Search Results for: Ian Parker

“Mugglemarch.” — Ian Parker, New Yorker

More by Parker

A Minnesota school district enacts a policy designed to stop teachers from discussing or acknowledging homosexuality. Gay students report bullying, but administrators do nothing. The result is a string of suicides that has shaken the community:

Sam’s death lit the fuse of a suicide epidemic that would take the lives of nine local students in under two years, a rate so high that child psychologist Dan Reidenberg, executive director of the Minnesota-based Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, declared the Anoka-Hennepin school district the site of a ‘suicide cluster,’ adding that the crisis might hold an element of contagion; suicidal thoughts had become catchy, like a lethal virus. “Here you had a large number of suicides that are really closely connected, all within one school district, in a small amount of time,” explains Reidenberg. “Kids started to feel that the normal response to stress was to take your life.”

There was another common thread: Four of the nine dead were either gay or perceived as such by other kids, and were reportedly bullied.

“One Town’s War on Gay Teens.” — Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone

See also: “The Story of a Suicide.” — Ian Parker, The New Yorker

On the death of Tyler Clementi, a gay Rutgers student, and the charges against his roommate, Dharun Ravi, who used a webcam to spy on him. Clementi took his own life shortly after the incident:

An online video chat, using an application like iChat or Skype, starts like a phone call: one person requests a conversation, and the recipient must accept the request. But Ravi had tweaked his iChat settings so that the program could automatically accept incoming calls. According to Ravi, he had made this his computer’s usual setting. Whatever the case, that evening the program was set to auto-accept; he also turned off his monitor, or darkened it to black. At 9:13 P.M., he was beside Wei at her computer. He opened iChat, and clicked his name on her chat list. A few feet away, his computer accepted his request, and Ravi and Wei saw a live video image of Room 30.

“The Story of a Suicide.” — Ian Parker, The New Yorker

See also: “Want to Prevent Gay Teen Suicide? Legalize Marriage Equality.” — Steve Silberman, PLos, Sept. 30, 2010

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Peter Beinart, Ko Bragg, Mathew Charles, Russell Worth Parker and Rachel Lance, and Egill Bjarnason.

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1. Teshuvah

Peter Beinart | Jewish Currents | May 11, 2021 | 6,500 words

“For Jews to tell Palestinians that peace requires them to forget the Nakba is grotesque. In our bones, Jews know that when you tell a people to forget its past you are not proposing peace. You are proposing extinction.”

2. Reporter’s Notebook: The Power of Proximity

Ko Bragg | Scalawag Magazine | May 12, 2021 | 3,894

“A behind-the-scenes look at a year-long investigation into Mississippi’s laws that automatically put some kids as young as 13 into adult prisons and jails.”

3. Narcos and necromancy: Turf wars and black magic in Colombia

Mathew Charles | The Telegraph | March 5, 2021 | 3,528 words

“The drug gangs that are waging war in the Latin American country rely on a surprising ritual to protect them from harm: a witch’s incantation.”

4. A Marine special operator’s fragmented legacy: Blast, impact, trauma, and everything that comes after

Russell Worth Parker, Rachel Lance | Task & Purpose | May 7, 2021 | 4,272 words

“Traumatic brain injury is an ‘invisible wound’ I’ve suffered 17 times.”

5. That Time Hitler’s Girlfriend Visited Iceland and the British Invaded

Egill Bjarnason | Hakai Magazine | May 11, 2021 | 4,500 words

“The location of this small island nation, along with its people and economy, played an unexpected and crucial role in the outcome of the Second World War.”

Longreads Best of 2020: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday. Read more…

A Genre of Myths: A Jazz Reading List

Tommy Potter, Charlie Parker, and Max Roach performing. William Gottlieb/Redferns

I am a jazz devotee, the kind with shelves of jazz books and photos of John Coltrane and Charlie Parker in his home office. Because I love music so much, I want to understand where it came from, and learn about the people who made it.

What is jazz? “It can be said that the entire story of jazz is actually a story about what can urgently be passed down to someone else before a person expires,” Hanif Abdurraqib writes in his book Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes on A Tribe Called Quest. “Jazz was created by a people obsessed with their survival in a time that did not want them to survive, and so it is a genre of myths—of fantasy and dreaming, of drumming on whatever you must and making noise in any way you can, before the ability to make noise is taken from you, or until the noise is an echo in your own head that won’t rest.”

Jazz is a uniquely American creation. People all over the world play it, and no matter how many talented white musicians play it, it was created and primarily redefined by Americans of color. Jazz is music that cannot be separated from the racially divided country that produced its musicians.

“Put it this way,” Duke Ellington said. “Jazz is a good barometer of freedom… In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.”

