/UIG/Getty Images)
When Christopher Columbus first encountered “Indians,” he formed the opinion: “These are very simple-minded and handsomely formed people.” As Robert Jago explains for The Walrus, this unjustified view of Native incompetence has persisted in some non-Natives to this day — even encountered in the way his tribe currently fishes the river named after them.
… in another news report, they advised that any salmon bought from us poses a “significant risk to human health.”
Our catch is fine for us to eat, apparently—it’s just a problem for “human” health.
Stó:lō means “river people,” and this river is full of salmon—or, at least, it used to be. It’s our staple food, eaten smoked, baked, boiled, and candied. My grandma prized the eyes, plucked out and sucked on till they popped and released their fishy goo. My nephew goes for the eggs; he quite literally licks his lips at the sight of them. My uncle takes the best cuts to smoke outdoors with a closely guarded, centuries-old family recipe.
It takes a lot of nerve to say we don’t know how to handle salmon—but I suspect the reality behind that claim is that a great many Canadians can’t imagine us knowing anything independently, as Native people.
In reality, Jago argues that it was only with the help of native knowledge and creations that non-Natives were able to create their world at all — alluded to in the name his ancestors gave to the new arrivals in Canada:xwelítem — the hungry people. A name coined after starving white miners came begging for food during the Fraser River gold rush.
Indigenous people around the world were experts at food long before non-Natives made an appearance — responsible for developing the agriculture techniques that led to the potato, maize, avocado, tomato, chocolate, and quinoa, to name but a few.
European farmers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had to leave as much as half of their fields empty at any time so as not to exhaust their growing potential. They were also overreliant on grain as one of their few sources of nutrition. The result was that, in England alone, between 1523 and 1623, there were seventeen major famines. The addition of Indigenous agricultural methods and foods domesticated by Indigenous people changed that. Where in the past, a study in Nature found, European farmers could feed 1.9 people per hectare, with our help they could now feed 4.3. Writing in Smithsonian Magazine, Charles C. Mann concludes that, with Indigenous peoples’ sharing of their domesticated foods and agricultural technology, “the revolution begun by potatoes, corn, and guano has allowed living standards to double or triple worldwide even as human numbers climbed from fewer than one billion in 1700 to some seven billion today.” didn’t hand us the keys to the modern world—they took from us the tools that built its foundations.
Non-Natives like to think that the Mayflower had Wi-Fi, that the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María brought with them consumer goods, Facebook, and nuclear medicine. In reality, they brought very little from Europe that Natives wanted beyond weapons and metalwork.
Greg Jaffe | The Washington Post | July 2, 2020 | 40 minutes (10,000 words)
“Clint Lorance had been in charge of his platoon for only three days when he ordered his men to kill three Afghans stopped on a dirt road. A second-degree murder conviction and pardon followed. Today, Lorance is hailed as a hero by President Trump. His troops have suffered a very different fate.”
Journalist Diana Moskovitz revisits Pulitzer-prize winning crime reporter Edna Buchanan’s memoir “The Corpse Had a Familiar Face,” enshrined as part of a “textbook collection of great works of literary journalism.” “I reached for it as America erupted this month, yet again, in protests over the killings of Black people at the hands of police, wondering what Edna Buchanan, one of the greatest influences on late 20th century crime writing, would have to offer this moment.”
Journalist Diana Moskovitz revisits Pulitzer-prize winning crime reporter Edna Buchanan’s memoir “The Corpse Had a Familiar Face,” enshrined as part of a “textbook collection of great works of literary journalism.” “I reached for it as America erupted this month, yet again, in protests over the killings of Black people at the hands of police, wondering what Edna Buchanan, one of the greatest influences on late 20th century crime writing, would have to offer this moment.”
“I spoke to four witnesses, including my wife. All of them said they saw the same thing. When I called Baker back, he told me that my wife and the three others were mistaken. The car hadn’t hit the kid. The kid had hit the car.” After his family saw an NYPD car hit a Black teen, Eric Umansky tried to find out what happened.
