Now, you will ask me what in the world we went up on the Moon for,” Qfwfq, the narrator of Italo Calvino’s “Cosmicomics,” says. “We went to collect the milk, with a big spoon and a bucket.” In our world, we are going for water. “Water is the oil of space,” George Sowers, a professor of space resources at the Colorado School of Mines, in Golden, told me. On the windowsill of Sowers’s office is a bumper sticker that reads “My other vehicle explored Pluto.” This is because his other vehicle did explore Pluto. Sowers served as the chief systems engineer of the rocket that, in 2006, launched nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft, which has flown by Pluto and continued on to Ultima Thule, a snowman-shaped, nineteen-mile-long rock that is the most distant object a spacecraft has ever reached. “I only got into space resources in the past two years,” he said. His laboratory at the School of Mines designs, among other things, small vehicles that could one day be controlled by artificial intelligence and used to mine lunar water.
Water in space is valuable for drinking, of course, and as a source of oxygen. Sowers told me that it can also be transformed into rocket fuel. “The moon could be a gas station,” he said. That sounded terrible to me, but not to most of the scientists I spoke to. “It could be used to refuel rockets on the way to Mars”—a trip that would take about nine months—“or considerably beyond, at a fraction of the cost of launching them from Earth,” Sowers said. He explained that launching fuel from the moon rather than from Earth is like climbing the Empire State Building rather than Mt. Everest. Fuel accounts for around ninety per cent of the weight of a rocket, and every kilogram of weight brought from Earth to the moon costs roughly thirty-five thousand dollars; if you don’t have to bring fuel from Earth, it becomes much cheaper to send a probe to Jupiter.
Experts predict a host of benefits and problems with this renewed lunar interest, from environmental damage to political tensions involving the 1976 Outer Space Treaty. Some see the moon as more of a solution than a problem.
“There’s the argument that we’ve destroyed the Earth and now we’re going to destroy the moon. But I don’t see it that way,” Metzger said. “The resources in space are billions of times greater than on Earth. Space pretty much erases everything we do. If you crush an asteroid to dust, the solar wind will blow it away. We can’t really mess up the solar system.”
In 1973, East Coast rock promoter Howard Stein assembled a special New Year’s Eve concert at New York City’s Academy of Music. It was a four-band bill. Blue Öyster Cult headlined. Iggy and the Stooges played third, though the venue’s marquee only listed Iggy Pop, because Columbia Records had only signed Iggy, not the band. A New York glam band named Teenage Lust played second, and a new local band named KISS opened. This was KISS’s first show, having changed their name from Wicked Lester earlier that year. According to Paul Trynka’s Iggy Pop biography, Open Up and Bleed, Columbia Records recorded the Stooges’ show “with the idea of releasing it as a live album, but in January they’d decided it wasn’t worthy of release and that Iggy’s contract would not be renewed.” When I first read that sentence a few years ago, my heart skipped the proverbial beat and I scribbled on the page: Unreleased live show??? I was a devoted enough Stooges fan to know that if this is true, this shelved live album would be the only known full multitrack recording ever made of a vintage Stooges concert.
The Stooges existed from late 1967 to early 1974. They released three studio albums during their brief first life, wrote enough songs for a fourth, paved the way for metal and punk rock, influenced musicians from Davie Bowie to the Sex Pistols, popularized stage diving and crowd-surfing, and were so generally ahead of their time that they disbanded before the world finally came to appreciate their music. Their incendiary live shows were legendary. Iggy taunted listeners. He cut himself, danced, posed, got fondled and punched, and by dissolving the barrier between audience and performer, changed rock ‘n’ roll.
I have one job — building the Pepper-Crusted Beef on Brioche with Celery Root Salad, an elegant little bite to be passed during cocktail hour at the Park Avenue Armory Gala, a black-tie dinner for 760 people. In theory, it’s an easy hors d’oeuvre, a thin coin of rosy beef on bread with a tuft of salad on top. It’s 4:50 now and the doors open at 6:30, so I’ve got some time to assemble this thing. The ingredients can be served at room temperature — any temperature, really — and they were prepared earlier today by a separate team of cooks at the caterer’s kitchen on the far West Side of town, then packaged on sheet pans and in plastic deli containers for a truck ride to the venue. All I have to do is locate the ingredients in the boxes and coolers, find some space to work — my “station” — and begin marshaling a small army of beef-on-toasts so I’ve got enough of a quorum, 240 pieces or so, that when serve-out begins I’ll be able to keep pace with replenishment demand through a forty-five-minute cocktail hour.
Jhovany León Salazar, the kitchen assistant leading the hors d’oeuvre (“H.D.”) kitchen, shows me the photo the executive chef supplied that reveals the precise architecture of this bite: a slice of seared beef tenderloin, rare in the center and the size of a Kennedy half-dollar, resting on a slightly larger round of toasted brioche.[1] On top of the beef is a tangle of rich celeriac slaw — superfine threads of shredded celery root slicked with mayo, with a sprinkling of fresh chives showered over the whole. This is New York–caliber catering intelligence at work: take a throwback classic — the beef tenderloin carving station — to a higher, more knowing plane in a single bite. Here, the colors are lively, the scale is humane, the meat perfectly rosy-rare and tender, its edge seared black with ground pepper and char, the celeriac bringing novelty, though its flavor is familiar enough. It’s a pro design that satisfies the meat-’n’-potatoes crowd without talking down to the epicures.
The kitchen tonight — like every night, no matter the venue — is as makeshift as a school bake sale, a series of folding tables covered with white tablecloths and fashioned into a fort-like U. Since there are two warm hors d’oeuvres on the menu, our crew has a hotbox standing by — the tall, aluminum cabinet on wheels that both serves as transport vehicle for food and, once it’s on-site and loaded with a few flaming cans of jellied fuel (the odor-free version of Sterno is favored), becomes the oven. Imagine the most flame-averse venues — the New York Public Library, City Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art — even there, the ghostly blue flames in the hotbox pass muster with the fire marshal. In fact, this one fudge, this unspoken exception to the no-open-flames rule, is the secret to restaurant-quality catering in New York City. Read more…
In 2014, Rich Niemann, president and CEO of the Midwestern grocery company Niemann Foods, made the most important phone call of his career. He dialed the Los Angeles office of Shook Kelley, an architectural design firm, and admitted he saw no future in the traditional grocery business. He was ready to put aside a century of family knowledge, throw away all his assumptions, completely rethink his brand and strategy — whatever it would take to carry Niemann Foods deep into the 21st century.
“I need a last great hope strategy,” he told Kevin Kelley, the firm’s cofounder and principal. “I need a white knight.”
Part square-jawed cattle rancher, part folksy CEO, Niemann is the last person you’d expect to ask for a fresh start. He’s spent his whole life in the business, transforming the grocery chain his grandfather founded in 1917 into a regional powerhouse with more than 100 supermarkets and convenience stores across four states. In 2014, he was elected chairof the National Grocery Association. It’s probably fair to say no one alive knows how to run a grocery store better than Rich Niemann. Yet Niemann was no longer sure the future had a place for stores like his.