Like critic Gary Giddin’s arbitrary map of post-war jazz, this list collects just a few of my favorite stories — mostly about my favorite period of jazz, from Bop to Hard bop. You’ll find a lot of worthwhile jazz reading in collections by Whitney Balliett, in the anthology Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings, and in Robert Gottlieb’s Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now. James Baldwin’s short story ”Sonny’s Blues” is essential jazz fiction. Of course, you could write a huge list of must-read jazz books, though these are the stories that stay with me, or that handle jazz’s big names and issues exceptionally well. I’m sure I missed many things. But as Miles Davis said, “Do not fear mistakes.”

* * *

I Thought I heard Buddy Bolden Say” (Luc Sante, The Believer, November 1, 2004)

Sante’s short essay is two things: an etymology of the term “funky,” and a profile of mythic, 19th century New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden, whose song “Funky Butt” turned “funk” into a musical concept. One of the many important figures who helped create what we call jazz, Bolden was a respected improvisational player in his time. Unfortunately, no recordings of Bolden survive, and reliable historical details are hazy. We know that he was institutionalized and died young. Sante conjures Bolden from the haze, painting a vivid, living portrait of a musical mystery man and his era.

He starts with a location: the site of a demolished church that doubled as a dance hall where Bolden performed. “On Saturday nights,” Sante writes, “it was rented for dances which lasted until early light, so that the deacons must have put in a hard few hours every week washing up spilled beer and airing out the joint before the pious came flocking.” As a reader I have a bias for stories of lost or nearly lost people and things, but Sante’s voice and sideways way of telling this one is what ultimately stays with me. This piece seamlessly weaves scenes with conversational exposition. And the essay’s structure does what essays can do: start in one place and end in a very different place.

Our Lady of Sorrows” Francis Davis, The Atlantic, November, 2000)

No matter how much you love Sarah Vaughan or Ella Fitzgerald, no one can deny that Billie Holiday remains one of jazz’s greatest singers. Along with her stirring music and delivery, she stands as a tragic symbol, “a victim,” as critic Francis Davis writes, “of both injustice and her own vices.” In this probing piece, he illuminates her artistic achievements and enduring stature by peering behind persistent stereotypes and listeners’ projections to see who Holiday truly was as a person and a singer. “The singer nicknamed ‘Lady Day’ or just ‘Lady’ has become an all-purpose Our Lady of Sorrows,” Davis writes, “embraced by many of her black listeners (and by many women and gay men) not just as a favorite performer but as a kind of patron saint. She touches such fans where they hurt, soothing their rage even while delivering a reminder of past humiliations and the potential for more.” Davis also wonders how she became so deeply connected to the idea of sadness. Part of the answer has to do with her masterpiece about racism and lynching, “Strange Fruit.” “If the story suggests that ‘Strange Fruit’ ultimately became a way for her to release her anger,” Davis writes, “it also suggests that her anger could be unfocused, her racial indignation mixed up with resentment at her mistreatment by the men in her life, her persecution by the law, and the public’s preference for blander female singers.”

“The Charlie Christian Story” (Ralph Ellison, Saturday Review, May 17, 1958)

Although famous for his 1952 novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison published many essays. This one is about pioneering electric guitarist Charlie Christian, whose scorching solos made too few appearances on record but whose small body of highly stylized work transformed amplified music. By a twist of fate, Ellison grew up with Christian in Oklahoma City. Unfortunately, Ellison’s essay is not online. You can read it in his book Shadow and Act. While you’re there, read his essay on Charlie Parker, too, “On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz.” Ellison was a singular voice and his ideas created a lasting portrait of racism in America. Reading this essay makes me grateful he was so influenced by jazz.

You might not know Charlie Christian’s name, but when you hear an electric guitar, be it rock or jazz or Blues, you hear Christian. “Some of the most brilliant jazzmen made no records,” Ellison writes. “So at best the musical contributions of these local, unrecorded heroes of jazz are enjoyed by a few fellow musicians and by a few dancers who admire them and afford them the meager economic return which allows them to keep playing…” Christian almost became one of those lost local musicians, but thankfully, he ended up in Benny Goodman’s band and lived long enough to get some of his genius on record.

