Search Results for: Dan P. Lee

‘The Paper’ is the Most Essential and Overlooked Film About Journalism

There’s a lot to like about The Post, a film that has drawn rave reviews even before its pre-holidays debut. The combination of Meryl Streep as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, and Tom Hanks as the paper’s editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee is the rare pairing of GOAT actors operating at their all-time peak.

The film covers the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the New York Times, the Washington Post’s attempt to obtain its own copy, and the ensuing battle against the Nixon administration which led to the Supreme Court case about the Daniel Ellsberg-leaked documents. As Manohla Dargis of the New York Times described in her review of the film, “The pleasure of The Post is how it sweeps you up in how it all went down…Like many movies that turn the past into entertainment, The Post gently traces the arc of history, while also bending it for dramatic punch and narrative expediency.”

The Post is the ultimate click-bait film for our current moment: An all-star cast telling the story of righteous journalism while press freedoms are being threatened on a daily basis. There is a time-honored tradition of films that have functioned in a similar way, including NetworkAll the President’s Men, and most recently, Spotlight. Last month The Post published a compendium of the greatest journalism movies ever made, selected by the likes of Katy Tur, Jill Abramson, and Marty Baron (who, of course, chose Spotlight, where he’s played by Liev Schreiber). And on the heels of The Post’s rundown was a feature by Haley Mlotek on the 30th anniversary of Broadcast News, the 1987 drama that “predicted journalism as we know it.”

What’s most interesting isn’t the selection of films that have largely defined what our conceived notions of how journalism functions, including what reporters look like — bodies clad in beige clothing drinking copious amounts of coffee. What I find fascinating is that most of these films deal with large-scale or long-form investigative reporting, the type of work that takes months and involves countless interview montages. What about a film that covers a day in the life of an average newspaper?

I’m talking about The Paper, in my opinion, the best journalism film ever made and one that almost never gets any credit. Starring Michael Keaton as the metro editor of the fictional Sun — a loose portrayal of The New York Post —  the movie details the killing of two out-of-state businessmen in a pre-gentrified Williamsburg and the arrest of two black teenagers for the crime. The problem is the charges are bogus, a mob hit made to look like murders with racial undertones at a time when New York, on the screen and in real life, had reached a tipping point. The Sun and its staff, including Glenn Close as the managing editor, Robert Duvall as the EIC, and Randy Quaid as a quasi-Mike McAlary-Pete Hamill-type columnist, have a day to both confirm and break the exclusive. Asked at one point why the story can’t wait until the next day, as Close tells Keaton during a staff meeting, “We taint them today, we make them look good on Saturday, everybody’s happy.” Keaton exclaims, “Not tomorrow, right fucking now, today!”

Co-written by Stephen Koepp, former executive editor of Time magazine, The Paper beautifully illustrates the lunacy and creativity of working under a deadline. The feeling one gets upon getting the perfect quote — “Don’t take the bat out of my hands, it’s the ninth inning, I got to get the quote, the guy’s not going to be there all night,” says Keaton — or confirming a previously deep background detail on the record. It’s a rush native to only journalists, the endorphins multiplying as you have only minutes to finish the article. Every reporter has experienced at least one editor snapping at them as Duvall does to Keaton, “You want to run the story? You have five hours until 8 o’clock — go get the story. Do your job!” And then it’s over, and you have to do it again the next day. That’s the inherent genius of The Paper. No other film conveys the madness of deadline journalism — or the fun.

Midway through the film, Quaid, who shines as the paper’s embattled columnist who believes people are plotting against him, fires a gun through a stack of newspapers to end an argument, which allows Keaton to finish a conversation with his wife (played by the brilliant Marisa Tomei).

At which point, Tomei, whose character works at the Sun and is at the beginning of her maternity leave, gushes, “God, I miss this place!”

The journalism practiced in All the President’s MenThe Post, and Spotlight is never going to cease — it’s the journalism that will always endure. The deep-rooted injustices that are so outrageous, it is as if the abuses themselves are practically begging for someone to shine a light on. Liev Schreiber, as The Boston Globe‘s editor-in-chief, makes this point in Spotlight: “Sometimes it is easy to forget that we spend most of our time stumbling around in the dark. Suddenly, a light gets turned on.” But what is being threatened is the journalism of The Paper: the daily local grind.

Following the dissolution of uber-local sites DNAInfo and Gothamist, Danielle Tcholakian wrote about what happens when newspapers stop covering what immediately impacts its citizens:

That was a big part of what we were there to do: show people exactly how every action, big or small, impacted their daily lives in the neighborhoods they lived in and loved.

And that is what makes The Paper so special, and why Tomei’s quote is such a genius line. She underscores the heart of the film: forget the money, the fame, and the accolades, all that matters is getting the story right — for a moment, because as the 1010 Wins tagline blares throughout the film at various points, “Your whole world can change in 24 hours.”

My Daughter Died, But I’m Still Mothering Her

neo8iam via Pexels

Jacqueline Dooley | Longreads | January 2018 | 20 minutes (5,067words)

In July 2016, when we got the results of my 15-year-old daughter’s CT scan, my friend Babs introduced me to a new term: “anticipatory grief.” The scan showed that tumors in Ana’s lungs were noticeably larger than they’d been three months earlier, and masses in her abdomen had multiplied. Having been through this eight years earlier with her then 16-year-old son, Killian, Babs recognized that what we were dealing with wasn’t just a bad scan. It was a turning point in Ana’s disease — the Inflammatory Myofibroblastic Tumor, a rare form of pediatric cancer, she’d been diagnosed with four years earlier.

Medicinenet.com defines anticipatory grief as “the normal mourning that occurs when a patient or family is expecting a death.” As if there was anything normal about preparing to mourn my child’s death.

I didn’t like the term. I wasn’t ready to start grieving.

Babs suggested I reach out to a local hospice organization. I recoiled at the thought. Ana looked and felt good. I was sure her oncologist would find a drug to slow her progression until some miracle of modern medicine revealed a cure. It seemed impossible that Ana would die. I had no frame of reference or spiritual foundation for the enormity of that kind of loss.

Ana’s oncologist switched her to a new medication, but made it clear that this likely would only slow things down. Although it was disappointing, we still had hope. Ana glowed with health, at least outwardly. Maybe this new treatment would work better than the others had. Maybe.

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2017: Under-Recognized Stories

Here are the best stories we thought deserved more attention this year. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday.

Sari Botton
Essays editor, Longreads

How to Write Iranian-America, or The Last Essay (Porochista Khakpour, Catapult)

Women writers of color aren’t given enough opportunities, and too often when they are, the opportunity is limited. They’re asked, again and again, to write about aspects of their identity, and are rarely afforded chances to write about anything else. Writing in the second person, Porochista Khakpour helps the reader to imagine being an artist hemmed in by such limitations. She takes us through the arc of her career thus far: from deciding early on that she didn’t want to “write what you know,” as a mentor suggested; to becoming the Iranian-American essayist of choice every time certain publications wanted an opinion from that particular demographic; to deciding she was no longer willing to be limited in that way, but feeling conflicted nonetheless. As a fan of Kahkpour’s writing, I certainly hope this isn’t her last essay but instead marks the beginning of a new chapter in which she feels free to write about whatever she chooses.

Kate’s Still Here (Libby Copeland, Esquire)

I’ve reached an age where death — of friends, family, colleagues — has become a more regular occurrence. I’ve become slightly obsessed with it, but at the same time, remain afraid to discuss it and plan for it. It was refreshing and moving for me to read this feature by Libby Copeland about a couple who embraced the inevitable so boldly and lovingly. Copeland spends time with Kate and Deloy Oberlin as they consciously prepare for Kate’s death from metastatic breast cancer, and again in the aftermath of her passing. Deloy honors his wife’s wishes that once she’s gone, a gathering will be held where family and friends can visit with her body, chilled with dry ice and frozen water bottles. Afterward, he delivers her body to a site where it is composted as part of a study in green burial. I believe it might be impossible to get to the end of this piece without feeling warmed and shedding some tears.