He was right to be worried. The traditional American supermarket is dying. It’s not just Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods, an acquisition that trade publication Supermarket News says marked “a new era” for the grocery business — or the fact that Amazon hopes to launch a second new grocery chain in 2019, according to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, with a potential plan to scale quickly by buying up floundering supermarkets. Even in plush times, grocery isa classic “red ocean” industry, highly undifferentiated and intensely competitive. (The term summons the image of a sea stained with the gore of countless skirmishes.) Now, the industry’s stodgy old playbook — “buy one, get one” sales, coupons in the weekly circular — is hurtling toward obsolescence. And with new ways to sell food ascendant, legacy grocers like Rich Niemann are failing to bring back the customers they once took for granted. You no longer need grocery stores to buy groceries.
Niemann hired Kelley in the context of this imminent doom. The assignment: to conceive, design, and build the grocery store of the future. Niemann was ready to entertain any idea and invest heavily. And for Kelley, a man who’s worked for decades honing his vision for what the grocery store should do and be, it was the opportunity of a lifetime — carte blanche to build the working model he’s long envisioned, one he believes can save the neighborhood supermarket from obscurity.
Kevin Kelley, illustration by Vinnie Neuberg
Rich Niemann, illustration by Vinnie Neuberg
The store that resulted is calledHarvest Market, which opened in 2016. It’s south of downtown Champaign, Illinois, out by the car dealerships and strip malls; 58,000 square feet of floor space mostly housed inside a huge, high-ceilinged glass barn. Its bulk calls to mind both the arch of a hayloft and the heavenward jut of a church. But you could also say it’s shaped like an ark, because it’s meant to survive an apocalypse.
Harvest Market is the anti-Amazon. It’s designed to excel at what e-commerce can’t do: convene people over the mouth-watering appeal of prize ingredients and freshly prepared food. The proportion of groceries sold onlineis expected to swell over the next five or six years, but Harvest is a bet that behavioral psychology, spatial design, and narrative panache can get people excited about supermarkets again. Kelley isn’t asking grocers to be more like Jeff Bezos or Sam Walton. He’s not asking them to be ruthless, race-to-the-bottom merchants. In fact, he thinks that grocery stores can be something far greater than we ever imagined — a place where farmers and their urban customers can meet, a crucial link between the city and the country.
But first, if they’re going to survive, Kelley says, grocers need to start thinking like Alfred Hitchcock.
* * *
Kevin Kelley is an athletic-looking man in his mid-50s, with a piercing hazel gaze that radiates thoughtful intensity. In the morning, he often bikes two miles to Shook Kelley’s office in Hollywood — a rehabbed former film production studio on an unremarkable stretch of Melrose Avenue, nestled between Bogie’s Liquors and a driving school. Four nights a week, he visits a boxing gym to practice Muay Thai, a form of martial arts sometimes called “the art of eight limbs” for the way it combines fist, elbow, knee, and shin attacks. “Martial arts,” Kelley tells me, “are a framework for handling the unexpected.”That’s not so different from his main mission in life: He helps grocery stores develop frameworks for the unexpected, too.
You’ve never heard of him, but then it’s his job to be invisible. Kelley calls himself a supermarket ghostwriter: His contributions are felt more than seen, and the brands that hire him get all the credit. Countless Americans have interacted with his work in intimate ways, but will never know his name. Such is the thankless lot of the supermarket architect.
A film buff equally fascinated by advertising and the psychology of religion, Kelley has radical theories about how grocery stores should be built, theories that involve terms like “emotional opportunity,” “brain activity,” “climax,” and “mise-en-scène.” But before he can talk to grocers about those concepts, he has to convince them of something far more elemental: that their businesses face near-certain annihilation and must change fundamentally to avoid going extinct.
“It is the most daunting feeling when you go to a grocery store chain, and you meet with these starched-white-shirt executives,” Kelley tells me. “When we get a new job, we sit around this table — we do it twenty, thirty times a year. Old men, generally. Don’t love food, progressive food. Just love their old food — like Archie Bunkers, essentially. You meet these people and then you tour their stores. Then I’ve got to go convince Archie Bunker that there’s something called emotions, that there are these ideas about branding and feeling. It is a crazy assignment. I can’t get them to forget that they’re no longer in a situation where they’ve got plenty of customers. That it’s do-or-die time now.”
Forget branding. Forget sales. Kelley’s main challenge is redirecting the attention of older male executives, scared of the future and yet stuck in their ways, to the things that really matter.
“I make my living convincing male skeptics of the power of emotions,” he says.
Human beings, it turns out, aren’t very good at avoiding large-scale disaster. As you read this, the climate is changing, thanks to the destructively planet-altering activities of our species. The past four years have beenthe hottest on record. If the trend continues — and virtually all experts agree it will — we’re likely to experiencemass disruptions on a scale never before seen in human history.Drought will be epidemic. Theocean will acidify. Islands will be swallowed by the sea. People could be displaced by the millions, creatinga new generation of climate refugees. And all becausewe didn’t move quickly enough when we still had time.
You know this already. But I bet you’re not doing much about it — not enough, at least, to help avert catastrophe. I’ll bet your approach looks a lot like mine: worry too much, accomplish too little. The sheer size of the problem is paralyzing. Vast, systemic challenges tend to short-circuit our primate brains. So we go on, as the grim future bears down.
Grocers, in their own workaday way, fall prey to the same inertia. They got used to an environment of relative stability. They don’t know how to prepare for an uncertain future. And they can’t force themselves to behave as if the good times are really going to go away — even if, deep down, they know it’s true.
I make my living convincing male skeptics of the power of emotions.
In the 1980s, you could still visit almost any community in the U.S. and find a thriving supermarket. Typically, it would be a dynasty family grocery store, one that had been in business for a few generations. Larger markets usually had two or three players, small chains that sorted themselves out along socioeconomic lines: fancy, middlebrow, thrifty. Competition was slack and demand — this is the beautiful thing about selling food — never waned. For decades, times were good in the grocery business. Roads and schools were named after local supermarket moguls, who often chaired their local chambers of commerce. “When you have that much demand, and not much competition, nothing gets tested. Kind of like a country with a military that really doesn’t know whether their bullets work,” Kelley says. “They’d never really been in a dogfight.”
It’s hard to believe now, but there wasnot a single Walmart on the West Coast until 1990. That decade saw the birth of the “hypermarket” and the beginning of the end for traditional grocery stores — Walmarts, Costcos, and Kmarts became the first aggressive competition supermarkets ever really faced, luring customers in with the promise of one-stop shopping on everything from Discmen to watermelon.