Bird-Watcher” (David Remnick, The New Yorker, May 12, 2008)

Charlie “Bird” Parker was one of the most influential musicians in history. An indisputable genius, he also suffered greatly, died at age 34, and left a vast body of work that people are still studying decades after his death in 1955. David Remnick profiled one of those hardcore Bird fans, Phil Schaap. The obsessive, detail-oriented Schaap had hosted the Parker-themed radio show “Bird Flight” for 27 years back in 2008. It was a show that fed a jazz fan’s curiosity while also testing their patience, or as Remnick put it, blurred “the line between exhaustive and exhausting.” Remnick doesn’t question Parker’s contribution or examine his music. He focuses on the way jazz completely shaped Schaap’s life and on his approach to his radio show. (Schaap was partially raised by jazz legends, including drummer Jo Jones, with whom he watched cartoons and played records.) Why does he play countless, poorly recorded, live renditions of Parker songs? Why does he pontificate on air for hours on historical minutia and the meanings of song titles and lost recordings? Because jazz obsessives like Schaap preserve the details of a musical history that increasingly few people care about. Ultimately, Remnick recognizes that Schaap’s invaluable cultural service goes beyond jazz, that “Schaap puts his frenzied memory and his obsessive attention to the arcane in the service of something important: the struggle of memory against forgetting—not just the forgetting of sublime music but forgetting in general.” Bird was one of a kind, and Schaap is, too.

The Grandest Duke” (Geoffrey O’Brien, The New York Review of Books, October 28, 2010)

Ostensibly a review of Harvey G. Cohen’s book Duke Ellington’s America, O’Brien’s essay expands to cover the grand scope of Ellington’s entire professional creative life. One of history’s greatest composers, Ellington was not strictly an American jazz composer. He was a visionary global artist, even though he was shaped by, and in return shaped, the racially segregated America he inhabited. Stanley Crouch, a respected poet, novelist, columnist, and provocative figure in jazz literature, called Ellington “the most American of Americans.” Ellington not only managed to succeed commercially in a divided nation, he succeed without compromising his artistic freedom, his musical vision, or his identity. Like the book it reviews, O’Brien’s essay goes beyond biography to examine how Ellington managed his career, his public image, and of course, his music, across decades of American life. “Reading Cohen’s book,” writes O’Brien, “we begin in one nation and end in quite a different one… Of many artists it can be said that deep cultural currents can be read through their work; much rarer are those who, like Ellington, worked so powerfully and subtly on those currents as to transform them.”

Black, Brown, and Beige” (Claudia Roth Pierpont, The New Yorker, May 10, 2010)

Miles Davis said, “At least one day out of the year all musicians should just put their instruments down, and give thanks to Duke Ellington.” Ellington’s range is so vast that he’s worth reading about twice here. Responding to Harvey G. Cohen’s book Duke Ellington’s America, biographer Claudia Roth Pierpont takes her examination of America’s Beethoven in a more particular direction than Geoffrey O’Brien did in his review. Drawing its title from Ellington’s unfinished piece “Black, Brown, and Beige,” Pierpont’s piece focuses on what Ellington’s career reveals about race in America. “Black, Brown, and Beige” was not well received. This stung Ellington especially hard, since the work celebrated Black history, following the many strands of Black culture from Africa to the United States. For insight, she follows Ellington’s long musical life back to its beginning:

“More than half a century after the Civil War, the most famous night club in New York was a mock plantation. The bandstand was a done up as a white-columned mansion, the backdrop painted with cotton brushes and slave quarters. And the racial fantasy extended well beyond décor: whites who came to Harlem to be entertained were not to be discomfited by the presence of non-entertaining Negroes. All the performers were black—or, in the case of the chorus girls, café au lait—and all the patrons white, if not by force of law then by force of the thugs at the door. …Ironically, it was the Cotton Club that allowed Ellington to expand his talents, by employing him to arrange and compose for a variety of dancers, singers, miscellaneous acts, entr’actes, and theatrical reviews.”

“What,” Pierpont asks, “was he thinking?” Meaning: how does Ellington’s early period square with his middle and later periods? It is a legitimate question about an artist whose work and reputation tried to transcend race in a world that would never let any artist of color remain unaffected by racial dynamics.

Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. Getty Images

“At the Five Spot” (Stanley Crouch, Considering Genius, 2006)

Crouch is a respected poet, novelist, columnist, and provocative figure in jazz literature. In 2003, JazzTimes fired him as a columnist for his article “Putting the White Man in Charge,” where he correctly argues that “white musicians who can play are too frequently elevated far beyond their abilities in order to allow white writers to make themselves feel more comfortable about being in the role of evaluating an art from which they feel substantially alienated.” Crouch did fine without that magazine. He’s opinionated. Some critics claim he has too narrow a set of aesthetic guidelines for what good jazz is. But he wrote the best book on Charlie Parker, called Kansas City Lightning, and his ideas about music, race, and history are brilliantly observed, finely articulated, and thought-provoking. I like my thoughts being provoked, just like I like my music to push me. In this book Considering Genius, Crouch writes many powerful, controversial jazz essays. “At the Five Spot” covers Thelonious Monk’s 1957 stint at the iconic Five Spot club in Manhattan, painting a portrait of this singular jazz composer and stylist at what is arguably his creative peak, and what makes him a genius. Originally written in 1977, the piece appears in his book Considering Genius.