Aaron Gilbreath
Contributing editor, Longreads

In the Land of Vendettas That Go on Forever (Amanda Petrusich, Virginia Quarterly Review)

Amanda Petrusich she traveled to Northern Albania to write about the culture of vengeance that guides the region’s sense of justice. Her story takes readers along rocky roads to mountain villages, but the real journey takes place inside the minds of the local people, whose ideas about justice require a vigilante, not the law, to kill a person who was involved in a murder. His eye-for-an-eye approach harkens back to early tribal times in the country. Perfectly mixing narration with analysis, the story ultimately asks philosophical questions: Does revenge really make up for a loss? What is justice? In a year when many of us eagerly watch special counsel Robert Mueller investigate a president who flaunts his disregard for the law, justice is on the forefront of our minds, except some of us want it to arrive through legal channels.


Matt Giles
Contributing editor and chief fact-checker, Longreads

Jumpin’ Joe (Robert Silverman, Victory Journal)

Much of sports discourse this year has centered on Colin Kaepernick. Thousands of words and hours of conversation have been unspooled on the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, his stance on athletes’ rights, and why the NFL has seemingly blacklisted the QB who nearly won a Super Bowl four years ago. But to understand the present, it helps to look to the past, and Silverman’s profile of Jumpin’ Joe Caldwell, a star forward with the ABA in the 1970s, is timely and worth highlighting. Caldwell was vice president of the league’s players union, and after a contentious episode with the management of the St. Louis Spirits, who believed Caldwell convinced Marvin Barnes, the team’s best player, to jettison to the NBA, Caldwell couldn’t land another contract in either league. Caldwell’s story is truly one of the first in which athletes sought the control they deserved from their employer, and though Silverman doesn’t overtly connect Caldwell’s situation to Kaepernick’s, the parallels are more than evident.


Ethan Chiel
Contributing editor and fact-checker, Longreads

The Immortal Life of John Tesh’s NBA Anthem “Roundball Rock” (David Roth, Vice)

The first time I heard John Tesh’s voice was in the passenger seat of my dad’s Mazda, driving through upstate New York as part of a road trip to visit colleges. Tesh was hosting his daily radio show and he was telling an interminable story with no point, but I ate that shit up. It was only later that I’d see the famous Red Rocks video David Roth mentions in his wonderful story about Tesh’s NBA on NBC anthem, or learn anything about that part of Tesh’s life. But through the story of that instrumental anthem — which remains a banger — and his conversation with Tesh, Roth manages to tease out the easygoing, very slightly anodyne, successful-yet-anonymous nature of Tesh’s work and life, as well as what makes him so bizarrely charming.


Ben Huberman
Senior editor, Longreads

The Age of Rudeness (Rachel Cusk, The New York Times Magazine)

Last February feels like centuries ago. There were still so many terrible things for us to endure in a year that had just started. Yet 10 months and 10,000 news cycles later, Rachel Cusk’s essay remains fresh and unsettling, like a prophecy in which the worst parts may or may not have already come true. Cusk looks at airport agents and shop assistants, Sophocles and Jesus, and yes, Trump makes an appearance too. Through this tangle of anecdotes, she channels something many of us have been feeling yet have failed to articulate: The sense that all previous protocols of basic social decency are broken, and that we’re still not sure how to handle the shards.


Catherine Cusick
Audience development editor, Longreads

The Selfie Monkey Goes to the Ninth Circuit (Sarah Jeong, Motherboard)

Humor never really felt like an option in such a serious year, but Jeong’s simian legal saga reminded me that humor shouldn’t be so disposable. Her story isn’t really about the monkey; it’s about who can rightfully be considered the “next friend” of an Internet-famous crested macaque. It’s about whether or not we can fight the good fight and giggle our way through it and still make a case for justice when it really matters. Bonkers things happened in 2017 — absurd, hilarious things — and not all of them were life-threatening or world-ending or rights-violating. (Unless monkeys have standing to sue under the Copyright Act. Then yeah, some violations went down.)

Humor is like taste-testing non-lethal poison: you never forget it. It’s what made Naruto stand out as the one monkey I clearly didn’t appreciate enough at the time. Most of what flew under the radar this year was probably funny, and I think missing out on that laughter cost us. But writing that has a punchline isn’t an indulgence, it’s a vitamin. We always need more of it than we think we do.


Emily Perper
Contributing editor, Longreads

Contemplating Death at the Edge of the Continent (Laura Turner, Catapult)

This year, I wrote rarely. Every time I put pen to paper or started to type, I began and ended in the same place, full of dread. Writing, which used to be a way to work through my fear, seemed only to reinforce it. And so I looked for writers who could say what I could not. Laura Turner was one of those writers. Her column at Catapult, “A Cure for Fear,” made me feel less alone. Every entry was poignant and true, in an eerie get-out-of-my-brain sort of way.

But my favorite essay of hers predates that column, and it’s called “Contemplating Death at the Edge of the Continent.” Maybe you, too, spiral into a panic when you think about the inevitability of dying. Many nights, I lie awake and hyperventilate while my partner sleeps peacefully next to me. Catapult published Turner’s essay on January 11, the week before Trump’s inauguration, and dying felt closer than ever this year. Would my death come via nuclear war with North Korea? Cancer I wouldn’t be able to treat when my healthcare disappeared? Assault at the hands of someone who hates trans people?

To come to terms with her own anxiety about The End, Turner sought out solitude at the New Camaldoli Hermitage on the Pacific coast. In addition to our shared chronic anxiety, Turner’s writing is infused with a Christian spirituality I recognize and appreciate deeply. I am a person of lapsed faith, but in these uncertain days, Christianity feels comforting in its familiarity. There are no neat answers. We have to sit with that — Turner in her quiet cell on the coast, me at my desk in my cold apartment. So I implore you to read Turner’s work — not just this essay, but her entire oeuvre about anxiety, because it is beautiful, authentic, and necessary.


Danielle Jackson
Contributing editor, Longreads

Eve Ewing: Other Means to Liberation (Kiese Laymon, Guernica)

This conversation between Laymon and poet and sociologist Eve Ewing on the publication of her well-received collection of poems Electric Arches, is spirited and wide-ranging. They talk through the policies that shaped the conditions of Chicago’s public schools, the migratory patterns of black Americans in the 20th century, and the case of Assata Shakur. What has stayed with me is how the sense of comfort and warmth between Ewing and Laymon makes space for them, and by extension, their audience, to imagine new ways of thinking, talking, and doing creative work.


Danielle Tcholakian
Staff writer, Longreads

How a Pearland Mom Changed Her Life to Save Her Transgender Child (Roxanna Asgarian, Houstonia Magazine)

It may seem strange to deem a story tweeted by the ACLU of Texas “under-recognized,” but Roxanna Asgarian’s feature on a devoutly religious, long-conservative Texas woman’s decision to give up her entire life — losing friends, family and community — and reconfigure her own identity to save her young transgender daughter’s life didn’t seem to generate the attention and discussion it deserved. Maybe it was because it came out in Houstonia’s December issue, maybe because the mother and daughter featured in it had also been written about by national outlets. But Asgarian did the crucial thing that local outlets do, after the national media parachutes in and back out again: She stayed on the story. Her account of Kimberly Shappley’s awakening and devotion to her daughter Kai spans years and is excruciating in its heartbreaking detail. I still wince and shudder thinking about the time Kimberly discovered Kai’s legs were cold while tucking her into bed, only to find her daughter — still called Joseph then — had taken too-small underpants from a toy doll and worn them herself, cutting off her own circulation. While national outlets heralded Kimberly’s heroism, Asgarian showed that their story, and their struggle, is far from over.

Before first grade started, Kai asked her mom a question. “She said, ‘Mommy, when I grow up and have really long hair, will I look weird that I have a penis?’” Shappley recalled. It started a long conversation between them about what makes someone beautiful, and about how everyone’s body is different. Kai seemed satisfied, but later, she followed up: Why, then, don’t princesses have penises?

“I said, ‘How do you know that? How do you know that Ariel wasn’t born with a penis? Because she didn’t like the body she was born in either, and so she changed her body to look like what she felt she was born to be.’”

Now, Shappley said, her and Kai’s “secret giggle-giggle” is that Ariel is transgender, and that other princesses might be, too, because “not everybody tells.”

“It’s constantly having to be an inventive parent, and being quick on your feet,” Shappley said. “But isn’t all parenting that way?”


Krista Stevens
Senior editor, Longreads

The Detective of Northern Oddities, (Christopher Solomon, Outside)

As someone who earns her living seated indoors, laptop in hand, I’m endlessly curious about people whose jobs are very different from mine. At Outside, Christopher Solomon profiles Kathy Burek, a veterinary pathologist who examines unusual deaths in the Alaskan animal kingdom. Elbow deep in bodily fluids, Burek works on everything from sea otters to polar bears, and her necropsies are revealing stunning evidence of climate change in the North that will soon find its way South. The fascinating science in Solomon’s beautiful prose made this a satisfying read.