The other bright red flag: Americans started cooking at home less and eating out more. In 2010, Americansdined out more than in for the first time on record, the culmination of a slow shift away from home cooking that had been going onsince at least the 1960s. That trend is likely to continue. According to a 2017 report from the USDA’s Economic Research Service, millennials shop at food stores less than any other age group, spend less time preparing food, and are more likely to eat carry-out, delivery, or fast food even when they do eat at home. But even within the shrinking market for groceries, competition has stiffened. Retailers not known for selling food increasingly specialize in it, a phenomenon called“channel blurring”; today, pharmacies like CVS sell pantry staples and packaged foods, while 99-cent stores like Dollar General are a primary source of groceries for a growing number of Americans. Then there’s e-commerce. Though only about 3 percent of groceries are currently bought online, that figure couldrocket to 20 percent by 2025. From subscription meal-kit services like Blue Apron to online markets like FreshDirect and Amazon Fresh, shopping for food has become an increasingly digital endeavor — one that sidesteps traditional grocery stores entirely.
A cursory glance might suggest grocery stores are in no immediate danger. According to the data analytics company Inmar, traditional supermarkets still have a 44.6 percent market share among brick-and-mortar food retailers. And thougha spate of bankruptcies has recently hit the news,there are actually more grocery stores today than there were in 2005. Compared to many industries — internet service, for example — the grocery industry is still a diverse, highly varied ecosystem. Forty-three percent of grocery companies have fewer than four stores, according to a recent USDAreport. These independent stores sold 11 percent of the nation’s groceriesin 2015, a larger collective market share than successful chains like Albertson’s (4.5 percent), Publix (2.25 percent), and Whole Foods (1.2 percent).
But looking at this snapshot without context is misleading — a little like saying that the earth can’t be warming because it’s snowing outside. Not long ago, grocery stores sold the vast majority of the food that was prepared and eaten at home — about 90 percent in 1988, according to Inmar. Today, their market share has fallen by more than half, even as groceries represent a diminished proportion of overall food sold. Their slice of the pie is steadily shrinking, as is the pie itself.
By 2025, the thinking goes, most Americans will rarely enter a grocery store. That’s according to areport called “Surviving the Brave New World of Food Retailing,” published by the Coca-Cola Retailing Research Council — a think tank sponsored by the soft drink giant to help retailers prepare for major changes. The reportdescribes a retail marketplace in the throes of massive change, where supermarkets as we know them are functionally obsolete. Disposables and nonperishables, from paper towels to laundry detergent and peanut butter, will replenish themselves automatically, thanks to smart-home sensors that reorder when supplies are low. Online recipes from publishers like Epicurious will sync directly to digital shopping carts operated by e-retailers like Amazon. Impulse buys and last-minute errands will be fulfilled via Instacart and whisked over in self-driving Ubers. In other words, food — for the most part — will be controlled by a small handful of powerful tech companies.
The Coca-Cola report, written in consultation with a handful of influential grocery executives, including Rich Niemann, acknowledges that the challenges are dire. To remain relevant, it concludes, supermarkets will need to become more like tech platforms: develop a “robust set of e-commerce capabilities,” take “a mobile-first approach,” and leverage “enhanced digital assets.” They’ll need infrastructure for “click and collect” purchasing, allowing customers to order online and pick up in a jiffy. They’ll want to establish a social media presence, as well as a “chatbot strategy.” In short, they’ll need to become Amazon, and they’ll need to do it all while competing with Walmart — and its e-commerce platform, Jet.com — on convenience and price.
That’s why Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods Market was terrifying to so many grocers, sending the stocks of national chains like Kroger tumbling: It represents a future they can’t really compete in. Since August 2017, Amazon has masterfully integrated e-commerce and physical shopping, creating a muscular hybrid that represents an existential threat to traditional grocery stores. The acquisition was partially a real estate play: Whole Foods stores with Prime lockers nowact as a convenient pickup depot for Amazon goods. But Amazon’s also doing its best to make it too expensive and inconvenient for its Prime members, who pay $129 a year for free two-day shipping and a host of other perks, to shop anywhere else. Prime membersreceive additional 10 percent discounts on select goods at Whole Foods, and Amazon is rolling out home grocery delivery in select areas. With the Whole Foods acquisition, then, Amazon cornered two markets: the thrift-driven world of e-commerce and the pleasure-seeking universe of high-end grocery. Order dish soap and paper towels in bulk on Amazon, and pick them up at Whole Foods with your grass-fed steak.
An Amazon worker wheels back a cart after loading a bag of groceries into a customer’s car at an AmazonFresh Pickup location in Seattle. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)
Ingredients from a three-meal Blue Apron box. (AP Photo/Bree Fowler)
An employee of grocery delivery service Amazon Fresh scans ordered products before putting them into a transport bag. (Monika Skolimowska/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images)
Traditional grocers are now expected to offer the same combination of convenience, flexibility, selection, and value. They’re understandably terrified by this scenario, which would require fundamental, complex, and very expensive changes. And Kelley is terrified of it, too, though for a different reason: He simply thinks it won’t work. In his view, supermarkets will never beat Walmart and Amazon at what they do best. If they try to succeed by that strategy alone, they’ll fail. That prospect keeps Kelley up at night — because it could mean a highly consolidated marketplace overseen by just a handful of players, one at stark contrast to the regional, highly varied food retail landscape America enjoyed throughout the 20th century.
“I’m afraid of what could happen if Walmart and Amazon and Lidl are running our food system, the players trying to get everything down to the lowest price possible,” he tells me. “What gives me hope is the upstarts who will do the opposite. Who aren’t going to sell convenience or efficiency, but fidelity.”
The approach Kelley’s suggesting still means completely overhauling everything, with no guarantee of success. It’s a strategy that’s decidedly low-tech, though it’s no less radical. It’s more about people than new platforms. It means making grocery shopping more like going to the movies.
* * *
Nobody grows up daydreaming about designing grocery stores, including Kelley. As a student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, he was just like every other architect-in-training: He wanted to be a figure like Frank Gehry, building celebrated skyscrapers and cultural centers. But he came to feel dissatisfied with the culture of his profession. In his view, architects coldly fixate on the aesthetics of buildings and aren’t concerned enough with the people inside.
“Architecture worships objects, and Capital-A architects are object makers,” Kelley tells me. “They aren’t trying to fix social issues. People and their experience and their perceptions and behaviors don’t matter to them. They don’t even really want people in their photographs—or if they have to, they’ll blur them out.”What interested Kelley most was how people would use his buildings, not how the structures would fit into the skyline. He wanted to shape spaces in ways that could actually affect our emotions and personalities, bringing out the better angels of our nature. To his surprise, no one had really quantified a set of rules for how environment could influence behavior. Wasn’t it strange that advertising agencies spent so much time thinking about the links between storytelling, emotions, and decision-making — while commercial spaces, the places where we actually go to buy, often had no design principle beyond brute utility?
“My ultimate goal was to create a truly multidisciplinary firm that was comprised of designers, social scientists and marketing types,” he says. “It was so unorthodox and so bizarrely new in terms of approach that everyone thought I was crazy.”