Jazz and the White Critic” (Amiri Baraka, Down Beat, 1963)

Crouch and poet and critic Baraka had a contentious relationship, but after JazzTimes fired Crouch, Baraka defended Crouch’s right to his musical opinion, especially with music. Baraka examined jazz at a time when few Black critics were publishing essays about the music. He has written timeless, influential pieces about jazz and race in America, most notably “Jazz and the White Critic.” He challenged critics to quit examining the music without examining its musicians’ lived experience, treating the music as if it emerged sui generis, as a collection of sounds, when it was, as he writes, inseparable from “the attitude that produced it.” “The major flaw in this approach to Negro music is that it strips the music too ingenuously of its social and cultural intent. It seeks to define Jazz as an art (or a folk art) that has come out of no intelligent body of socio-cultural philosophy…” He begins the essay:

Most jazz critics have been white Americans, but most important jazz musicians have not been. This might seem a simple enough reality to most people, or at least a reality which can be readily explained in terms of the social and cultural history of American society. And it is obvious why there are only two or three fingers’ worth of Negro critics or writers on jazz, say, if one understands that until relatively recently those Negroes who could become critics, who would largely have to come from the black middle class, have simply not been interested in the music. Or at least jazz, for the black middle class, has only comparatively recently lost some of its stigma (though by no means is it yet as popular among them as any vapid musical product that comes sanctioned by the taste of the white majority). Jazz was collected among the numerous skeletons the middle-class black man kept locked in the closet of his psyche, along with watermelons and gin, and whose rattling caused him no end of misery and self-hatred. As one Howard University philosophy professor said to me when I was an undergraduate, “It’s fantastic how much bad taste the blues contain!“ But it is just this “bad taste“ that this Uncle spoke of that has been the one factor that has kept the best of Negro music from slipping sterilely into the echo chambers of middle-brow American culture. And to a great extent such “bad taste“ was kept extant in the music, blues or jazz, because the Negroes who were responsible for the best of the music were always aware of their identities as black Americans and really did not, themselves, desire to become vague, featureless, Americans as is usually the case with the Negro middle class.

Post-War Jazz: An Arbitrary Map” (Gary Giddins, Village Voice, June 4, 2002)

Gary Giddins has long been one of jazz’s most passionate and incisive authors — authoritative but approachable, rigorous but not academic. You see him speaking in many jazz documentaries. He wrote the Village Voice’s his “Weather Bird” column for years. In 2002, he decided to create what he called “an overview” of jazz records during the post-swing heyday of Bop, Hard bop, free, avant-guarde, and modern jazz, so he challenged himself: He would create a map by selecting a single jazz song for each year between 1945 and 2001. Just one song. Then he’d write a paragraph about each song — for 57 songs! That was a gargantuan undertaking that exhausted me just thinking about it, and “choosing,” he wrote, “was an exercise in frustration, even heartbreak.” Why subject himself to this? “I hoped to offer a purview that balanced achievement and innovation.”

He acknowledged his subjective map’s inherent flawsone and the many ways readers would disagree with his choices. (Only one song? The year 1957 alone produced countless jazz masterpieces!) “An infinite number of maps were possible,” he said, “all of them valid.” Instead of debating him, Giddins wrote, he invited readers to make their own selections to enjoy the process of revisiting the music. “For me,” he wrote, “the key reward was in exploring hundreds of records I hadn’t revisited in years. Some records that I expected to include no longer sounded as good; others I had previously neglected now filled me with admiration.” Reading this is fun. You can dip in and out for years, reading your favorite years or your favorite artists. And although I will never subject myself to the grueling process of mapping jazz’s years myself, I do appreciate the chance to listen closely to the music. That’s why anything like this matters.

Heroine” (David Hajdu, The New Republic, December 24, 2006)

Jazz has no shortage of brilliant, tragic figures. Sometimes their destructive behavior is inseparable from their body of work. Foremost among them was singer Anita O’Day. Many listeners called her the greatest of all jazz singers, but the substances that helped her swing also ensured she never reached the top like Ella Fitzgerald. Hadju explores how O’Day’s singular delivery, her whole approach, was unfortunately related to inebriation. Or in his words, he shows us “the error in defining her by either her substance abuse or her singing alone. The two were not inextricable; they were one.” Even short pieces like this make it clear why Hajdu has long been one of America’s foremost writers. “Her music was the manifesto of her devotion to kicks at all cost,” he writes. “Ecstatic, indulgent, risky, excessive, and volatile, it was drug music, improvised in a state of simulated euphoria and imagined immunity.”

O’Day has long been an artist more difficult to accept than she is to appreciate, because of the primacy of dope in her aesthetic. We like our junkies tragic, preferably taken before their time, like O’Day’s long-gone contemporaries Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday (or, in rock and roll, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain); and in their music we want to find the evidence of mad genius run wild (Parker) or gothic decay (Holiday). We know that heroin is an evil soul-killing venom, and that is pretty much all we want to know about it. We want to hear only about heroin’s inevitable betrayal, not about its seduction. We most certainly do not want to think that music as spirited and delightful as Anita O’Day’s work in her prime could be good because of its debt to heroin.