Women's Prison (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Sygma via Getty Images)
The United Nations says that solitary confinement, otherwise known as “restrictive housing” or “administrative segregation, is a form of torture, yet incarcerated people are still subject to this, and many other forms of abuse. At Dissent, Justine van der Leun tells the story of Kwaneta Yatrice Harris, a registered nurse and mother of three incarcerated for killing her abusive partner. Her legal team was reluctant to recount her victim’s behavior because they didn’t want to disparage a veteran. Harris has been in solitary confinement for over 1600 days awaiting a hearing. “Harris did not push the attorneys. ‘The stigma and shame of allowing myself to continually accept abusive behavior is stronger than the shame of being a convicted murderer.’”
In a solitary cell in a central Texas prison, as a global pandemic and protests raged, Kwaneta Yatrice Harris was eating cold bologna sandwiches on the better days. On the worst days, she was given nutraloaf, also known as discipline cake: a rectangle of meat, potatoes, margarine, syrup, liquified egg, and anonymous vegetable.
The food was slid through the door of a windowless room the size of a walk-in closet where Harris has been held since 2015. Eventually, she will be returned to a general population unit to serve the rest of her sentence, the estimated end of which is in 2058, when she will be eighty-six. Throughout her time in prison, Harris, like many incarcerated people, has been subject to questionable disciplinary cases brought by guards, including, most recently, the offense of “aiding” me to telephone her under a fraudulent name. She did not do this, but she is still being penalized. Punishments vary: nutraloaf is one of them; more time in solitary is another.
Harris did not work because she was in “restrictive housing,” or “administrative segregation,” which is what Texas calls its solitary confinement. In late 2017, the state announced that it would do away with solitary confinement as a form of punishment, but the reform, in practicality, only affected seventy-five people, according to a 2019 report by the Texas Civil Rights Project. Solitary has been classified as torture by the United Nations, serves no rehabilitative purpose, and causes mental health to deteriorate in as few as ten days. After the pandemic lockdowns, many know this. Millions of people stayed at home for months, increasingly distressed, cut off from community. Those who were alone began to physically throb for human connection.
But true solitary is nothing like shelter-in-place: no quilts or sunlight, no fridges or Netflix or Zoom, no quick bike rides or walks around the block or brown-bag cocktails on the sidewalk at a six-foot distance. I’ve been told by several individuals who have lived in solitary for months and years that the experience magnifies the senses: You can smell the guard’s perfume, hear the click of shoes echoing from far away. You will clean every corner of your cell on your knees, which grow calloused. You’ll become desperate for touch. A woman in California kept a pet cricket and tore off one of its legs so it couldn’t leave her. A man in Minnesota nurtured a baby mouse and taught it to sleep by his head in a Folger’s jar.
At thirty-five, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. One year before my diagnosis, my mother died from complications after heart surgery. At the time of her death, my mother had cancer — lymphoma. Five years prior to Mom’s death, my father passed away from a brain tumor, a metastasis from the cancer melanoma.
Two years after I had completed my chemotherapy treatment for cancer, I gave birth to Olivia. My miracle baby.
Bob Dylan playing on the Olympia stage, France, May 24, 1966, on his 25th birthday. Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
Music legends from Tom Waits to Joni Mitchell immediately heard Dylan’s genius in songs like “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,“ but not me. It took me two decades to warm to Bob Dylan. It’s a common story. He’s one of those artists that people say will “grow on you,” or, in more patronizing terms: You’ll understand when you’re older. No young person wants to hear that, but people I knew in high school loved Dylan, so I gave him a try.