In 1992, when he was 28, Kelley cofounded Shook Kelley with the Charlotte, North Carolina–based architect and urban planner Terry Shook. Their idea was to offer a suite of services that bridged social science, branding, and design, a new field they called “perception management.” They were convinced space could be used to manage emotion, just the way cinema leads us through a guided sequence of feelings, and wanted to turn that abstract idea into actionable principles. While Shook focused on bigger, community-oriented spaces like downtown centers and malls, Kelley focused on the smaller, everyday commercial spaces overlooked by fancy architecture firms: dry cleaners, convenience stores, eateries, bars. One avant-garde restaurant Kelley designed in Charlotte, called Props, was an homage to the sitcom craze of the 1990s. It was built to look like a series of living rooms, based on the apartment scenes in shows like Seinfeld and Friends and featured couches and easy chairs instead of dining tables to encourage guests to mingle during dinner.
The shift to grocery stores didn’t happen until a few years later, almost by accident. In the mid-’90s, Americans still spent about 55 percent of their food dollars on meals eaten at home — but that share was declining quickly enough to concern top corporate brass at Harris Teeter, a Charlotte-area, North Carolina–based grocery chain with stores throughout the Southwestern United States. (Today, Harris Teeter is owned by Kroger, the country’ssecond-largest seller of groceries behind Walmart.) Harris Teeter execs reached out to Shook Kelley.“We hear you’re good with design, and you’re good with food,” Kelley remembers Harris Teeter reps saying. “Maybe you could help us.”
At first, it was Terry Shook’s account. He rebuilt each section of the store into a distinct “scene” that reinforced the themes and aesthetics of the type of food it sold. The deli counter became a mocked-up urban delicatessen, complete with awning and neon sign. The produce section resembled a roadside farmstand. The dairy cases were corrugated steel silos, emblazoned with the logo of a local milk supplier. And he introduced full-service cafés, a novelty for grocery stores at the time, with chrome siding like a vintage diner.It was pioneering work, winning that year’s Outstanding Achievement Award from the International Interior Design Association — according to Kelley, it was the first time the prestigious award had ever been given to a grocery store.
Shook backed off of grocery stores after launching the new Harris Teeter, but the experience sparked Kelley’s lifelong fascination with grocery stores, which he realized were ideal proving grounds for his ideas about design and behavior. Supermarkets contain thousands of products, and consumers make dozens of decisions inside them — decisions about health, safety, family, and tradition that get to the core of who they are. He largely took over the Harris Teeter account and redesigned nearly 100 of the chain’s stores, work that would go on to influence the way the industry saw itself and ultimately change the way stores are built and navigated.
Since then, Kelley has worked to show grocery stores that they don’t have to worship at the altar of supply-side economics. He urges grocers to appeal instead to our humanity. Kelley asks them to think more imaginatively about their stores, using physical space to evoke nostalgia, delight our senses, and appeal to the parts of us motivated by something bigger and more generous than plain old thrift. Shopping, for him, is all about navigating our personal hopes and fears, and grocery stores will only succeed when they play to those emotions.
When it works, the results are dramatic. Between 2003 and 2007, Whole Foods hired Shook Kelley for brand strategy and store design, working with the firm throughout a crucial period of the chain’s development. The fear was that as Whole Foods grew, its image would become too diffuse, harder to differentiate from other health food stores; at the same time, the company wanted to attract more mainstream shoppers. Kelley’s team was tasked with finding new ways to telegraph the brand’s singular value. Their solution was a hierarchical system of signage that would streamline the store’s crowded field of competing health and wellness claims.
Kelley’s view is that most grocery stores are “addicted” to signage, cramming their spaces with so many pricing details, promotions, navigational signs, ads, and brand assets that it “functionally shuts down [the customer’s] ability to digest the information in front of them.”
Kelley’s team stipulated that Whole Foods could only have seven layers of information, which ranged from evocative signage 60 feet away to descriptive displays six feet from customers to promotional info just six inches from their hands. Everything else was “noise,” and jettisoned from the stores entirely. If you’ve ever shopped at Whole Foods, you probably recognize the way that the store’s particular brand of feel-good, hippie sanctimony seems to permeate your consciousness at every turn. Kelley helped invent that. The system he created for pilot stores in Princeton, New Jersey, and Louisville, Kentucky, were scaled throughout the chain and are still in use today, he says. (Whole Foods did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)
With a carefully delineated set of core values guiding its purchasing and brand, Whole Foods was ripe for the kind of visual overhaul Kelley specializes in. But most regional grocery chains have a different set of problems: They don’t really have values to telegraph in the first place. Shook Kelley’s approach is about getting buttoned-down grocers to reflect on their beliefs, tapping into deeper, more primal reasons for wanting to sell food.
* * *
Today, Kelley and his team have developed a playbook for clients, a finely tuned process to get shoppers to think in terms that go beyond bargain-hunting. It embraces what he calls “the theater of retail” and draws inspiration from an unlikely place: the emotionally laden visual language of cinema. His goal is to convince grocers to stop thinking like Willy Loman — like depressed, dejected salesmen forever peddling broken-down goods, fixated on the past and losing touch with the present. In order to survive, Kelley says, grocers can’t be satisfied with providing a place to complete a chore. They’ll need to direct an experience.
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Today’s successful retail brands establish what Kelley calls a “brand realm,” or what screenwriters would call a story’s “setting.” We don’t usually think consciously about them, but realms subtly shape our attitude toward shopping the same way the foggy, noirishly lit streets in a Batman movie tell us something about Gotham City. Cracker Barrel is set in a nostalgic rural house. Urban Outfitters is set on a graffitied urban street. Tommy Bahama takes place on a resort island. It’s a well-known industry secret that Costco stores arehugely expensive to construct — they’re designed to resemble fantasy versions of real-life warehouses, and the appearance of thrift doesn’t come cheap. Some realms are even more specific and fanciful: Anthropologie is an enchanted attic, complete with enticing cupboards and drawers. Trader Joe’s is a crew of carefree, hippie traders shipping bulk goods across the sea.A strong sense of place helps immerse us in a store, getting us emotionally invested and (perhaps) ready to suspend the critical faculties that prevent a shopping spree.
Kelley takes this a few steps further. The Shook Kelly team, which includes a cultural anthropologist with a Ph.D., begins by conducting interviews with executives, staff, and locals, looking for the storytelling hooks they call “emotional opportunities.” These can stem from core brand values, but often revolve around the most intense, place-specific feelings locals have about food. Then Kelley finds ways to place emotional opportunities inside a larger realm with an overarching narrative, helping retailers tell those stories — not with shelves of product, but through a series of affecting “scenes.”