Another great O’Day piece is Matthew C. Duersten’s “The Moon Looks Down and Laughs,” from Flaunt Magazine. It isn’t online, but you can read it in Da Capo’s Best Music Writing 2002.

When Canadian Jazz Was Good” (Chantal Braganza, Maisonneuve. May 4, 2010)

Heard of Nelson Symonds? Me neither. The guitarist’s talents attracted the attention of B.B. King and Miles Davis. During a 1965 performance, John Coltrane told Symonds’ band “This is the best organ trio I’ve ever heard.” And yet Symonds only recorded one proper studio album as a leader and a few collaborations. His ouevre is mostly what writer Chantal Braganza calls “crude recordings that get shuffled around like playing cards.” Why didn’t Symonds tour, release more albums, and have a more visible career? Why, when jazz left Montreal, did he stay? This is a fascinating story of an overlooked talent who crossed paths with giants but never joined their ranks.

Those old enough to remember often cite Symonds’ nights at the Black Bottom as among the best of his career. Out-of-town acts—Miles Davis, John Coltrane—would drop by after their gigs to see what all the fuss was about. Once, at the end of Symonds’ set, Davis pulled him aside. “What’s your story, what you playin’?” he asked. “Hey man, I do what I can,” was Symonds’ answer. “I like it,” said Davis, but it’s hard to tell if Symonds did. He was constantly self-effacing about his licks, sometimes to his own detriment. Whenever friends asked him to record albums with them, they got the same response: “Man, I gotta practice. I’m not ready.” For the most part, Symonds wasn’t interested in any aspect of the business that didn’t take place in a smoky club.

Nica’s Story: The Life and Legend of the Jazz Baroness” (David Kastin, Popular Music and Society, August 21, 2006)

This is one of those academic pieces that doesn’t read like an academic piece. Unfortunately it’s behind a paywall, but any deeply researched story about the compassion and financial support of the Jazz Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter — whose name graces many mid-century jazz titles — is worth reading. Jazz would have much less music were it not for her support, and this profile does her contribution justice. Here is the abstract: “While a coterie of bebop loyalists keep alive a caricature of Pannonica de Koenigswarter that has been woven into some of the music’s most durable myths, she has, for the most part, been relegated to the dustbin of history. A closer look at Nica’s 40‐year reign as New York’s ‘Jazz Baroness,’ however, reveals an iconic figure whose extraordinary life was played out at the nexus of gender, race, and class during a particularly transformative period in American popular culture.”

The Shopper’s Dream of an Optimized Life

Press Association via AP Images

Shopping online can seem like the ultimate way to save time and trouble. This is especially true now that we have to stay indoors to reduce exposure to the Coronavirus. From Netflix to candle subscriptions to Rent the Runway, subscription-based businesses and direct to consumer services like Warby Parker take that promise further, allowing you to both avoid a brick and mortar store and even the thought of shopping at all. Subscriptions buy you time. Think of all the things you can do with your time once you have to shop less! At Esquire, editor Kelly Stout reveals the tragic flaw in that thinking. Although, theoretically, subscriptions free up customers’ time to do other things, no one can get us to spend that newly available time more efficiently. There is no optimizing for that.

The dream of the subscription is that without having to use our brains for something as mundane as remembering to buy razor cartridges, we might do something better with our time. We might even become more optimized human beings—an economic fever dream that dates back to, I don’t know, the invention of the cotton gin. Probably earlier. In a memorable essay for The Guardian, Jia Tolentino summarized the economist William Stanley Jevons’s definition of optimization: “We all want to get the most out of what we have.” Saving not just time but effort is key to forward momentum in the industrial phantasmagoria that is, at this moment, blasting circus music into my ears. It’s a flattering proposition that implies I’m capable of something grand. Once we’ve saved all that money, all that time, all that hassle, out pops a gameshow host—his smile wider than a Smile-DirectClub member’s—to ask us, What will you do with all this time?

One answer is work. With fewer hours, minutes, or even seconds spent chopping onions and herbs for tonight’s dinner, I could be turning that extra time into money. But I had a different idea: What if, instead, I enjoyed myself? In her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell makes a compelling case for leisure time—not leisure time as “side hustle” or “monetizable” or even something that will improve the self, but as recreation for no reason. This is a novel idea in 2020, even though it’s been around for more than a century. “As far back as 1886 . . . workers in the United States pushed for an eight-hour workday: ‘eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours of what we will,’ ” Odell writes. The movement inspired a poster of people in canoes and a song about feeling the sunshine and smelling the flowers. When I read that, I thought: Dang, I never canoe! Maybe shaving off a sliver of my time at CVS could add to those eight what-I-will hours. And yet I spent those extra seconds sitting on my couch. I wasn’t doing anything except scrolling through my feeds, thinking about my subscriptions, contemplating how I could optimize my life further. I wasn’t even going to the store.