When they captured her off Cohen Island in the summer of 2007, she weighed 58 pounds and was the size of a collie. The growth rings in a tooth they pulled revealed her age—eight years, a mature female sea otter.

They anesthetized her and placed tags on her flippers. They assigned her a number: LCI013, or 13 for short. They installed a transmitter in her belly and gave her a VHF radio frequency: 165.155 megahertz. Then they released her. The otter was now, in ­effect, her own small-wattage Alaskan ­radio station. If you had the right kind of ­antenna and a receiver, you could launch a skiff into Kachemak Bay, lift the antenna, and hunt the air for the music of her existence: an ­occasional ping in high C that was both solitary and reassuring amid the static of the wide world.


Michelle Legro
Senior editor, Longreads

The Painful Truth About Teeth (Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan, The Washington Post)

Filling the Gap (John Stanton, Buzzfeed)

It’s almost hard to believe that the life and death battle over health care dominated the first half of this year, as stories about Medicare, Medicaid, pre-existing conditions, and outrageously expensive medications helped defeat the bill in Congress.

Among these dire stories there was a medical desperation still in the shadows: that of inadequate or nonexistent dental care. The Washington Post’s visit to an enormous mobile clinic on the Eastern Shore showed the lengths people were willing to go to in order to fix just one thing. And in a Mexican border town, John Stanton’s riveting reporting revealed a parallel economy thriving on the shoddy American healthcare system, one where patients — many of them Trump voters — cross the border for cheap dental procedures, if they can afford to make the trip. These stories were a stark reminder that medical care is about far more than life or death, it’s about living with dignity.


Mike Dang
Editor in chief, Longreads

Series on Children and Gun Violence (John Woodrow Cox, The Washington Post)

Whenever someone asked me for a story recommendation this year, I asked them if they were reading Cox’s Washington Post series on how children are being affected by gun violence in the U.S. They would either say “no” or would tell me, “Oh, I’ve seen that but haven’t gotten around to it yet.” Well, now is the time to read this stellar series that might have been overshadowed by so many other stellar reporting done this year.

Start here, and then go here, here, here, here and here. If you’ve only got time for one, in this piece Cox does a particularly good job of showing the trauma suffered by six teenagers following the Las Vegas shooting massacre. If I were on a committee handing out journalism awards, John Woodrow Cox would be on my list of honorees.

Watching a Fall

AP Photo/Massoud Hossaini

Christine Spillson | Boulevard | Fall 2017 | 18 minutes (5,070 words)

On the morning of August 14, 1936, Rainey Bethea stepped out a door and into the crowd whose reported numbers would conflict greatly, anywhere between 10,000-20,000, but whose number, reports agree, had been growing in the dark of pre-dawn Owensboro, Kentucky.  Though neither Bethea nor anyone else in the crowd could have known it, this would be the last public execution in the United States. When Bethea arrived for his scheduled hanging, he had his short-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the top so that his collar was closed.

He did not wear a necktie.

A path had been cleared for him. A tunnel, walled with human bodies, funneled him towards a stage. On the stage stood a scaffold, in the middle of which, was a trap door marked with an X. The X told Rainey Bethea where he would be standing and where the other men, some in white panama hats some not, should not stand. Not if they didn’t want to drop into history with the convicted man that they guided toward the center.

Rainey Bethea put one shoeless foot forward, pushing lightly down, as if to test the integrity of the space. As he moved onto the X it’s possible that, as Phil Hanna (“the humane hangman”) slipped on the noose he took a moment to whisper, “Remember, I am here to help you.”

The night before he was to be executed, Bethea took his last meal in a Louisville, Kentucky prison. One of the more widely printed pictures of Bethea shows him in the process of eating either lemon pie or mashed potatoes, both of which he requested. The black and white of the photo makes it difficult to tell which he is eating. In the picture, his shirt opens at the collar, revealing a cross tightly circling his neck. He stares out.

At some time between 5:23 a.m., when he arrived at the foot of the stairs, and 5:44 a.m., when he was pronounced dead, Bethea must have had a moment to stare out at the crowd that had gathered to watch him. He stood there watching them watch him watch them. A cycle that loops out into an infinite moment of observation. As he looked out he couldn’t have known that one of the men in the crowd had just told a reporter that he’d driven with six others from Florida to see the hanging. Bethea probably didn’t know that reporters were taking note of license plates from at least half a dozen other states and twenty different counties in Kentucky. The distance that they had traveled to be there didn’t matter, the audience was just a massive white monolith that pressed towards him from the front, the way dawn’s short but lengthening fingers reached toward him from his right, the way the stairs receded from his left, and the way that empty space beneath him pressed up toward his feet until it met the wood that held the X which, for that moment, still held his feet. Behind him, he must have known, there was nothing he could turn to see. Then there was the black hood to cover his face, a courtesy for the audience not Rainey Bethea; after that, he could see nothing at all.

***

My grandmother was there. My mother has tried to provide me an excuse for it. My grandmother, Dorothy Hagan before she was Dorothy Hagan Riley, was seventeen in 1936. She had left school three years earlier, after the eighth grade, to help support her family, her three brothers and two sisters. Her father, Jerome, walked every day to work in his tobacco field outside of town. While the living he made from it was enough to have moved his family from a log cabin with dirt floors and no running water and into a house in Owensboro, it was not enough to be enough. They had not made it far enough from the cabin and from rural poverty not to need more. A picture in my mother’s room shows her in that abandoned house, leaning out of a loft window that looks more like something that belongs to a barn than a home, and I stand below with my sister and my grandmother.

My grandmother, I am told, wouldn’t have gone to see a man hanged. My great-grandfather, I am told, wouldn’t have gone with his teenage daughter to see a man hanged. The definitive proof of this is that he was considered by all to be a Christian man. But they did. They were there. In that Friday’s predawn darkness, my great-grandfather chose not to walk to his fields outside of town but deeper into its center.  They walked together the few blocks from their home on Fifth Street and north towards the Ohio River and the parking lot that sat between First and Second streets (where the city convention center now stands) where the execution was to take place. They are somewhere there, possibly in the picture, definitely in the crowd of men in white hats, white shirts, and women in long skirts. After I asked, after I tried to make sense of it, of why the grandmother who I remember having jars full of those terrible puffy orange “circus peanut” candies, who made the world’s sweetest pecan pie and the South’s best biscuits and gravy, would have gone to watch a man killed, my mother calls me to offer her theory. She has come to it long after I originally posed the question and perhaps as a way to explain to herself why her mother would have been there. What lesson could she have been attempting to learn that wasn’t worth repeating to her children?  My mother tells me about the job in town. She argues that, if it was crowded like I say, then maybe it was hard to get home, hard to get out of the center of town, hard not to attend. She does not acknowledge that there is a distinction between having been there and having watched. I was told that she watched. I also know that it was done at dawn, that it was not evening, that she would not have been leaving. She had left her home early enough to attend.

***

The story of the execution of Rainey Bethea is likely not the story of an innocent man wrongly accused and put to death. It is not the story of a man being railroaded because of a city’s need for closure. Some disagree and the state of the justice system at the time certainly invites doubt but, by the time of his execution, Rainey Bethea had confessed to his crime on five separate occasions and had pleaded guilty during his trial. The first confession started in the back of a police car while being transported between jails after his arrest.

Sitting in the back of a Jefferson County police car, he leaned forward, “I might as well tell you something.” A small shape in the long back seat of the giant black Ford, he tells the two men driving him from Owensboro to Louisville that he entered Lishia Edward’s home, which he had worked in previously, by walking over the roofs of neighboring buildings and then prying at a loose window screen. In this first confession, possibly made while he was still intoxicated from the whiskey that he had been drinking earlier, he admits to choking the 70-year-old woman and then beating her and raping her. In this version, she does not move when he is finished and turns away to search the room for jewelry. By his fifth confession, she is alive when he leaves, and she tells his back as he exits out the window, “I know you.” But there, in his first confession, she doesn’t move as he left. He knew why the police focused on him and shook his head as if he can’t believe it even then, days later: “When I left, I forgot my ring.”