In Alberta, Canada, Shook Kelley redesigned a small, regional grocery chain now called Freson Bros. Fresh Market. In interviews, the team discovered that meat-smoking is a beloved pastime there, so Shook Kelley built huge, in-store smokers at each new location — a scene called “Banj’s Smokehouse” — that crank out pound after pound of the province’s signature beef, as well as elk, deer, and other kinds of meat (customers can even BYO meat to be smoked in-house). Kelley also designed stylized root cellars in each produce section, a cooler, darker corner of each store that nods to the technique Albertans use to keep vegetables fresh. These elements aren’t just novel ways to taste, touch, and buy. They reference cultural set points, triggering memories and personal associations. Kelley uses these open, aisle-less spaces, which he calls “perceptual rooms,” to draw customers through an implied sequence of actions, tempting them towards a specific purchase.
Something magical happens when you engage customers this way. Behavior changes in visible, quantifiable ways. People move differently. They browse differently. And they buy differently. Rather than progressing in a linear fashion, the way a harried customer might shoot down an aisle — Kelley hates aisles, which he says encourage rushed, menial shopping — customers zig-zag, meander, revisit. These behaviors are a sign a customer is “experimenting,” engaging with curiosity and pleasure rather than just trying to complete a task. “If I was doing a case study presentation to you, I would show you exact conditions where we don’t change the product, the price, the service. We just change the environment and we’ll change the behavior,” Kelley tells me. “That always shocks retailers. They’re like ‘Holy cow.’ They don’t realize how much environment really affects behavior.”
A strong sense of place helps immerse us in a store, getting us emotionally invested and (perhaps) ready to suspend the critical faculties that prevent a shopping spree.
In the mid-2000s, Nabisco approached Kelley’s firm, complaining that sales were down 16 percent in the cookie-and-cracker aisle. In response, Shook Kelley designed “Mom’s Kitchen,” which was piloted at Buehler’s, a 15-store chain in northern Ohio. Kelley took Nabisco’s products out of the center aisles entirely and installed them in a self-contained zone: a perceptual room built out to look like a nostalgic vision of suburban childhood, all wooden countertops, tile, and hanging copper pans. Shelves of Nabisco products from Ritz Crackers to Oreos lined the walls. Miniature packs of Animal Crackers waited out in a large bowl, drawers opened to reveal boxes of Saltines. The finishing touch had nothing to do with Nabisco and everything to do with childhood associations: Kelley had the retailers install fridge cases filled with milk, backlit and glowing. Who wants to eat Oreos without a refreshing glass of milk to wash them down?
The store operators weren’t sold. They found it confusing and inconvenient to stock milk in two places at once. But from a sales perspective, the experiment was a smash. Sales of Nabisco products increased by as much as 32 percent, and the entire cookie-and-cracker segment experienced a halo effect, seeing double-digit jumps. Then, the unthinkable: The stores started selling out of milk. They simply couldn’t keep it on the shelves.
You’d think that the grocery stores would be thrilled, that it would have them scrambling to knock over their aisles of goods, building suites of perceptual rooms. Instead, they retreated. Nabisco’s parent company at the time, Kraft, was excited by the results and kicked the idea over to a higher-up corporate division where it stalled. And Buehler’s, for its part, never did anything to capitalize on its success. When the Nabisco took “Mom’s Kitchen” displays down, Kelley says, the stores didn’t replace them.
Mom’s Kitchen, fully stocked. (Photo by Tim Buchman)
“We were always asking a different question: What is the problem you’re trying to solve through food?” Kelley says. “It’s not just a refueling exercise — instead, what is the social, emotional issue that food is solving for us? We started trying to work that into grocery. But we probably did it a little too early, because they weren’t afraid enough.”
Since then, Kelley has continued to build his case to unreceptive audiences of male executiveswith mixed success. He tells them that when customers experiment — when the process of sampling, engaging, interacting, and evaluating an array of options becomes a source of pleasure — they tend to take more time shopping. And that the more time customers spend in-store, the more they buy. In the industry, this all-important metric is called “dwell time.” Most retail experts agree that increasing dwell without increasing frustration (say, with long checkout times) will be key to the survival of brick-and-mortar retail. Estimates vary on how much dwell time increases sales; according to Davinder Jheeta, creative brand director of the British supermarket Simply Fresh,customers spent 1.3 percent more for every 1 percent increase in dwell time in 2015.
Another way to increase dwell time? Offer prepared foods. Delis, cafes, and in-store restaurants increase dwell time and facilitate pleasure while operating with much higher profit margins and recapturing some of the dining-out dollar that grocers are now losing. “I tell my clients, ‘In five years, you’re going to be in the restaurant business,” Kelley says, “‘or you’re going to be out of business.’”
Kelley’s job, then, is to use design in ways that get customers to linger, touch, taste, scrutinize, explore. The stakes are high, but the ambitions are startlingly low. Kelley often asks clients what he calls a provocative question: Rather than trying to bring in new customers, would it solve their problems if 20 percent of customers increased their basket size by just two dollars? The answer, he says, is typically an enthusiastic yes.
Just two more dollars per trip for every fifth customer — that’s what victory looks like. And failure? That looks like a food marketplace dominated by Walmart and Amazon, a world where the neighborhood supermarket is a thing of the past.
* * *
When Shook Kelley started working on Niemann’s account, things began the way they always did: looking for emotional opportunities. But the team was stumped. Niemann’s stores were clean and expertly run. There was nothing wrong with them. Niemann’s problem was that he had no obvious problem. There was no there there.
Many of the regionals Kelley works with have no obvious emotional hook; all they know is that they’ve sold groceries for a long time and would like to keep on selling them. When he asks clients what they believe in, they show him grainy black-and-white photos of the stores their parents and grandparents ran, but they can articulate little beyond the universal goal of self-perpetuation. So part of Shook Kelley’s specialty is locating the distinguishing spark in brands that do nothing especially well, which isn’t always easy. At Buehler’s Fresh Foods, the chain where “Mom’s Kitchen” was piloted, the store’s Shook Kelley–supplied emotional theme is“Harnessing the Power of Nice.”
Still, Niemann Foods was an especially challenging case. “We were like, ‘Is there any core asset here?’” Kelley told me. “And we were like, ‘No. You really don’t have anything.’”
What Kelley noticed most was how depressed Niemann seemed, how gloomy about the fate of grocery stores in general. Nothing excited him — with one exception. Niemann runs a cattle ranch, a family operation in northeast Missouri. “Whenever he talked about cattle and feed and antibiotics and meat qualities, his physical body would change. We’re like, ‘My god. This guy loves ranching.’ He only had three hundred cattle or something, but he had a thousand pounds of interest in it.”
Niemann’s farm now has about 600 cattle, though it’s still more hobby farm than full-time gig — but it ended up being a revelation.During an early phase of the process, someone brought up “So God Made a Farmer” — a speech radio host Paul Harvey gave at the 1978 Future Farmers of America Convention that had been used in an ad for Ram trucks in the previous year’s Super Bowl. It’s a short poem that imagines the eighth day of the biblical creation, where God looks down from paradise and realizes his new world needs a caretaker. What kind of credentials is God looking for? Someone “willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board.” God needs “somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt. And watch it die. Then dry his eyes and say, ‘Maybe next year.’” God needs “somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bails, yet gentle enough to yean lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-combed pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadow lark.” In other words, God needs a farmer.