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Shelved: Jeff Buckley’s Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk

Frans Schellekens / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,966 words)

 

On the evening of May 29, 1997, singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley and his roadie Keith Foti picked their way down the steep, weedy bank to Wolf River Harbor in Memphis, Tennessee. Buckley, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and heavy Doc Martens boots, waded into the water singing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” After about 15 minutes, a boat passed. Concerned about their boom box getting wet, Foti moved it out of harm’s way. When he turned back around, Buckley was gone with the undertow. His body wouldn’t be found for days. He was 30 years old.

Jeff Buckley had mastered that most singular of instruments: his own voice. Possessing the same incredible range as opera icon Pavarotti, his phrasing could be anguished or exquisite; his breath control was phenomenal. Beyond that, he was the soul of eclecticism: Raised on prog rock, he dabbled in hair metal, gospel, country, and soul. Once, during a live performance, he improvised in the ecstatic style of Qawwali devotional singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — someone Buckley once described as “my Elvis” — over the riff from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

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Every One of Us Is Other: Looking Back on Representation in “Heavenly Creatures” 25 Years Later

WingNut Films

Alex DiFrancesco | Longreads | November 15, 2019 | 9 minutes (2,578 words)

In 1994, years before showing us the wonders and terrors of Middle Earth, Peter Jackson released a film that some still consider his finest work to date. The film was Heavenly Creatures, the real-life story of the 1954 Parker-Hulme murders in Christchurch, New Zealand. It won awards all over the festival circuit before receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

To provide a brief background to the history of the case and the film: Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme met as teeangers and went on to form a loving and obsessive friendship built around a mythical world that they created and escaped to frequently when the real world proved too much for them. When the girls’ parents began to fear they were developing an “unnatural,” queer bond, they decided to separate the young women. The girls, in retaliation and hopes they would be together forever, decided to murder Parker’s mother. They committed the act on June 22, 1954, bludgeoning the mother to death with a brick in a stocking.

Peter Jackson’s fourth film (after low-budget splatter-fests Bad Taste and Dead Alive and a Muppet-Show-gone-perverse venture called Meet the Feebles) was a departure for him. Jackson’s partner Fran Walsh had been passionate about the real-life Parker-Hulme murders for many years, and Jackson joined in the obsession. The film would take Jackson out of the realm of camp and cult, and catapult him into the playing field that made all of his later blockbusters possible. Attempts had been made to tell the salacious murder story before, including Michelanne Forster’s play Daughters of Heaven, but one reason that those attempts may have fallen flat was that no one before Jackson had had quite his empathy and dedication to the girls portrayed in the film. New Zealand filmmaker Costa Botes, a friend and one-time collaborator of Jackson’s, in a lengthy 2002 piece for NZ Edge, told a story that he believed exemplifies Jackson’s dedication:

He had already found black and white photographs of the Hulme family’s Port Levy summer house, but had no idea what colour it was painted in the 1950s. Anyone else would have built a recreation and settled for a best guess.

Jackson flew to Christchurch, drove two hours to the site, and then proceeded to dig in a grown over rubbish pile he found in the back. He emerged with a wooden shingle. Comparing it to his photographs, he realised he was holding a name plate that used to be screwed above the front door at the time of the Hulmes occupancy. Traces of original green paint still clung to the plate.

Thus, the colour the Port Levy house ended up being painted in the film was … exactly the right colour.

This dedication would be admirable for any director to undertake, but why exactly Jackson was so dedicated to this story is another matter.

In a 1994 Los Angeles Times article, Jackson himself said that the story had been around for decades. “But in all this time … the story has never been told sympathetically.”

Though he grew up in another era, though he was a white cisgender heterosexual man, Jackson, along with Walsh, was the first to reach through time with sympathy for Parker and Hulme. Or, perhaps, it could be something closer to empathy. Surely, Jackson’s early feature films, the splatter-fests like Bad Taste, which was made on weekends, (movies that were made around life events like a cast member marrying a devout Christian, being unable to work on the Sundays the films were shot (in the case of Bad Taste), being written out of the script, then written back in after his divorce), were not far off from the fantasy world that Parker and Hulme created to escape to, portrayed with gruesome life-sized plasticine figures in the film. Both were obsessive and thought out to the smallest detail. Both were ongoing projects that Jackson and the girls spent years on, relentlessly refusing to give them up despite any attempts by nature or man to interrupt them. And though the film doesn’t skirt the issue of the girls’ connection verging into homosexuality, Jackson doesn’t flinch away from it or sensationalize it, either. The sex scenes in the film juxtapose a disintersted, disconnected Parker having sex with a male boarder in her parents’ guest room against a scene in which Parker and Hulme experiment sexually with each other, acting out the roles of matinée stars to gently disguise their fascination with and passion for each other.