***

The crime that Rainey Bethea was convicted of committing, though horrific, becomes an essential but small detail in the story as it was brought to the nation. It was a story of a woman sheriff and the humane hangman. It was the story of a black man to be hanged by white men at the orders of a white woman in the South, and that was the way that it was presented. It was the story of a county that had elected to charge a man with rape rather than with murder, though the prosecutor believed him guilty of both, because in Kentucky one could punish rape by a public hanging in the town where the crime occurred; a murderer would be executed privately by the state with an electric chair.

In a decade that had seen 103 lynchings by the end of 1936 and would see another sixteen in the four years before its end, the public, court-sanctioned execution of an African American was, even so, a spectacle worthy of note and worthy of condemnation by the media of a country whose states had largely already removed the punishing of capital crimes from the public view. Even in a decade in which 2/3 of those executed by the government were African- American, the public nature of the event made it worthy of wider attention.

Rainey Bethea’s death was the story of a black man to be hanged by white men at the orders of a white woman in the South, and that was the way that it was presented.

The tension was obvious enough for anyone with an eye for drama to notice. The dynamics of race and gender and class were working together to create a story that was hard to look away from. Florence Shoemaker Thompson, the sheriff of Daviess County Kentucky, had been sheriff for only a few short months when Bethea was sentenced to hang. Sheriff Thompson had not run for the job. After her husband died in April of 1936 while in the office, a judge appointed his widow to fill the vacant seat. The appointment came from pity — she was a housewife with four young children that she needed to support — and from practicality — the vacancy needed to be filled swiftly so that law enforcement for the county could continue to function.

In his 1992 book, The Last Public Execution in America, Perry Ryan tells us that “hers is not the story of a feminist” rather “hers is the story of a simple but brave and forthright woman.” He characterizes Thompson as a good cook and an excellent seamstress who just wanted what was best for her children. This portrayal of the woman is reductively simple, just as the contemporary accounts of her go little beyond the picture of her as a sheriff in skirts. The press, and thus much of the nation, wondered if this woman who had only recently stepped outside of the home to work would be able to fulfill the duty required of a county sheriff if an execution was to be served out in their county. Could she, would she, pull the lever to make Rainey Bethea drop? How could they look away until they knew?

***

About a year ago, while eating dinner with my family in Florida, I very awkwardly brought up the topic of the execution of Rainey Bethea. My mother had invited her sister and brother over for dinner since I was home for a visit. I sat on the side of the dining room table that faces the smoked mirror wall that forms one side of the room. It is a relic of the house’s 1970’s origin that my mother finds charming and has refused to change in various renovation projects. I believe that she also thinks that it works to nicely reflect the light from the same era’s smoked glass bubble light chandelier that hangs over the dining room table, another relic of the house’s past that she has determined to keep.

I had watched a segment on The Rachel Maddow Show about the last public execution to take place in America. Maddow started the segment by talking about Florence Thompson inheriting her late husband’s job as the sheriff of Daviess County and the focused media attention that surrounded the execution. The point that Maddow was working to arrive at was that, though it was terrible, there was a sense of transparency to the processes, a transparency that had been notably absent during a botched lethal injection in Arizona. The story continued to stay in my mind as I thought about my grandmother’s connection to the place. I knew that while my mother and her siblings had not been born in or ever lived in that city, they had spent every summer there as children, since it was the town that their mother was from and the place where the majority of her family still lived. So when I brought it up over dinner in a sort of “did you know about this” way, I was surprised that my mother and her siblings looked at me with an “of course we knew that” look. They tell me that my grandmother attended but couldn’t explain why.

“She always just shook her head if it came up,” my aunt told me while we ate dessert. From what I can gather she never actually said a word about it to any of her children. But they never really asked about it. They didn’t ask her why she went. When I ask if she was racist or if her father was racist I get the reply, “No, of course not.”

I try to imagine going to see the execution out of a sense of justice or to get a feeling of closure. These are reasons that are offered for capital punishment, the reasons why they held public executions in the community that was affected by the crime, the reasons that might support my grandmother’s attendance. The victim had lived on the same street as my grandmother. It is said that everyone in town knew Lishia Edwards. Perhaps she felt personally injured. Perhaps she, and what was likely a majority of the Owensboro, felt that to watch the execution was to watch justice being done.

In 2001, when Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber, was to be executed, the government received more than 250 requests from those who had lost someone in the bombing for access to view the execution. Oneta Johnson lost her mother in the bombing, her body hadn’t been found until ten days later in the rubble. Ms. Johnson said that she hoped that seeing McVeigh dead might make her feel better. The Entertainment Network Inc. in Tampa, FL tried to sue the government so that we could all watch. They wanted to webcast the footage of McVeigh being executed to anyone willing to pay $1.95. The Entertainment Network Inc. lost its suit.

***

When Bethea was incarcerated in 1935 for the theft of two purses from the Vogue Beauty Shop located on Frederica Street in Owensboro for which he pleaded guilty to grand larceny, he was given a physical at which time his weight was noted as being 128 pounds and his height was recorded as 5’4”. Because of his small stature and slight build, he would, according to the 1947 Army Manual for military executions, need to drop a distance between 7’10” and 7’7” for an optimal outcome. An optimal outcome here would mean that he did not drop too far and too long, which could result in decapitation, or drop too short and too briefly which would result in a slow strangulation that could subsequently take up to forty-five minutes.

G. Phil Hanna would have known this. He might have known these figures and recommendations by heart when he stood waiting at the top of the scaffold that day in August. Bethea’s execution would be his seventieth. The hangman would have known how far a man needs to fall. He would have known that it is recommended that a hanging rope should be made from manila hemp fibers, and should be not more than one-and-a-quarter inches in diameter but not less than three-quarters of an inch. Hanna, by that point, would know that the experts suggest that the rope be thirty feet in length and that the rope should “be boiled and then stretched while drying to eliminate any spring, stiffness, or tendency to coil” and that the “portion of the noose which slides through the knot will be treated with wax, soap or grease to ensure a smooth sliding action through the knot.” A smooth sliding action through the knot would be vital to the execution, so when Hanna bought his hanging rope, or rather had one specially made for him in St. Louis out of a long-strand hemp fiber (which would be softer and less scratchy), he was willing to pay $65.

He knew the importance of a good rope. He kept all thirty-eight feet of it coiled and protected in a special box. He could observe you, estimate your weight and tell you how far you’d need to drop for a good hanging, something that he did to a reporter interviewing him in 1933 for The Decatur Daily Review. “I tie the knot” Hanna said. “Your neck would require about eight turns of the rope.” He knows that a man with a long neck might require thirteen turns of the rope but had learned to eyeball it with accuracy. He then demonstrated the noose’s construction, the twists and turns that he would require of the rope. If it weren’t just a demonstration, if it were a real hanging, he would treat the knot with pure castile soap and then sprinkle it with a scented talcum. If this were a real hanging, he would have gone to the jail and introduced himself to the condemned man by saying his name and then, “I am here to help you.”

The victim had lived on the same street as my grandmother.  Perhaps she felt personally injured. Perhaps she, and what was likely a majority of the Owensboro, felt that to watch the execution was to watch justice being done.

Hanna was a curiosity in the same way the woman sheriff and the town square hanging was a curiosity for the press. He had already earned his reputation of “humane hangman” when he was recommended to Sheriff Thompson because he had his own equipment and the experience and expertise to carry off the sentence. He also didn’t demand any payment. Hanna saw his work of execution facilitator (perhaps a term that he’d appreciate given that he did not like being called a hangman) as vocational rather than occupational and he had never, in any of his seventy hangings, actually sprung the trapdoor.

Having hired Hanna to bring his portable scaffold, his thirty-eight-foot rope, and his experience in sixty-nine previous hangings, Sheriff Thompson was faced with making the decision of who would officially pull the lever to spring the moment that would ultimately kill a man. It was, strictly speaking, her duty. She refused to answer any questions posed by an interested public and a persistent press about whether she would be acting as the executioner. She started receiving requests for “reserve seating” tickets and questions as to when they might be going on sale from people all over the country. She spoke to her priest, she spoke to her friends, but she wouldn’t speak to the press. This was a mistake. By not telling anyone what her decision was she creates mystery. This mystery, the will-she or won’t-she aspect of the story became a mystery that had a defined expiration date and that would end with a death regardless of her decision. How could it fail to sell papers?