Part denim psalm, part Whitmanesque catalogue, it’s a quintessential piece of Americana — hokey and humbling like a Norman Rockwell painting, and a bit behind the times (of course, the archetypal farmer is male). And when Kelley’s team played the crackling audio over the speakers in a conference room in Quincy, Illinois, something completely unexpected happened. Something that convinced Kelley that his client’s stores had an emotional core after all, one strong enough to provide the thematic backbone for a new approach to the grocery store.
Rich Niemann, the jaded supermarket elder statesman, broke down and wept.
* * *
I have never been a fan of shopping. Spending money stresses me out. I worry too much to enjoy it. So I wanted to see if a Kelley store could really be what he said it was, a meaningful experience, or if it would just feel fake and hokey. You know, like the movies. When I asked if there was one store I could visit to see his full design principles in action, he told me to go to Harvest, “the most interesting store in America.”
Champaign is two hours south of O’Hare by car. Crossing its vast landscape of unrelenting farmland, you appreciate the sheer scale of Illinois, how far the state’s lower half is from Chicago. It’s a college town, which comes with the usual trappings — progressive politics, cafes and bars, young people lugging backpacks with their earbuds in — but you forget that fast outside the city limits. In 2016, some townships in Champaign county voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by 50 points.
I was greeted in the parking lot by Gerry Kettler, Niemann Foods’ director of consumer affairs. Vintage John Deere tractors formed a caravan outside the store. The shopping cart vestibules were adorned with images of huge combines roving across fields of commodity crops. Outside the wide-mouthed entryway, local produce waited in picket-fence crates — in-season tomatoes from Johnstonville, sweet onions from Warrensburg.
And then we stepped inside.
Everywhere, sunlight poured in through the tall, glass facade, illuminating a sequence of discrete, airy, and largely aisle-less zones. Kettler bounded around the store, pointing out displays with surprised joy on his face, as if he couldn’t believe his luck. The flowers by the door come from local growers like Delight Flower Farm and Illinois Willows. “Can’t keep this shit in stock,” he said. He makes me hold an enormous jackfruit to admire its heft. The produce was beautiful, he was right, with more local options than I’ve ever seen in a grocery store. The Warrensville sweet corn is eye-poppingly cheap: two bucks a dozen. There were purple broccolini and clamshells filled with squash blossoms, a delicacy so temperamental that they’re rarely sold outside of farmers’ markets. Early on, they had to explain to some teenage cashiers what they were — they’d never seen squash blossoms before.
I started to sense the “realm” Harvest inhabits: a distinctly red-state brand of America, local food for fans of faith and the free market. It’s hunting gear. It’s Chevys. It’s people for whom commercial-scale pig barns bring back memories of home. Everywhere, Shook Kelley signage — a hierarchy of cues like what Kelley dreamed up for Whole Foods — drives the message home. A large, evocative sign on the far wall reads Pure Farm Flavor, buttressed by the silhouettes of livestock, so large it almost feels subliminal. Folksy slogans hang on the walls, sayings like FULL OF THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS and THE CREAM ALWAYS RISES TO THE TOP.
Then there are the informational placards that point out suppliers and methods.
There are at least a half dozen varieties of small-batch honey; you can find pastured eggs for $3.69. The liquor section includes local selections, like whiskey distilled in DeKalb and a display with cutting boards made from local wood by Niemann Foods’ HR Manager. “Turns out we had some talent in our backyard,” Kettler said. Niemann’s willingness to look right under his nose, sidestepping middlemen distributors to offer reasonably priced, local goods, is a hallmark of Harvest Market.
Champaign, IL’s Harvest Market is styled like Whole Foods for the Heartland—complete with a John Deere tractor stationed outside. (Photo courtesy of the author.)
Unlike most large-format grocery stores, Harvest Market buys some produce directly from farmers (like these sweet candy onions from Warrensville, IL, o, about 50 miles away). (Photo courtesy of the author.)
Interior of Harvest Market from the upper mezzanine, where shoppers gather for lunch and board games during the day and glasses of wine at night. (Photo courtesy of the author.)
By the cheese section, a glassed in contraption works night and day: a butter churner, which transforms local sweet cream into yellow, briskly selling-bricks of fat. (Photo courtesy of the author.)
Interior of Harvest Market from the upper mezzanine, where shoppers gather for lunch and board games during the day and glasses of wine at night. (Photo courtesy of the author.)
Harvest Market executives Gerry Kettler, left, and Rich Niemann chat with a salsa vendor visiting to do demos. (Photo courtesy of the author.)
That shortened chain of custody is only possible because of Niemann and the lifetime of supply-side know-how he brings to table. But finding ways to offer better, more affordable food has been a long-term goal of Kelley — who strained his relationship with Whole Foods CEO John Mackey over the issue. As obsessed as Kelley is with appearances, he insists to me that his work must be grounded in something “real”: that grocery stores only succeed when they really try to make the world a better place through food. In his view, Whole Foods wasn’t doing enough to address its notoriously high prices — opening itself up to be undercut by cheaper competition, and missing a kind of ethical opportunity to make better food available to more people.
“When,” Kelley remembers asking, “did you start to mistake opulence for success?”
In Kelley’s telling, demand slackened so much during the Great Recession that it nearly lead to Whole Foods’ downfall, a financial setback that the company never fully recovered from — and, one could argue, ultimately led to its acquisition. Harvest Market, for its part, has none of Whole Foods’ clean-label sanctimony. It takes an “all-of-the-above” approach: There’s local produce, but there’re also Oreos and Doritos and Coca-Cola; at Thanksgiving, you can buy a pastured turkey from Triple S Farms or a 20-pound Butterball. But that strong emphasis on making local food more accessible and affordable makes it an interesting counterpart to Kelley’s former client.
The most Willy Wonka–esque touch is the hulking piece of dairy processing equipment in a glass room by the cheese case. It’s a commercial-scale butter churner — the first one ever, Kettler told me, to grace the inside of a grocery store.
“So this was a Shook Kelley idea,” he said, “We said yes, without knowing how much it would cost. And the costs just kept accelerating. But we’re thrilled. People love it.”Harvest Market isn’t just a grocery store — it’s also a federally inspected dairy plant. The store buys sweet cream from a local dairy, which it churns into house-made butter, available for purchase by the brick and used throughout Harvest’s bakery and restaurant. The butter sells out as fast as they can make it. Unlike the grocers who objected to “Mom’s Kitchen,” the staff don’t seem to mind.
As I walked through the store, I couldn’t help wondering how impressed I really was. I found Harvest to be a beautiful example of a grocery store, no doubt, and a very unusual one. What was it that made me want to encounter something more outrageous, more radical, more theatrical and bizarre? I wanted animatronic puppets. I wanted fog machines.