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While I wouldn’t suggest that Jackson or Walsh could intimately know any of what these girls went through in their repressed time, when they were further repressed by their gender and their obsessive love for each other, the pair seem to have been able to take their own experiences and morphed them into care and even understanding for these murderous young women. Particularly, Jackson seems to view the girls’ make-believe world as a creative outlet not dissimilar from his own acts of creativity — a world both the filmmaker and the girls went to great pains to portray in full and vibrant reality. While the girls made painstaking figurines of the characters who inhabited “the fourth world,” as they called it, Jackson’s work in recreating it went above and beyond much of the CGI work of the time, including claymation battle scenes and orgies, in what would later become the studios that made orcs and elves for Lord of the Rings. This empathy with these girls so unlike himself, created through the bridges he was able to build to them in the understanding of their lives and fantasies, becomes particularly relevant in our time, which no longer allows many examples of sloppy representation by those outside a demographic being represented to slide by unnoticed. Jackson’s approach and careful attention to detail in his portrayal becomes important because it’s a prototypical example of how we can use our own inner worlds and emotions to create, lovingly and with care, the world of someone who is nothing like us.

Though he grew up in another era, though he was a white cisgender heterosexual man, Jackson, along with Walsh, was the first to reach through time with sympathy for Parker and Hulme.

I am not playing devil’s advocate here. I firmly agree that some representation of marginalized people in art is better left undone. For example, Ariel Schrag’s Adam, a book in which a young cisgender man is mistaken for a trans man and becomes part of the queer community so he can make friends and find dates, was written by a cisgender lesbian and used transgender people as a foil for the lives of cis people. The television show Transparent notoriously chose a cisgender actor, Jeffrey Tambor, to play a transgender lead.

Though the topic is thornier in the example above, poor or sloppy representation typically happens when we view those outside our purview as “other.” There have been countless classes and panel discussions in the arts about “writing the other.” But the fact is, each of us is “other” to everyone else, and it is the job of art to lessen the distance of that othering. Essayist and editor Janice Lee, in a presentation at the Thinking Its Presence conference in 2017, likened the distance between any two humans as the same between a human and a badger.

What I’m going to propose though is that the impossible distance between a human and a badger, that daunting and difficult and impossible divide, all of the differences between a human and a badger, is the same impossible distance between any two humans. But that the similarities between two humans, that which makes us alive and living, that closeness that can be intimated, is the same possible closeness between a human and a badger.

I’m also going to propose that attempting to occupy the point of view of a badger is just as important as the attempt and willingness to occupy the point of view of a different human being other than yourself. If we can consider the similarities between humans and badgers in a way that unites us, both as creatures of this planet, both as creatures that want to live and find intimacy differently but similarly, then we might be able to understand the differences and similarities between humans too.

It would be presumptuous to assume Jackson felt the same way when portraying these girls so outside his own purview. But Jackson took several steps toward making sure the girls themselves were represented in ways that humanized them. For one, he poured obsessively over the diaries left behind by Pauline Parker, making the voiceover of the film the girls’ own words. He dug through court records and diaries to find and interview living friends and family, including former classmates of the girls, to round out his understanding of the girls, their love for each other, and their final, horrific act. The film, through camerawork and the voiceover of words directly from Parker’s diary, stays remarkably close to the girls, their sensitiblities, and their actions, until the very end, when the murder is committed, and the camera and the viewer are made to pull away. Up until this point, Jackson sticks to the facts of the girls’ lives and friendship as the girls would have told them themselves. The murder itself, while factual, reels away and lacks the steady gaze that Jackson has cast on these facts throughout. (“I can understand everything but their motivation for the murder, everything until the leap they made from the fantasy of killing to its reality,” Jackson said in the Los Angeles Times interview.) And perhaps, in a world where we are so removed from one another that it is suggested most of us could never understand one another, this documentary-ish approach is a necessary one. Perhaps it is not just good filmmaking to dig through the rubble of a demolished house to find the color scheme, to obsess over the history left behind by people themselves in their first-person accounts, but perhaps it is a living example of the empathy necessary to cross the divide between any one human and another.

But the fact is, each of us is “other” to everyone else, and it is the job of art to lessen the distance of that othering.