Dear Mrs. Thompson,

I am writing you this letter, offering you my services … for several reasons, … First you are a woman and have four children, none of which I am sure would want you to spring the trap that sends Rainey Bethea into eternity. Second, I wouldn’t want my mother to be placed in such an unpleasant position. Third, I am an ex-serviceman and served … in France in 1918 and 1919, and I know just how you would feel after the execution if you went through with it. You may think it wouldn’t bother you, after it is all over, but I know different … Please do not give this letter to anyone for publication … I am not hunting for publicity. I only want to help you.

Your friend,
A.L. Hash

The press didn’t know that Sheriff Thompson had been corresponding with Arthur L. Hash, a former Louisville policeman, and that he had offered to take up this responsibility on her behalf. He cites his wartime service in France as evidence that he knows what she would feel in the aftermath of the execution, even though the death wasn’t the result of a choice that she had made. “You may think it wouldn’t bother you after it is all over, but I know different,” Hash tells her. Perhaps aware that duty and obligation wouldn’t remove the immediate connection between her hand on the lever and the sudden rushing sense of a body moving quickly through space before the abrupt snap. And, of course, it will be witnessed, written about, photographed and talked about.

***

In his writings about incarceration and punishment, Michel Foucault made an observation similar to so many of the newspapers writing contemporary accounts of the execution of Bethea. The public aspect of punishment often turned into a carnival. If the purpose of public execution was once to terrify a population into being law-abiding citizens, to act as a type of control of the masses by the smaller coalitions of people in positions of power, modern public executions slipped further and further from the horror that they sought to inspire. Rather than reaffirming the authority of those in power, public executions started to degrade it and, through the lawlessness of the crowd, offered those attending as witnesses a glimpse of their own collective power.

France continued to behead people in public spaces until 1939 (and continue to behead people in private until capital punishment was banned in 1977). The final public use of the guillotine was photographed by people in the crowd. One person was able to film it. The video and photographic evidence of the social revelry before and after the execution was said to be disturbing enough to the wider French population and the French government that the use of public executions was reassessed.

Of course, this was the very narrative that Foucault was denying. He didn’t believe that the authorities developed some sentiment about the brutality of the practice, that they suddenly saw wrong and cringed from the horror. It was an issue of control.

Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle, would likely have agreed but for different reasoning.

The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever…The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification.

For this context, the last public execution in the U.S., we might understand this to mean that we get a greater and greater transference of power from the action and the representation of the action. In an earlier society, the government or those with power had, for the most part, direct and limiting control of the images of a public execution. They scheduled it; they carried it out. Once people have the ability to take these images themselves and distribute them widely and in whatever context they chose, the power of the spectacle transferred from those that once controlled the execution to those who observe it and then redistribute it.

After 1936, control of these images was reestablished. With executions moved indoors, journalists may watch, if they are selected (usually through a lottery system), but they may not bring cameras or recording devices. They may be searched and stripped of all personal items and given a small spiral notebook that they can use. The families of victims watch like Oneta Johnson watched. In several states volunteer witnesses also watch. In Missouri, at least eight “reputable citizen” witnesses are required at each execution. Virginia, reportedly, has a list of twenty to thirty rotating witnesses compiled from a bank of hundreds of volunteers, because six are required to be at every execution. One of the volunteer witnesses, a paint store salesman from Emporia, told one reported that he had witnessed fifteen executions. When applying to be a witness, you must answer the question “why?” Why they would they want to sign up to watch people die. Some write in that it is a civic duty, some admit to being curious. Florida, though it requires volunteer witnesses, has stopped asking why.

In 1936, though, there was no need to apply for a spot. The execution was downtown, public lot, open humid air. The people were crowding and climbing, the press was swarming. The widely distributed narrative of the execution wouldn’t be the one that constructed by the police or the courts or even the guillotine operator or the hangman. It was the details shared in the papers, in the photographs. The execution was constructed characters: the Lady Sheriff, the Humane Hangman, the Condemned Man, and finally a newcomer to the show — Arthur Hash aka “Daredevil Dick from Montana”. These people become the show and it’s a show that we must now watch to the end.

We might watch out of a need for closure; we might watch out of a feeling of obligation to act as a witness; we might watch because we believe that this is justice; we might, too, still be watching because now it is a story and, even if we know the ending, we can’t resist turning the page.

***

On the day of the execution, 1,300 reporters were present and ready to make the news. Twenty-thousand people stood waiting in the dark vacant lot for history to happen. Vendors had set up the day before and sold the crowd hotdogs and soda. Parents brought their children. People climbed trees, climbed buildings, climbed telephone poles, climbed cars, including the one that would take away Rainey Bethea’s body after the hanging. Phil Hanna stood at the top of the gallows and tested the trapdoor three times to make sure they wouldn’t stick or swing up to hit Bethea on his way down.

Then dawn was arriving and the crowd was growing restless. Some had been up all night at house parties. Some had spent the night traveling to town or trying to sleep in the lot adjacent to the scaffold. Some had tried to sleep underneath the scaffold. The people were growing restless for the event that they had come to see. Shortly after 5:00 a.m., when the dark wasn’t as dark as it had been all night, some in the crowd began to yell “bring him out” and “let’s go!”

Rainey Bethea exited the Daviess County jail and walked the approximately 800 feet to the steps of the scaffold. From witness accounts, at this moment either the crowd cheered or grew hushed. Obviously, it couldn’t be both. At the bottom of the thirteen steps that lead up to the trapdoor, Bethea paused. Sitting down for a moment on the bottom step, he said “I don’t like to die with my shoes on.” He removed one shoe and then the other. He took another moment to remove one sock and then the other and to put on a new, clean pair before standing to take his first step up. He was finally at the top and at the literal center of the attention. He knelt before Father Lammers and said his final confession. Bethea’s ankles, thighs, and arms were then strapped together with leather bindings. The bindings made his body compressed and rippled. Hanna slipped on the noose and arranged it so the knot rested behind his left ear.

It became obvious as the moment neared and Sheriff Thompson didn’t appear, that she had chosen someone else to handle the duty of springing the trap. The picture that the press had come for, the headline that they all wanted, wouldn’t be happening that day. It would never happen. Perhaps fearing her presence would make it more of a circus, Sheriff Thompson sat in a car parked fifty yards away. She had chosen to deputize Arthur Hash who climbed the stairs in a white suit and a panama hat, dodging the reporter’s questions about who he was by saying, “I’m Daredevil Dick of Montana. Take a drink with me when this is over and I’ll tell you my name.”

***

In a moment, it will be over. In a moment, the man will drop and the dreadful physics of a hanging will go as smoothly as Hanna promised with his grim expertise. A moment after that, spectators, in a frenetic rush, will descend upon the still, but hanging, body to tear at it, to rip at the concealing hood and shred it for souvenirs. So many wanted a small piece to take home with them. It will be this frenzy, the barbarism, the reports, the headlines and photographs that show to the world a cheering crowd and the total annihilation of the order that this execution was proposed to uphold that would drive future death behind walls and screens and the transparent, illusory distance of the glass observation window behind which sit those that have retained their right to watch.

***

At the top of the scaffold, Hash appeared to be drunk and staggering. His wife, Cordie, hadn’t been able to understand why he would agree to play the role of executioner, possibly not knowing at the time that he hadn’t just accepted it but sought it out. He sought out this role, to be not only one among many in the crowd, but to be one among few at the top of the gallows’ stairs and to be the sole person with the responsibility of pulling the lever which would hang Raniey Bethea. “Can you imagine him doing a thing like that,” Cordie Hash said “when there are other people in the state who would do it?”

Can we imagine?

When the moment arrived Hash seemed unsure of what he was doing. The moment expanded and went on. He fumbled. Finally, someone helped him spring the door.

* * *

This essay first appeared in Boulevard, St. Louis’ biannual print journal, founded by fiction writer Richard Burgin in 1985. Our thanks to Spillson and the Boulevard staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

No Más Fantasía

Illustration by Zach Meyer

Chris Outcalt | Longreads | December 2017 | 16 minutes (4,461 words)

On a warm, sunny morning in November 2016, a few dozen people packed a county courtroom about 20 miles northeast of Denver, Colorado. Of the cases on the docket that day in Brighton, a working-class city of 34,000 situated amid the state’s plentiful oil and gas fields, one in particular drew the crowd: a hearing to determine the fate of Giselle Gutierrez-Ruiz, a 37-year-old man who’d been sentenced to life in prison for his involvement in a fatal highway shooting in 1997.