I should have known better — Kelley had warned me that you can’t take the theater of retail too far without breaking the dream. He’d told me that he admires stores where “you’re just not even aware of the wonder of the scene, you’re just totally engrossed in it” — stores a universe away from the overwrought, hokey feel of Disneyland. But I had Amazon’s new stores in the back up my mind as a counterpoint, with all their cashierless bells and whistles, their ability to click and collect, their ability to test-drive Alexa and play a song or switch on a fan. I guess, deep down, I was wondering if something this subtle really could work.
“Here, this is Rich Niemann,” Kettler said, and I found myself face-to-face with Niemann himself. We shook hands and he asked if I’d ever been to Illinois before. Many times, I told him. My wife is from Chicago, so we’ve visited the city often.
He grinned at me.
“That’s not Illinois,” he said.
We walked to Harvest’s restaurant, a 40-person seating area plus an adjacent bar with a row of stools, that offers standards like burgers, salads, and flatbreads. There’s an additional 80-person seating area on the second-floor mezzanine, a simulated living room complete with couches and board games. Beyond that, they pointed out the brand-new wine bar — open, like the rest of the space, until midnight. There’s a cooking classroom by the corporate offices. Through the window, I saw a classroom full of children doing something to vegetables. Adult Cooking classes run two or three nightsevery week, plus special events for schools and other groups.
For a summer weekday at noon in a grocery store I’m amazed how many people are eating and working on laptops. One guy has his machine hooked up to a full-sized monitor he lugged up the stairs — he’s made a customized wooden piece that hooks into Harvest’s wrought-iron support beams to create a platform for his plus-size screen. He comes every day, like it’s his office. He’s a dwell-time dream.
We sit down, and Kettler insists I eat the corn first, slathering it with the house-made butter and eating it while it’s hot. He reminds me that it’s grown by the Maddoxes, a family in Warrensburg, about 50 miles west of Champaign.
The corn was good, but I wanted to ask Niemann if the grocery industry was really that bad, and he told me it is. I assume he’ll want to talk about Amazon and its acquisition of Whole Foods and the way e-commerce has changed the game. He acknowledges that, but to my surprise he said the biggest factor is something else entirely — a massive shift happening in the world of consumer packaged goods, or CPGs.
For years, grocery stores never had to advertise, because the largest companies in the world — Proctor and Gamble, Coca-Cola, Nestle — did their advertising for them, just the way Nabisco helped finance “Mom’s Kitchen” to benefit the stores. People came to supermarkets to buy the foods they saw on TV. ButAmericans are falling out of love with legacy brands. They’re looking for something different, locality, a sense of novelty and adventure. Kellogg’s and General Mills don’t have the pull they once had.
When their sales flag, grocery sales do too — and the once-bulletproof alliance between food brands and supermarkets is splitting. For the past two years, the Grocery Manufacturers’ Association, an influential trade group representing the biggest food companies in the world,started to lose members. It began with Campbell’s Soup. Dean Foods, Mars, Tyson Foods, Unilever, Hershey Company, the Kraft Heinz Company, and others followed. That profound betrayal was a rude awakening: CPG companies don’t need grocery stores. They have Amazon. They can sell directly through their websites. They can launch their own pop-ups.
It’s only then that I realized how dire the predicament of grocery stores really is, and why Niemann was so frustrated when he first called Kevin Kelley. It’s one thing when you can’t sell as cheaply and conveniently as your competitors. But it’s another thing when no one wants what you’re selling.
Harvest doesn’t feel obviously futuristic in the way an Amazon store might. If I went there as a regular shopper and not as a journalist sniffing around for a story, I’m sure I’d find it to be a lovely and transporting way to buy food. But what’s going on behind the scenes is, frankly, unheard of.
Grocery stores have two ironclad rules. First, that grocers set the prices, and farmers do what they can within those mandates. And second, that everyone works with distributors who oversee the aggregation and transport of all goods. Harvest has traditional relationships with companies like Coca-Cola, but it breaks those rules with local farmers and foodmakers. Suppliers — from the locally milled wheat to the local produce to the Kilgus Farms sweet cream that goes into the churner — truck their products right to the back. By avoiding middlemen and their surcharges, Harvest is able to pay suppliers more directly and charge customers less. And it keeps costs low. You can still find $4.29 pints of Halo Top ice cream in the freezer, but the produce section features stunning bargains. When the Maddox family pulls up with its latest shipment of corn, people sometimes start buying it off the back of the truck in the parking lot. That’s massive change, and it’s virtually unheard of in supermarkets. At the same time, suppliers get to set their own prices. Niemann’s suppliers tell him what they need to charge; Niemann adds a standard margin and lets customers decide if they’re willing to pay.
If there’s a reason Harvest matters, it’s only partly because of the aesthetics. It’s mainly because the model of what a grocery store is has been tossed out and rebuilt. And why not? The world as Rich Niemann knows it is ending.
* * *
In 2017, just months after Harvest Market’s opening, Niemannwon the Thomas K. Zaucha Entrepreneurial Excellence Award — the National Grocers Association’s top honor, given for “persistence, vision, and creative entrepreneurship.” That spring, Harvest was spotlighted in a “Store of the Month” cover feature in the influential trade magazine Progressive Grocer. Characteristically, the contributions of Kelley and his firm were not mentioned in the piece.
Niemann tells me his company is currently planning to open a second Harvest Market in Springfield, Illinois, about 90 minutes west of Champaign, in 2020. Without sharing specifics about profitability or sales numbers, he says the store was everything he’d hoped it would be as far as the metrics that most matter — year-over-year sales growth and customer engagement. His only complaint about the store, has to do with parking. For years, Niemann has relied on the same golden ratio to determine the size of parking lot needed for his stores — a certain number of spots for every thousand dollars of expected sales. Harvest’s lot uses the same logic, and it’s nowhere near enough space.
“In any grocery store, the customer’s first objective is pantry fill — to take care of my needs as best I can on my budget,” Niemann says. “But we created a different atmosphere. These customers want to talk. They want to know. They want to experience. They want to taste. They’re there because it’s an adventure.”
They stay so much longer than expected that the parking lot sometimes struggles to fit all their cars at once. Unlike the Amazon stores that may soon be cropping up in a neighborhood near you — reportedly, the company is considering plans to open 3,000 of them in by 2021 — it’s not about getting in and out quickly without interacting with another human being. At Harvest, you stay awhile. And that’s the point.
ButAmericans are falling out of love with legacy brands. They’re looking for something different, locality, a sense of novelty and adventure. Kellogg’s and General Mills don’t have the pull they once had.
So far, Harvest’s success hasn’t made it any easier for Kelley, who still struggles to persuade clients to make fundamental changes. They’re still as scared as they’ve always been, clinging to the same old ideas. He tells them that, above all else, they need to develop a food philosophy — a reason why they do this in the first place, something that goes beyond mere nostalgia or the need to make money. They need to build something that means something, a store people return to not just to complete a task but because it somehow sustains them. For some, that’s too tall an order. “They go, ‘I’m not going to do that.’ I’m like, ‘Then what are you going to do?’ And they literally tell me: ‘I’m going to retire.’” It’s easier to cash out. Pass the buck, and consign the fate of the world to younger people with bolder dreams.