Compared to all the loud, cutting-edge guitar bands my friends and I listened to in the ’90s, like Bad Brains and Meat Puppets, Dylan seemed to belong to what my naive teenage mind characterized as ancient rock dinosaurs like The Rolling Stones and The Who: historically interesting but obsolete. I was in high school. Shows what I knew. Dylan and The Who were nothing alike. As cool as Dylan looked in old photos with his cigarette and sunglasses, folk music could not have seemed less cool. My friends and I skated and moshed in the pit. Acoustic guitar didn’t move me. Then I heard about Dylan’s legendary 1966 concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall, from the tour where he played controversial electric sets. As a die-hard fan of live recordings, a legendary rock show seemed a great place to start with Dylan.
In the early ’90s I found a bootleg CD of the Royal Albert Hall show at the record store next to my high school. Swingin’ Pig released it. I had other Swingin’ Pig bootlegs, so I trusted it as much as you can trust black market record labels. When I played the album at home, it left me cold. This was what people fawned over? “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”? Compared to power chords and fuzz petals, Dylan’s rock sounded tame. His nasally voice grated, so I shoved the CD in a box where my unloved albums went.
In college, I spotted the CD buried in a drawer. I wondered how it would sound now. Even as a more worldly college undergrad who listened to Miles Davis and twinkly New Zealand underground like The Clean, Dylan’s music still bored me, so it went back in the drawer. This was my pattern during my 20s and 30s. I’d play the CD every few years, dislike it, and squirrel it away. As big of an idiot as I was, something about Dylan demanded respect. He was too venerated to just throw his CD away. Albums are like that. Sometimes your favorites find you at the time in your life and you love them upon first listen. Sometimes they grow on you. Dylan also seemed like the kind of artist you needed in your collection, to provide variety and a sense of history, as well as something mainstream to compliment all the adolescent statement albums by Misfits and Slayer. So that album came with me to different states and through different stages of my life. Even when I didn’t enjoy listening to old music, I always appreciated music history.
Jacques Haillot/Apis/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images
In 1999, my then-girlfriend wanted to see Paul Simon, Ringo Starr, and Bob Dylan play. I was all in, because I loved The Beatles and knew these legends could die at any minute. Ringo was eh. Simon was fun. Dylan blew me away. He came out in some kind of clean, country music suit, a big hat, and tore through a rocking set that was more honky-tonk than the rambling folk-rock I expected. I watched, enraptured. The set rolled like a train that never slowed at crossings. Turns out, he was touring for his best new album in ages, Time Out of Mind. Dylan’s performance completely changed my mind about him. I never laughed him off again. But the experience didn’t turn me into a devotee. I didn’t buy that double album, and when I played Royal Albert Hall 1966 again, I still heard no magic. When I met the woman who I fell for immediately in my late 30s, my musical taste had grown so broad that when she played me Dylan’s 1976 album Desire, I finally heard Dylan’s peculiar magic. “Hurricane” and “Isis” were masterpieces. How had Dylan sounded so different to the younger me? How could I not like this? When I went to play her my old live bootleg, the CD case was empty. My last girlfriend had lost it and forgotten to tell me. No problem. In the intervening years, Dylan had officially released a better-sounding version of the concert as part of his official Bootleg Series, so I bought that, and the circle was complete. Now I listen to his live 1966 acoustic performances of “Visions Of Johanna” and it gives me chills. One good thing about taking this long to come around is that his most familiar songs still sound fresh to me. That familiar acoustic strumming can still elicit tears. Turns out that the Royal Albert Hall show I had was actually recorded at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. It’s a famous show and famous error. At least the bootleggers got the year right.
Stories like this abound in Dylan lore and fan circles: stories of transformation, reinvention, and musical progress. Those themes define Dylan himself. He’s always changing, putting listeners and scholars off the trail, to keep us guessing about who he is, about songs’ meanings, and what he’ll do next. That’s one reason Dylan scholarship and journalism constitute their own body of literary work. Here are a few of my favorite Dylan stories, written by everyone from Ellen Willis to Greg Tate. You can appreciate these stories even if you don’t dig Dylan’s music. Maybe you’re curious about the man himself, or you enjoy hating someone enshrined by so much hype. Like Dylan’s music, these stories will be here if you find yourself ready for them, though remember, you don’t ever have to be ready. His voice can still be pretty annoying.