On that night nearly 20 years ago, Gutierrez-Ruiz, a kid in a strange country, left a dance club north of Denver around 10:30 p.m. He drove someone his older brother knew south on Interstate 25, the main north-south thoroughfare through the city. A few miles down the road, near the city limit, the passenger pulled out an Uzi and fired at cars on the highway, killing one person. Gutierrez-Ruiz didn’t learn a man had died that night for another eight days; he then cooperated with police, helping them catch the actual shooter. Nevertheless, even though he was a juvenile, he was charged as an adult and convicted for his complicity in the crime, which at the time carried a mandatory life sentence. I reported on Gutierrez-Ruiz’s case for several months throughout the summer and fall of 2015, and I attended his resentencing hearing. Like everyone else there, I was anxious to learn his fate.

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2017: Profile Writing

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

Seyward Darby
Executive editor, The Atavist

A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof (Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, GQ)

There was no piece of journalism in 2017 more honest or more raw than Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s profile of Dylann Roof for GQ. Its brilliance began with an enviable lede—”Sitting beside the church, drinking from a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, he thought he had to go in and shoot them” — and persisted for the duration of what proved to be an unlikely profile. Unlikely, because Kaadzi Ghansah didn’t set out to write it. She went to Charleston to cover Roof’s murder trial, planning to report on the families of his victims, but found herself drawn to the young man who sat, angry and silent and unfazed, day after day in the courtroom. She decided to profile a black hole, an absence, because she couldn’t not.

The story is unlikely, too, because of its style. Ghansah winds through Roof’s life like a criminal profiler. She collects evidence, data, interviews, and observations, then pieces them together for readers, showing where the connective tissue resides. She is an essential presence in the story, which is no easy feat to pull off, and the result is wholly organic. This is a story about race, class, anger, bewilderment, and division. It is also, as the headline “A Most American Terrorist” attests, a story about the current political moment. You come away from it knowing who Dylann Roof is, who Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is, and what America is—or, really, what it has always been.


Read more…

In Praise of Cowardice

Emily Weinstein's ancestors

Emily Meg Weinstein | Longreads | December 2017 | 22 minutes (5,522 words)

For Ruth Weisenfeld Diamond (1921-2014) and Samuel Meyer Diamond (1919-2008)

I.

First, it came for my grandfather, then for my grandmother. Death comes for us all, but still Jews toast, l’chaim! To life!

When my mother and her brother cleaned out their dead parents’ apartment, they found their father’s Bronze Star from the war.

“Do you know what was in the box with the Bronze Star?” my mother asked me.

“A Nazi Iron Cross.”

“How did you know that?”

“Grandpa showed it to me a bunch of times.”

“Where did he get it?”

“Off a dead Nazi.”

That makes it sound like my grandfather killed the Nazi, but he didn’t. He never fired his gun, not once in the whole Allied advance.

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Longreads Best of 2017: Investigative Reporting on Sexual Misconduct

Photo treatment by Kjell Reigstad, Photos by Jeff Christensen (AP) and Joel Ryan (AP)

It was a year in which investigations loomed over us as we woke up each day and absorbed the news. Former FBI director Robert Mueller began investigating whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had any links to the Russian government and its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. The opioid crisis was covered by a few outlets wondering who, exactly, is profiting while countless people are dying. But it is the investigations into sexual misconduct perpetrated by powerful men across several industries that has had the most significant impact in 2017. And much of the reporting has been led by The New York Times. Read more…

Living Differently: How the Feminist Utopia Is Something You Have to Be Doing Now

Cover of program for the National American Women's Suffrage Association procession. (Getty Images)

Lynne Segal | Verso | November 2017 | 32 minutes (8,100 words)

The following is an excerpt from Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, by Lynne Segal (Verso, November 2017). This essay is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

The utopian novel had become one of the most effective means of frightening people off it.

It is sometimes said that the twentieth century began with utopian dreaming and ended with nostalgia, as those alternative futures once envisioned seemed by then almost entirely discredited. However, it was never quite so straightforward. The challenge to envisage how to live differently, in ways that seem better than the present, never entirely disappears.

The most prominent American utopian studies scholar, Lyman Tower Sargent, notes that dystopian scenarios increasingly dominated the speculative literary form as the twentieth century progressed. In the UK, the equally eminent utopian studies scholar Ruth Levitas concurs, pointing out, for instance, that as sociology became institutionalized in the academy, it became ‘consistently hostile’ to any utopian content.

What stands out in speculative fantasies of the future arising towards the end of the twentieth century are their darkly dystopic leanings, whether in books, cinema, comics or elsewhere. The best known would include the mass surveillance depicted in the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s satirical novel We (1921).

Set in the future, it describes a scientifically managed totalitarian state, known as One State, governed by logic and reason, where people live in glass buildings, march in step, and are known by their numbers. England’s Aldous Huxley called his dystopic science fiction Brave New World (1932), where again all individuality has been conditioned out in the pursuit of happiness. Bleaker still was George Orwell’s terrifyingly totalitarian 1984 (1945): ‘If you want a picture of the future,’ Orwell wrote in 1984, ‘imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.’

These imaginings serve primarily as warnings against futures that are often read, as with Zamyatin and Orwell, as condemnations of Soviet society. The happiness expressed in Huxley’s ‘utopic’ universe depicts a deformed or sinister version of the route where all utopias end up, as totalitarian regimes, in which free will is crushed. As the Marxist political scientist Bertell Ollman later noted: ‘From a means of winning people over to the ideal of socialism, the utopian novel had become one of the most effective means of frightening people off it.’

Post-1945, public intellectuals for the most part broadcast the view that democracy and utopic thinking were opposed, the latter declared both impossible and dangerous. The influential émigré and British philosopher of science Karl Popper argued in his classic essay ‘Utopia and Violence’ (1947) that while ‘Utopia’ may look desirable, all too desirable, it was in practice a ‘dangerous and pernicious’ idea, one that is ‘self‐defeating’ and ‘leads to violence’. There is no way of deciding rationally between competing utopian ideals, he suggested, since we cannot (contra Marxism) scientifically predict the future, which means our statements are not open to falsification and hence fail his test for any sort of reliability.

Indeed, accusations of ‘totalitarian’ thinking were the chief weapon of the Cold War, used by Western propaganda to see off any talk of communism. In the USA it was employed to undermine any left or labour movement affiliations, as through the fear and financial ruin inflicted upon hundreds of Americans hauled before Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s – over half of them Jewish Americans. Read more…

My Secondhand Lonely

(Klaus Vedfelt/Getty)

Zoë Gadegbeku | Slice | Spring/Summer 2017 | 15 minutes (4,081 words)

If it’s a Sunday, my mother is probably tucked into her bed, the stillness of the time between rest and the week’s unrelenting pace hanging heavy in the air, late afternoon light filtering through the half-drawn lavender curtains. She is probably reading, or maybe dozing and waking to the sounds of frantic sirens from the latest crime drama she has been engrossed in. The next morning, she will collect herself into the polished package she presents at work, just enough foundation to accentuate her cheekbones, dressed in a black suit with thin white pinstripes, her silver jewelry angular and slightly threatening like the point of her chin, eyes glaring above her glasses frames as if to say, “Don’t try me.” She has spent years building and defending her independence, interrupting a supposedly comfortable solitude only occasionally with relationships with men who eventually show themselves to be unworthy of her time. Still, her single motherhood never looks tragic to me, in spite of backhanded compliments that are supposed to affirm her strength: “Ah, in fact! You Mama Essie, you’re not a woman, ooh! You’re a man! Look at all the things you have done!” Working twelve-hour days, giving her family stern, frills-free advice, laughing with such unrestraint that it’s almost possible to see the fillings in her molars, she is single-minded in her mission to be excellent in every way. I can’t quite remember the exact moment she started to say, “Dzifa, I just want you to be happy. I don’t want you to end up like me.”

It may have been after I left home to go to college, after she began measuring my absence in the number of weekends she spends alone or how long it has been since I last called, but it is always distressing to hear, and I never let her continue long enough to give an explanation for this lament. I snap at her, “Why would you say that? Don’t talk like that!” Most of the time she sighs, or repeats in a resigned near-whisper, “I just want you to be happy, that’s all.” I’m only now growing to understand why being like her is supposedly an undesirable state in which to “end up.” She has spent a whole lifetime masking profound loneliness as self-sufficiency, and I have been her unknowing apprentice.