Whether or not the girls were actually homosexual is still a piece of conjecture. While Jackson’s film portrays the girls engaging in sexual acts with each other and shows a scene in which a psychologist labels the girls “depraved homosexuals” (it was the ’50s when homosexuality was still firmly in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, an unquestionable mental illness), it’s never been “proven,” if such a thing can be “proven.” What seems important is that Jackson never used the piece of potential information to sensationalize the way others had in the past, nor the way that someone who is decidedly not homosexual might be tempted to. Accounts from newspapers and tabloids of the time the murder was committed were relentless in their othering of the lesbian schoolgirl murderers. In the digital newspaper collection of the Christchurch city libraries, one article recounts a psychiatrist’s view of the girls as homosexual and insane. “Their association, I consider, proved tragic for them. There is evidence that their friendship became a homosexual one. There is no proof there was a physical relationship, although there is a lot of suggestive evidence from the diary that this occurred. There is evidence that they had baths together and had frequent talks on sexual matters. That is not a healthy relationship in itself, but more important, it prevents the development of adult sexual relationships. I don’t mean by that physical relationships, but attachment to people of the opposite sex. Homosexuality is frequently related to paranoia.” Jackson, according to the interview in the Los Angeles Times, found little use in these accounts.

A Film Quarterly review of Heavenly Creatures suggests that Jackson veered away from the connection between homosexuality and insanity that even the girls hid behind in their trial by considering it a “red herring” in light of the rest of their powerful, intimate feminine relationship. Simply put, Jackson didn’t seem to care whether the girls were in love with each other because he knew they were in love with each other, and that bond of love and obsession carried enough weight to transcend categories of easy and dismissive identification. While their potential homosexuality wasn’t irrelevant (it was portrayed in a scene as inventive and intimate as the rest of their relationship, mentioned earlier, in which the girls’ sexual ecounters were informed partly by their fantasy world and partly by their love for each other), it also wasn’t an easy out, a way of othering that allowed Jackson the explanation for the unthinkable that so many sought in the story.

Jackson’s approach and careful attention to detail in his portrayal becomes important because it’s a prototypical example of how we can use our own inner worlds and emotions to create, lovingly and with care, the world of someone who is nothing like us.

I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s. There was little self-representation in those times. Visibility in the realm of popular culture was almost nonexistent for queer and trans people, not as anything other than a punchline or a sideshow dweller, a flippant one-liner on The Simpsons about Homer’s mistreated uncle Frank who transitioned because of childhood trauma, or a “bearded lady” in the circus. When I first came across Heavenly Creatures in the early 2000s, years after its release, I would find something like understanding there. I was a nascent queer, just beginning to identify as bisexual, living briefly back in my small hometown, working at a video store, and understanding the repression that Parker and Hulme may have felt in ways that I wouldn’t have expected someone like Jackson to. In those days, we took what we could get, and when what we got was something as shining as this film, it didn’t really matter as much where it had come from, just that someone had appropriately seen. Years later, after I had cut off ties with my own family (its own sort of murder, I suppose) in order to live my life as an out trans person, I rewatched the film and marveled again at how little judgement Jackson lorded over these girls, and how much care and sympathy he afforded them. How dedicated he was to telling their story in their words, how his sympathies, throughout the film, are firmly with the girls — not with the parents terrorized by a diagnosis of homosexuality, or a world outside Parker and Hulme’s deeply imagined one. I wonder about the generation of ’90s queers who felt the same, in some little way. Being seen is a powerful thing — sometimes being seen by someone nothing like you is powerful in ways that can’t be replicated by someone who hasn’t had to make the leap between potential consciousnesses.

We live in a time when “own voices” is becoming the norm — rightfully and happily so in most cases. It seems that many, to paraphrase Janice Lee, are not ready to do the work of leaping over the divide that is between one living being and another in a sensitive and caring way, not, in many cases, in a way that we might consider artful. Yet those of us who see ourselves portrayed poorly or with little sensitivity in the media are also, often, aware that this trend will never stop. And, in some ways, it should not. We should never stop trying to bridge the space between us, doing the work that art insists we do to understand one another. However, there are prototypes for understanding and sensitivity all around us. I believe Heavenly Creatures is one of the finest examples of an artist finding one of the multitudes of self and using it to show the lives of people who, for all reasonable purposes, are utterly unlike him.

***

Alex DiFrancesco is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism who has published work in Tin House, The Washington Post, Pacific Standard, and more. Their first novel, an acid western, was published in 2015, and their essay collection Psychopomps (Civil Coping Mechanisms Press) and their second novel All City (Seven Stories Press), in 2019. Their storytelling has been featured at The Fringe Festival, Life of the Law, The Queens Book Festival, and The Heart podcast. DiFrancesco is currently an MFA candidate at Cleveland State University. They can be found @DiFantastico on Twitter.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact checker: Jason Stavers
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

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

Illustration by Carla Fuentes Fuertes

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

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

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


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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Fact checker: Steven Cohen