It all starts here: the Dylan literary cannon, and Willis’ writing career. Sure, in 1961 Robert Shelton wrote about Dylan for The New York Times, but few people wrote about Dylan with such intelligence, electricity, and insight until Willis did. The Dylan cannon was still relatively small when his 1967 album Blonde on Blonde came out. The 7800-word exploration that Willis took five months to write set the proverbial bar, marking a literary high-point against which all subsequent Dylan pieces, even rock criticism itself, can be measured. Willis created Cheetah, and it proved to be the kind of smart scrappy magazine that published solid stories before quickly fading into obscurity after a year. It was of its time, but in that short time, it launched careers. After Willis’ Dylan piece published, a New Yorker writer convinced editor William Shawn to cover modern music, and said Willis was the person to do it. Based on the strength of this Dylan piece, Shawn hired her to be the magazine’s first pop music critic, and the rest of her life is history. Pick any paragraph and you’ll see why.
“His masks hidden by other masks, Dylan is the celebrity stalker’s ultimate antagonist,” Willis writes. “And in coming to terms with that world, he has forced us to come to terms with him.” Willis was an astute observer and listener. Long before Dylan’s knack for invention and reinvention became well-known parts of his appeal, she spotted the push and pull between his public and private lives, the artifice and the art, and how it reflected modern culture. “The tenacity of the modern publicity apparatus often makes artists’ personalities more familiar than their work, while its pervasiveness obscures the work of those who can’t or won’t be personalities.” That’s as true 50 years later. Cheetah closed the year after her piece came out, but she’d made the leap from obscurity to The New Yorker, where she applied her brilliance to iconic underground artists like the Velvet Underground and The New York Dolls, before turning her back on music and this phase of her writing life all-together.
When he first saw Dylan perform with Joan Baez at an outdoor stage in 1963, Marcus was 18 years old, and Dylan seemed to have no age, no sense of origin or identity. Dylan only had two albums out at the time, and already, he exhibited a unique, sui generis aura. “When the show was over, I saw this person, whose name I hadn’t caught, crouching behind the tent,” Marcus wrote in the introduction of his book Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, “so I went up to him.” This pivotal moment marked the beginning of Marcus’ writing career. He had witnessed one of the most influential musicians in history before his moment of emergence. This meeting also marked Marcus’ emergence. “Along with a lot of other things,” Marcus wrote, “becoming a Bob Dylan fan made me a writer.” Five years after that 1963 performance, Marcus published his first Dylan piece. He has since written enough about Dylan to literally fill books, but this piece always stood out because it addresses Dylan’s origins. To try to understand how childhood shaped Dylan’s genius, Marcus visited Hibbing High School, where Dylan graduated, and whose legend centers around the school’s striking architecture, lavish decoration, and creative influence. Speaking of origins: What’s the appeal of Dylan for Marcus? His answer could apply to many Dylan fans: “I don’t think about it, I just do it, or rather can’t help it.”
Climbing the enclosed stairway that followed the expanse of outdoor steps, we saw not a hint of graffiti, not a sign of deterioration in the intricate colored tile designs on the walls and the ceilings, in the curving woodwork. We gazed up at old-fashioned but still majestic murals depicting the history of Minnesota, with bold trappers surrounded by submissive Indians, huge trees and roaming animals, the forest and the emerging towns. It was strange, the pristine condition of the place. It spoke not for emptiness, for Hibbing High as a version of Pompeii High—though the school, with a capacity of over 2,000, was down to 600 students, up from four hundred only a few years before—and, somehow, you knew the state of the building didn’t speak for discipline. You could sense self-respect, passed down over the years.