* * *

I’ve been engaged in the slow, careful process of constructing my own solitary fortress for the past five years — four in the unhealthily competitive atmosphere of an elite private college, one at a graduate program in the cold of Boston that feels unhealthy in a different way, as I’m constantly picking through my pain for the most exquisite parts to exploit for a story, or to bring the heavy black woman perspective, coded as “nuance,” to certain classroom discussions. I’ve learned how to carve bricks for the boundary around myself out of intricate excuses to explain away the obvious strain in my tight smiles: “Oh, nothing, I’m just tired.” “Yeah, I have so much shit to do, but it’s cool.” “You know, I’m a writer, so I’m always in my feelings.” Or my default reply, also inherited from my mother, “It’ll be fine. I just have to get on with it.”

I’ve developed great skill at stacking these platitudes between myself and anyone who may see me often enough to notice the cracks in my poor performance of strength. My aesthetic is always adapting to sustain the deceit. There are days when the hyper-feminine and form-fitting serve as the perfect costume: black skirt with slits on either side, paired with a black top making up for the modesty of its high neck and long sleeves with its slightly see-through material. On other occasions, I put on my tomboy disguise, still silhouetted in black but this time in the form of jeans and round-neck sweatshirts a few sizes too big, hiding a body that still feels uncomfortable at times with its dips and curves that I don’t always want to display. Each compliment is more than a validation of personal style; it is a warning to never let the mask slip: You always look so good. Always on point. Honestly, how do you do it?

Every word is a confirmation of what I’m convinced will happen if I choose to deviate from the customary gracious smile, responding instead with “Actually, I’m not okay. I’m scared and alone. Can you please talk to me?” As far as I’m concerned, the trick of “not looking how I feel,” another coping mechanism I’ve modeled after my mother’s never-ending capacity to keep going even on her most sorrowful of days, has succeeded to the point where no one will know how to react to my crumbling before them. There’s never an appropriate time to reveal the extreme isolation of harboring feelings you don’t quite understand, and every attempt lands clumsily in the space between myself and the other person, unashamed in its messiness but too frightening for either of us to touch any further beyond prodding the issue tentatively with a few ill-placed jokes.

She has spent a whole lifetime masking profound loneliness as self-sufficiency, and I have been her unknowing apprentice.

I tentatively crack open the door on a subject that I almost never speak out loud for fear it would swallow me with its terrifying reality. I drop vague references to how much I’m “going through it” at inappropriate times, like on the walk to the train station with a friend after class. I’m held back in my lonely place by the fear that I’ll expose the ugliness of my perfect farce. No formulation feels right or reasonable: I don’t know what this is. Every month since the spring of 2014, without fail, a smothering fog settles over me, before the premenstrual bloating and the pimples set in. Every month, seven to ten days before my period, every month with no exceptions. I think about ending myself for seven to ten days, every month, for two years. I flinch when my train rushes to a stop in front of me, only a short platform and a stripe of yellow paint between myself and its force. Every month, seven to ten days before my period, tears threaten to flood me in a too-hot shower, right before classes, in the middle of weekly check-in meetings at work.

It has taken this long to even allow these thoughts to whisper in my mind, because the training offered by my mother’s example has helped me to erase these grim blotches from the gleam of my effortless presentation, because for a part of those two years I dated someone I was always nervous would dismiss this horror as one of my “emotional excuses” for being a bad girlfriend, because if I don’t “get on with it,” there are friends who would find their calls unanswered at 4 a.m. when they have boy-related anxiety, or job-related anxiety, or what-am-I-doing-with-my-life anxiety. A heavy hand with the concealer hides the puffy eyes I get from going to sleep in tears I can’t explain, and I can get on with the lonely business of faking a life.

* * *

I recognize a similar show of flawlessness — albeit without the morbid subtext that stalks me — in Molly, the successful, gorgeous counterpart to Issa’s slightly inept persona on the HBO series Insecure. I can see traces of my mother’s charm in Molly’s relaxed laugh in front of a room full of colleagues as she makes a presentation, the ease with which she plays a game of dominoes with three men in the parking garage, spotless outfits in variations of ivory and cream standing out against her dark skin because she knows how striking that combination can be, and also that we, her admiring audience, won’t be able to ignore its stunning effect. It only takes the quick fade-out announcing a new scene for me to begin to see the unraveling of Molly’s perfection, so familiar and expected that I feel as though I’m the one pulling at its increasingly fraying edges.

In one scene, Molly gets a text, a simple “Hey” from Hassan the engineer, the latest man she’s seeing, or “the Arab guy,” as another character refers to him. Molly seems almost wistful as she reflects on how “different” he is, and the fact that she never imagined ending up with someone who wasn’t black — which seems a rather permanent statement to be making after only three dates. Of course, Hassan inevitably lets her down, and when Molly later recounts the story to Issa over dinner, she ends with a resigned “That’s my life” before lamenting the futility of navigating a dating scene which almost always seems to play out against her no matter whether she’s smothering, aloof, demure, or any combination of approaches to letting men know that she is interested in pursuing a relationship. The brilliance of the show lies in lifelike moments like these, when I see two black women using humor to avoid hitting too close to the heartbreaking center of the moment they’ve just shared: Issa offers a “broken pussy” as the explanation for Molly’s dating woes. “I think your pussy is sad,” she says. “It’s had enough. If your pussy could talk, it would make that sad Marge Simpson groan.”

I see myself in Molly’s wavering smile, in her attempts to keep herself together for colleagues and a larger anonymous public, in the possibility that this could be who I am becoming — this woman who thinks she has figured out how to measure herself in appropriate proportions, to always be more than enough for every situation, incredibly qualified for her job, head-turning from board meetings to restaurants, only to discover that her sole reward could be the yawning void where a life partner and peace of mind should reside.

For every shred of fear of a loveless, lonely future I feel, there seems to be an infinite number of reminders that I should be ashamed to crave romantic companionship to the same extent that I’m working toward academic and professional success. Gloria Naylor’s Ophelia seems to be pointing fingers at my weakness when she says, “I was never in that camp of a night out with someone is better than a night alone. I was someone, and there was always something to do with me.” My favorite poet, Warsan Shire, appears to echo this accusation of low self-worth on my part, “My alone feels so good, I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude.” It is as if these women’s affirmations of being enough for themselves, of loving their own company so wholly that they would not let anyone interfere with their serenity just for the sake of doing so, is some sort of indictment against my half-baked self, acting out a self-reliance I do not feel.

Listening to the two black women hosts of the official podcast for the TV show, Insecuritea: The Insecure Aftershow, deepens the embarrassment that I think I should feel for empathizing with Molly, for seeing in her the reflection of the same act my mother and I, and many other black women, fictional and otherwise, have been putting on for our entire adult lives. The hosts laugh about how “pressed” Molly feels to find a man:

“I wasn’t expecting to see a woman in 2016 who’s willing to openly say, ‘I just want to be married,’ cuz I feel like I don’t see that a lot anymore.”

“Right, I think for us we tend to be either/or . . . like either you’re heavily career-based and you’re just going hard in that direction, or you’re more family oriented and you’re just focused on building that side.”

Even as the radio hosts slip in the disclaimer that they are speaking only from their own experiences and those of women they know personally, the archetype of the no-nonsense black boss lady stands in plain view, complete with shoulder pads à la Teri Joseph from Soul Food in the early 2000s, or immaculate white suit and precise side part like Molly. I feel as though I am hearing the retelling of a myth that predates my existence — the independent black woman who doesn’t need anybody. I am drinking in the idea that longing for a love connection was a trivial concern, and that personal ambition and the gleaming summit of career success should suffice until such time as a woman decides to shed her professional sheen in favor of the muted tones of motherhood, marriage, and all the accompanying trappings. Being anything less than enough — yearning for another person outside of oneself, for the chance to be seen without the masks, to be cared for in the way one cares for others — then becomes off-brand for an unstoppable black woman™.

* * *

As I try, and fail, to fully understand what it means to revel in being alone, Toni Morrison writes to me through Sula on her deathbed, Sula who has truly lived life rather than plodding through it at a gentle pace. Her estranged friend Nel challenges Sula’s last boast that she is “going down like one of those redwoods,” majestically, and not “dying like a stump” like everyone else. Nel’s skepticism demands a deeper explanation: what does Sula have to show for this supposedly grand life of hers?

“Show? To who? Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.”

“Lonely, ain’t it?” Nel’s question sticks out in my mind like the point of an index finger toward a shameful secret unfurled before a judgmental public. Lonely, ain’t it.

“Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.”

Sula gives me the language to describe my loneliness, to hold it away from myself and dissect it, tackling its complex mesh and dissecting it piece by piece in the hope of finding some fulfillment on the other side of its demise.

It is as if these women’s affirmations of being enough for themselves, of loving their own company so wholly that they would not let anyone interfere with their serenity just for the sake of doing so, is some sort of indictment against my half-baked self, acting out a self-reliance I do not feel.

Loneliness may exist for me as a craving for romantic love, as a hope that a partner may be able to help me untangle the web of reasons why I feel alone with my emotional turmoil, but it also moves far beyond the presence and potential abandonment of a lover. It lives in the moments after a strenuous day, when my monthly distress threatens to destroy the titanium resolve I have bolted down firmly over any hints of softness that may betray me. It is in my trembling lips pressed tightly together, but not hard enough to stem the outburst of sorrowful isolation that eventually spills over the edges of heavily made-up eyes, streaking jet-black down my face. I’ve cried the full length of the ride on a red-line train and onto the bus. In public I crumple into myself and wallow in the awareness that no one will be waiting at home or on the phone to listen to me cry, no one will turn away from their own worries to listen to mine. I’ve cried staring directly into the faces of strangers shut tight with lack of concern, or with apprehension that my tears may open a gateway to some erratic and potentially dangerous behavior that could affect them. All this lonely isn’t mine. Even after I get home, I imagine it still clinging tightly to my hair and clothes, smelling like the man in the faded navy hoodie sitting next to me on the train, who didn’t seem to care that I don’t want to chat.

Loneliness rests in the soft tap on my shoulder, clad in my favorite wax-print outfit, a wrinkled hand, a quiet smile leading to the question, “You’re from Nigeria? Or Ghana? I saw your dress and I knew.” Every African woman of a certain age on the train could be my great-aunt or grandmother, with the same manner of folding their arms in front of their chests, the same gold-framed glasses with perfectly round lenses. We are looking for relatives, long left behind and hardly spoken to, in each other’s faces.

Yet, I can’t afford to immerse myself in the sentimentality of being lonely, to make sweeping statements about the nostalgia that immigrants face, miles and temperature points too far from the Equator’s reassuring heat, to address it as a uniquely urban plague that defines the landscape as much as skyscrapers like glass cages and an anonymity that crushes those who are unable to fend for themselves and bolsters those who have come to escape a dull elsewhere they used to call home. This lonely I’ve been carting around every month for the past two years is sinister. My lonely is life-threatening, as it grows more and more difficult to convince myself that anyone would notice the space I left behind if I were to cease to exist. My lonely is my mother’s, but it’s also a secondhand acquisition that could be hormonal or psychological, one that scares me into concealing what could be a very serious mental health condition whose dimensions I haven’t been fully able to grasp. My lonely is also that of Ahine, my best friend, who moves from work to home and back again amidst London’s eternal dreariness, isolated in the exhaustion of striding forward in her career while helping her mother through illness, who sends me a tearful voice message after months of unusual silence to explain how her loneliness felt so insurmountable that it seemed easier to retreat further into herself than to reach out to anyone. It is also Bre’s, when we pass each other on the street, and at the exact same moment we are screaming private crises but somehow cannot topple the boundary of expectations and break down to each other. We make eye contact, and she smiles. “Where are you off to?” the single cowrie shell in her locs flashing back and forth as she shakes her head slightly to the rhythm of her waving hands. Later I’ll explain to her that I was marching as fast as I could to disappear onto a crowded train before someone caught me out of character, drinking back the lumps of sobs forming in my throat, and she’ll already know.

“Girl, I was going through it too!” So why didn’t we stop for each other?

There must be some unfortunate birthright we have inherited, my black girlfriends and I, that traps us beneath its weight, some powerful entity that widens the distance between ourselves and any source of comfort and support. We take care of ourselves only to the extent that we can paste on a cheerful face and keep showing out and showing up for others to feel at ease, keeping our hurt and our fear tucked away in the desolate, uncharted territories of the hours in the early morning when sleep is replaced by a depression that appears impossible to chase away. Twenty-five years after Sula’s death, Nel visits her grave and mourns not only the loss of her friend, nor the betrayal of the affair between Nel’s husband and Sula, nor the secret the two women shared of the day a little boy drowned after slipping from Sula’s grasp and into the river. “Sula?” Nel calls into the emptiness, with only the leaves and the ground beneath her feet answering her call. “All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude.” Nel’s cries descend into an endless loop, “circles and circles of sorrow,” as she realizes that the source of her loneliness had roots deeper than the absence of her husband. “Girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.” The gaps between myself and the women in my life grow wider and more impassable the more we hide our difficulties from each other under the guise of being, or at least appearing, strong.

* * *

I finally speak my agony out loud one Wednesday in September of 2016, because my mother’s training has not prepared me adequately for a time when private suffering becomes unbearable and spills out into the open no matter how much I try to halt its flow. I’m standing in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom, my reflection framed by its glossy black border. I’m about fifteen minutes away from the arrival of my bus but unable to keep putting on my face because I’m not confident that my wobbly hands won’t stab my eye with the mascara brush I’m holding. There is the familiar tightening in my chest and my throat, and I try to steady my shaky breath by inhaling and exhaling deeply. Panic is winning a silent war against me, and I whimper as quietly as possible so as not to alert my two roommates. It wouldn’t do to bother them while they’re also getting ready for school and work. Instead I call my mother in Accra, hoping she can hold some of this chaos for me.

There must be some unfortunate birthright we have inherited, my black girlfriends and I, that traps us beneath its weight, some powerful entity that widens the distance between ourselves and any source of comfort and support.

“Baby, just try to calm down. Take deep breaths. Oh, baby, I’m so worried about you . . .”

I cry to her with my head tilted back so I don’t damage the mask I’ve just painted on. I’m not terrified because my morbid thoughts have intensified but because they are now beginning to overpower my desire and ability to just get on with it. I make it to the bus stop right as the bus pulls up, and I’m even twenty minutes early for work. I look good, always stylish, as my supervisor says, my hair at its hugest and fluffiest, the way I like it, because the humidity hasn’t started to shrink it yet. Later that day, the distance across the desk between myself and my favorite professor doesn’t seem quite as vast because I blurt out a summary of the monthly struggle I’ve been navigating, sharing with her my fear of conceding defeat to loneliness by even considering seeking the advice of a therapist.

“I don’t know, it’s just such a lonely feeling to know there’s no one who can listen the way I listen to them, so that I have to go and talk to a stranger.”

Her eyes widen behind the smudged lenses of her glasses with a concern that I know isn’t pity, but still makes me anxious.

“Zoë, it’s one thing if your friends are a safety net that you can fall back on, but if you don’t have that . . .”

* * *

There was a time when I controlled my lonely, when I would have been glad to claim ownership over it, to take it by the hand and along with me on adventures only I could see or appreciate. Being an only child meant that I was a self-contained source of my own joy. I climbed the twisted trunk of the same forget-me-not tree almost every day of the long vacation between July and late September, most of its velvety yellow flowers stuck in the red gravel at its base. Sometimes I was brave enough to jump back down from among the branches, following the path of descent back to solid ground that one of my slippers invariably took; other times I would have to wait for my mother to come back from work to help me down, my grandma’s arms unable, or more like unwilling, to get me out of my self-made predicament. I grew up always carrying a place for myself where the only other invited guest was my imagination, which allowed me to twist life’s mundaneness into whichever shape intrigued me the most. It seems fitting that the process of reclaiming my lonely as a place of satisfaction with myself, rather than a haunting jail that I’m too scared to escape, is a solitary one. I want to feel motivated to keep living for my own sake and not solely because giving up would alter the lives of people around me, to be “on point” for myself and not to be just a symbol of “black girl magic” for other people to cling to. I’m throwing away these secondhand burdens to avoid handing them to the daughter I may have in the future. I don’t want her to think it’s her duty to hold the fractured pieces of herself together long enough to fool others into thinking that her strength is unmatched. I’m prying open the vicious clamp of my lonely trap and pointing it out to other people in my effort to rid it of its power. No, I’m not okay. Can you please talk to me? 

* * *

This essay first appeared in the Spring/Summer issue of SliceOur thanks to Zoë Gadegbeku and the staff at Slice for allowing us to reprint this essay.