We followed the empty corridors in search of the legendary auditorium. A custodian let us in, and told us the stories. Seating for 1,800, and stained glass everywhere, even in the form of blazing candles on the fire box. In large, gilded paintings in the back, the muses waited; they smiled over the proscenium arch, too, over a stage that, in imitation of thousands of years of ancestors, had the weight of immortality hammered into its boards. “No wonder he turned into Bob Dylan,” said a visitor the next day, when the bus tour stopped at the school, speaking of the talent show Dylan played here with his high-school band the Golden Chords. Anybody on that stage could see kingdoms waiting.
Dylan has generated an entire field of study called Dylanology. Universities offer courses. Scholars publish books and discuss him everywhere from Inside Higher Education to The Wall Street Journal. Long before Dylan’s 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature generated an international discussion about whether his writing was even literature and why, as Richard F. Thomas’s book puts it, Bob Dylan matters, and fans knew the answer.
“If Shakespeare was in your midst, putting on shows at the Globe Theatre,” one Dylanologist tells fan and reporter Mark Jacobson, ”wouldn’t you feel the need to be there, to write down what happened in them?” Jacobson spends time with fanatics to address that question, and he studies the line between appreciation and fanaticism, scholar and obsessive. Dylan fanatics are people who have collected 20,000 live recordings. They’re people spend their time comparing differences in individual songs performances, who even want to clone Dylan’s DNA. “Rock is full of cults,” Jacobson writes as he goes down the rabbit hole, “but nothing—not collecting the Beatles, not documenting Elvis—rivals Dylanology.” What was the limit? Jacobson writes: “I was looking for the limit.” The problem, he discovers, is the issue of accessing Dylan himself.
Here’s the kind of photo that impressed me as a teenage Dylan hater. Blank Archives/Getty Images
Greg Tate is a musician and prose stylist whose love of music and critical eye earned him a title as one of “the Godfathers of hip-hop journalism,” but he writes widely about music and culture. As a staff writer for the Village Voice from 1987 to 2005, Tate covered enormous territory and built a unique body of work. Here he offers a fresh perspective on late-period Dylan, around the release of Love and Theft, Dylan’s follow up to the masterful album Time Out of Mind. Tate hears not only genius, but an “impact on a couple generations of visionary black bards has rarely been given its propers,“ from Curtis Mayfield and Tracy Chapman to Stevie Wonder and Bob Marley.
The codger’s got plenty kick left in him yet. Feel like a fightin rooster, feel better than I ever felt, but the Pennsylvania line’s in an awful mess, and the Denver road is about to melt. Plenty parables too. There may be no second acts in American life, but at 60, Dylan could care less. Like Miles Davis and his shadow, that asshole Pablo Picasso, Dylan has given us one long act to chew on, and one long song: a peerless and exquisite display of craft, nerve, and wit. His riddle-rhyming trail is marked by the silence, exile, and cunning of the hermetic populist—Joyce, Pynchon, Reed, Clinton. Occasional lapses of taste and crises of faith, periods of doubt, self-derision, and personal revival too. Rare among American artists, he shouldered the burden of a great and precocious gift. He crashed but did not burn out after the ’60s. Now contemporary evidence, a new release called “Love and Theft,” suggests that the poet of his generation is once again prophet of his age.
Unlike me, Catherine Nichols loved Dylan the first time she heard him. She was 16 and driving in the car with her dad. He’d introduced her to a lot of good old American music, but Dylan’s song “felt like a searchlight had been switched on shining directly into my eyes, an almost unbearable sense of significance,” she writes. “That’s how I became the last person on the planet to discover that Bob Dylan is really, really, really good. Then she wonders why: “The mystery I’ve wondered about ever since: what’s so good about him.” Her essay is my favorite kind of music writing: personal and analytical, driven to examine both the music and the particular way it works on her as a listener.
When she looks at two versions of one song — Dylan’s version and the version by The Animals — you get a knockout taste of her crystalline vision and the poetry of her sentences. “The Animals’ version should feel more exciting — it has a bounding and rolling melody, Eric Burdon’s voice is stronger and clearer. He lets the song build; he works up to a big roar of sincere misery, vigor and regret. The Dylan version, on the other hand, is snarled virtually at a monotone. The chain that hobbles him is not his own hedonism but the hopelessness and despair he can’t escape. *And yet one track feels like a beloved teddy bear and the other like the touch of living skin. There’s more person in Dylan’s voice than anyone else’s; his voice transmutes the unnerving sensation of being wholly, troublingly alive.”
Although Dylan may have, as her father believed, taught “a generation of white boys with terse WWII-vet fathers how to connect to their own emotions,” Nichols didn’t initially find or need any lessons from Dylan. After she read his memoir, Chronicles Vol. 1, she found a musician with many literary talents who could offer her insight as a female writer.
There are few things are as exciting to Dylan fans as the prospect of new unreleased material. More home demos. More vintage concert footage. Hope endures for a reason. Lost treasures still surface, like the previously unknown recording of Dylan playing Brandeis University in 1963, found in the basement of Rolling Stone magazine cofounder Ralph Gleason. And new footage from the reels D.A. Pennebaker shot on Dylan’s 1965 tour. Dylan has always been notoriously protective of his private life and his creative process, but for Dylanologists, who want to know how he creates, their dreams have come true.
For an estimated $15 to $20 million, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa purchased Dylan’s personal collection, which includes footage, written correspondence, film, and lyrics — 6,000 pieces in total — dating back to his formative years. This material will be displayed for the public, and for study, at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Bob Dylan Center’s crown jewel: The notebooks that contain Dylan’s sketches for his album Blood on the Tracks. This was once the holy grail among fanatics, rumored but not confirmed. Now there are three. Why Tulsa? The connection to Woody Guthrie, Dylan’s early influence and an Oklahoma native. Also, opportunity: a respected archivist approached the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa, and the Kaiser Foundation had the money. “Portland wasn’t always cool,” George B. Kaiser said. “Seattle wasn’t always cool.” Dylan could help revitalize Tulsa. It’s the motherload fans have waited for, and as The New York Times announced in 2016, “it is clear that the archives are deeper and more vast than even most Dylan experts could imagine, promising untold insight into the songwriter’s work.”
Cream was the loudest rock magazine of the 1970s. Based in Detroit, they covered the big names like Zeppelin and the ignored ones like the Stooges, and rereading this Cream piece, you can hear its time. It is a thorough, thoughtful examination of Dylan’s creativity and approach to songwriting. ”What Dylan has exhausted is not any kind of subject matter,” James writes, ”but a specific kind of approach to the song: the approach that relies on the indiscriminate imagination.” But this piece is also one of those very thinky, early rock pieces that examines the larger rock culture as much as Dylan. It’s fascinating to hear what people thought of his body of work in 1972, since he kept producing more music for decades, yet James can say that ”a critical estimate of Dylan comes within reach.” Ha! Dylan himself said it would take people 100 years to really appreciate his work. The clock keeps ticking.
Nat Hentoff is largely known as a jazz writer, but in 1964, he profiled a young Bob Dylan. And it’s good. The subhead describes this early Dylan as “A fusion of Huck Finn and Woody Guthrie, the musician writes songs that sound drawn from oral history.“ Thankfully Dylan became so much more.
Speaking of Dylanology: After Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, a slew of think pieces and scholarly articles debated the prize and Dylan’s work. Was it worthy? In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Evan R. Goldstein asked a deeper question: “Why are intellectuals so besotted with Dylan?” Long before Dylan won the prize, fans and scholars were making the case for the award. Scholar Gordon Ball specializes in Beat Generation literature, but he saw Dylan perform at his famous 1965 Newport Jazz Festival show, where Dylan shocked fans by first playing electric. “In 1996 I first wrote the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy,“ Ball writes in the journal Oral Tradition, “nominating Dylan for its Prize in literature.“ To get a sense of what Dylan scholarship is like, this makes for an interesting read. “My point,“ Ball writes, “is rather modest: that poetry and music share time-honored ground, that the two arts are often bound closely together, and that Dylan’s great gifts may be appreciated within such a performative lineage. Poetry and music aren’t mutually exclusive.“
“The Wanderer” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker, May 10, 1999)
Following Dylan on his now famous 1998 tour of Time Out of Mind, Alex Ross realizes how much the music matters more than the messenger, which is what the Dylanologist often miss.
Discussions of Dylan often boils down to that: “Please speak. Tells us what it means.” But does he need to? He had already given something away, during the ritual acoustic performance of “Tangled Up in Blue.” This dense little tale, which may be about two couples, one couple, or one couple plus an interloper, seems autobiographical: it’s easy to guess what Dylan might be thinking about when he sings, “When it all came crashing down, I became withdrawn / The only thing I knew how to do was keep on keeping on / Like a bird that flew . . .” See any number of ridiculous spectacles in Dylan’s life. But the lines that he shouted out with extra emphasis came at the end:
Me, I’m still on the road, heading for another joint
We always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point
Of view
Tangled up in blue.
Suddenly the romance in questions seemed to be the long, stormy one between Dylan and his audience. Dylan is over there and the rest of us are over here, and we’re all seeing things from different points of view. And what is it that we’re looking for? Perhaps the thing that comes between him and us—the music.
BRUNSWICK, GA - MAY 07: American and Confederate flags fly at a residence in the Fancy Bluff neighborhood on May 7, 2020 where Ahmaud Arbery lived in Brunswick, Georgia. Arbery was shot and killed during a confrontation with an armed father and son in the nearby Satilla Shores neighborhood on Feb 23. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
There is nothing I can say about Mitchell S. Jackson‘s Runner’s Worldarticle-essay-history-elegy on Ahmaud “Maud” Arbery and the deep-seated racism of “jogging” in America other than: read it. Read it, and feel it, and then do something about it. “But I’m not a runner”? Doesn’t matter. As Jackson well knows and explains, sports are culture are people are us; we are a deeply racist country, which means sports are deeply racist, which means Maud became “fleeing Black criminal” instead getting to be “Black man out for a run.”
On February 23, 2020, a young man out for a run was lynched in Glynn County, Georgia.
His name was Ahmaud Marquez Arbery, called “Quez” by his beloveds and “Maud” by most others. And what I want you know about Maud is that he had a gift for impressions and a special knack for mimicking Martin Lawrence. What I want you to know about Maud is that he was fond of sweets and requested his mother’s fudge cake for the birthday parties he often shared with his big sister. What I want you to know about Maud is that he signed the cards he bought for his mother “Baby Boy.” What I want you to know about Maud is that he and his brother would don the helmets they used for go-carting and go heads-up on their trampoline, and that he never backed down from his big brother. What I want you to know about Maud is that he jammed his pinkie playing hoop in high school and instead of getting it treated like Jasmine advised, he let it heal on its own—forever crooked. What I want you know about Maud is that he didn’t like seeing his day-ones whining, that when they did, he’d chide, “Don’t cry about it, man. Do what you gotta do to handle your business.” What I want you to know about Maud is that Shenice told me he sometimes recorded their conversations so he could listen to her voice when they were apart. What you should know about Maud is that he adored his nephews Marcus III and Micah Arbery, that when they were colicky as babies, he’d take them for long walks in their stroller until they calmed. What you should know about Maud is that when a college friend asked Jasmine which parent she’d call first if ever in serious trouble, she said neither, that she’d call him. What I want you to know about Maud is that he was an avid connoisseur of the McChicken sandwich with cheese. What I want you know about Maud is that he and Keem were so close that the universe coerced each of them into breaking a foot on the same damn day in separate freak weight-room accidents, and that when they were getting treated in the trainer’s office, Maud joked about it. You should know that Maud dreamed of a career as an electrician and of owning a construction company. You should know that Maud gushed often of his desire to be a great husband and father. You should know that he told his boys that he wanted them all to buy a huge plot of land, build houses on it, and live in a gated community with their families. You should know that Maud never flew on a plane, but wanderlusted for trips to Jamaica, Japan, Africa. What you must know about Maud was that when Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William “Roddie” Bryan stalked and murdered him less than three months shy of his 26th birthday, he left behind his mother Wanda, his father Marcus Sr., his brother Buck, his sister Jasmine, his maternal grandmother Ella, his nephews, six uncles, 10 aunts, a host of cousins, all of whom are unimaginably, irrevocably, incontrovertibly, poorer from his absence.
Ahmaud Marquez Arbery was more than a viral video. He was more than a hashtag or a name on a list of tragic victims. He was more than an article or an essay or posthumous profile. He was more than a headline or an op-ed or a news package or the news cycle. He was more than a retweet or shared post. He, doubtless, was more than our likes or emoji tears or hearts or praying hands. He was more than an R.I.P. t-shirt or placard. He was more than an autopsy or a transcript or a police report or a live-streamed hearing. He, for damn sure, was more than the latest reason for your liberal white friend’s ephemeral outrage. He was more than a rally or a march. He was more than a symbol, more than a movement, more than a cause. He. Was. Loved.
A disabled and orphaned Romanian child lies in his bed on November 24, 2009, at the Targu Jiu orphanage, southwestern Romania, after being transfered from Bilteni's orphanage, which was considered to be the worst place for children under the dictatorship of former Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu. Twenty years after the death of former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the orphanages are still full of children and adults, because the regime�s policy which previously rendered abortion and contraception illegal, is still very strong in the minds of the population. (THOMAS COEX/AFP via Getty Images)
At three weeks old, Izidor was abandoned at a state-run hospital for “unsalvageables” in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania — left behind by his family because one of his legs was deformed. Estimates say that under Ceaușescu’s regime, 170,000 babies, children, and teens lived in “child gulags” subsisting on thin gruel, often in filthy, horrific conditions. Deprived of loving care of any kind, those that lived were often under-developed physically and mentally, and found it difficult to form attachments with other people. At The Atlantic, Melissa Fay Greene reports on how growing up at the hospital affected Izidor’s capacity for empathy and attachment and how his emotional makeup has affected the American family that adopted him as a teen.
Like all the boys and girls who lived in the hospital for “irrecoverables,” Izidor was served nearly inedible, watered-down food at long tables where naked children on benches banged their tin bowls. He grew up in overcrowded rooms where his fellow orphans endlessly rocked, or punched themselves in the face, or shrieked. Out-of-control children were dosed with adult tranquilizers, administered through unsterilized needles, while many who fell ill received transfusions of unscreened blood. Hepatitis B and HIV/AIDS ravaged the Romanian orphanages.
At age 3, abandoned children were sorted. Future workers would get clothes, shoes, food, and some schooling in Case de copii—“children’s homes”—while “deficient” children wouldn’t get much of anything in their Cămine Spitale. The Soviet “science of defectology” viewed disabilities in infants as intrinsic and uncurable. Even children with treatable issues—perhaps they were cross-eyed or anemic, or had a cleft lip—were classified as “unsalvageable.”
Neural pathways thrive in the brain of a baby showered with loving attention; the pathways multiply, intersect, and loop through remote regions of the brain like a national highway system under construction. But in the brain of a neglected baby—a baby lying alone and unwanted every week, every year—fewer connections get built. The baby’s wet diaper isn’t changed. The baby’s smiles aren’t answered. The baby falls silent. The door is closing, but a sliver of light shines around the frame.
You must be logged in to post a comment.