Does it even matter? The world existed before supermarkets, and it won’t end if they vanish. And in the ongoing story of American food, the 20th-century grocery store is no great hero. A&P — the once titanic chain, now itself defunct — was a great mechanizer, undercutting the countless smaller, local businesses that used to populate the landscape. More generally, the supermarket made it easier for Americans to distance ourselves from what we eat, shrouding food production behind a veil and letting us convince ourselves that price and convenience matter above all else. We let ourselves be satisfied with the appearance of abundance — even if great stacks of unblemished fruit contribute to waste and spoilage, even if the array of brightly colored packages are all owned by the same handful of multinational corporations.
But whatever springs up to replace grocery stores will have consequences, too, and the truth is that brick-and-mortar is not going away any time soon — far from it. Instead, the most powerful retailers in the world have realized that physical spaces have advantages they want to capitalize on. It’s not just that stores in residential neighborhoods work well as distribution depots, ones that help facilitate the home delivery of packages. And it’s not just that we can’t always be home to pick up the shipments we ordered when they arrive, so stores remain useful. The world’s biggest brands are now beginning to realize what Kelley has long argued: Physical stores are a way to capture attention, to subject customers to an experience, to influence the way they feel and think. What could be more useful? And what are Amazon’s proposed cashierless stores, but an illustration of Kelley’s argument? They take a brand thesis, a set of core values — that shopping should be quick and easy and highly mechanized — and seduce us with it, letting us feel the sweep and power of that vision as we pass with our goods through the doors without paying, flushed with the thrill a thief feels.
This is where new troubles start. Only a few companies in the world will be able to compete at Amazon’s scale — the scale where building 3,000 futuristic convenience stores in three years may be a realistic proposition. Unlike in the golden age of grocery, where different family owned chains catered to different demographics, we’ll have only a handful of players. We’ll have companies that own the whole value chain, low to high. Amazon owns the e-commerce site where you can find almost anything in the world for the cheapest price. And for when you want to feel the heft of an heirloom tomato in your hand or sample some manchego before buying, there is Whole Foods. Online retail for thrift, in-person shopping for pleasure. Except one massive company now owns them both.
If this new landscape comes to dominate, we may find there are things we miss about the past. For all its problems, the grocery industry is at least decentralized, owned by no one dominant company and carved up into more players than you could ever count. It’s run by people who often live alongside the communities they serve and share their concerns. We might miss that competition, that community. They are small. They are nimble. They are independently, sometimes even cooperatively, owned. They employ people. And if they are scrappy, and ingenious, and willing to change, there’s no telling what they might do. It is not impossible that they could use their assets — financial resources, industry connections, prime real estate — to find new ways to supply what we all want most: to be happier, to be healthier, to feel more connected. To be better people. To do the right thing.
I want to believe that, anyway. That stores — at least in theory — could be about something bigger, and better than mere commerce. The way Harvest seems to want to be, with some success. But I wonder if that’s just a fantasy, too: the dream that we can buy and sell our way to a better world, that it will take no more than that.
Which one is right?
I guess it depends on how you feel about the movies.
Maybe a film is just a diversion, a way to feel briefly better about our lives, the limitations and disappointments that define us, the things we cannot change. Most of us leave the theater, after all, and just go on being ourselves.
Still, maybe something else is possible. Maybe in the moment when the music swells, and our hearts beat faster, and we feel overcome by the beauty of an image — in the instant that we feel newly brave and noble, and ready to be different, braver versions of ourselves — that we are who we really are.
* * *
Joe Fassler, The Counter’s deputy editor, has covered the intersection of food, policy, technology, and culture for the magazine since 2015. His food reporting has twice been a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Award in Journalism. He’s also editor ofLight the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Creative Process (Penguin, 2017), a book based on “By Heart,” his ongoing series of literary conversations for The Atlantic.
Editor: Michelle Weber Fact checker: Matt Giles Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross
There was the decision in ’46 by the Brevard Mosquito Control District to slather the Merritt Island salt marshes in DDT dropped aerially from a No. 2 diesel–fuel carrier.
Then, because the mosquitoes grew resistant to DDT, there was the application of BHC and Dieldrin and Malathion.
Corey Goode was barely in grade school when he was classified as “an anomaly.”
“Apparently, I was identified as being on the intuitive empath spectrum,” he told a rapt audience one hot summer morning in 2017. Goode claims that he was soon placed in alternative classes. His parents, he says, gave permission for that. But what they didn’t know was that he’d been tapped to take part in a military program: Every morning he’d wait outside with his lunchbox to be picked up by a white van, which would drive him to Carswell Air Force Base, in Texas. From there, they’d go through a back gate, across two runways, through another security gate, and into a motor pool hangar, down a cargo elevator into a secret underground facility where nine to 15 other children would be waiting.
Some time around 1986, Goode says, he was drafted into the Secret Space Program, a purported hidden government entity doing clandestine research and fighting secret wars with extraterrestrials in outer space. He was not yet 17. Goode says that when his space military service came to an end, he returned to Earth, where his government handlers performed an “age regression.” He awoke as a child again, in his bedroom at home, with his mother unaware that he’d ever been gone.
There’s plenty more to Goode’s story, but a little of this goes a long way. Goode has told his account at many places, but I heard it at the annual meeting of the Mutual UFO Network, known as MUFON. It is the oldest UFO research group in the United States, active since 1969, and it presents itself as a scientific organization seeking hard evidence of the UFO phenomenon and pursuing that evidence wherever it might lead.
Most of the year, state MUFON chapters investigate tips of UFO sightings, hundreds of which pour into their email and voicemail each month. But on a blazing summer day in Summerlin, a wealthy suburb of northwest Las Vegas, the MUFON members were all together, and things were tense. Earlier, another well-respected speaker, Richard Dolan, called Goode a liar and quite possibly a plant. “I’m not accusing anybody of anything,” Dolan said delicately at the start of his talk, in the manner of someone about to accuse someone of something. “But it’s absolutely a fact of U.S. history that there’s been government interference in many organizations. Many of you have heard of COINTELPRO. And that goes on to this day.”
Although broad discussion of UFOs has been eclipsed in the general culture by fresher, shinier conspiratorial ideas — birtherism, false flags, pedophile rings — a remarkably high number of Americans believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life. The poll numbers can vary wildly and frustratingly. In 1997, a CNN/Time poll showed that a whopping 80 percent of the adult population believed the government was hiding “knowledge of the existence of extraterrestrial life-forms.” In 2015, a YouGov survey found that 54 percent of the adult population believed that alien life exists, while 30 percent were convinced, in the poll’s words, that “extra-terrestrial intelligent life has already contacted us but the government has covered it up.” According to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears that same year, 42.6 percent of respondents thought the government was concealing what it knows about alien encounters. The Chapman survey noted that more Americans believe in UFOs than believe in natural selection or that the earth is 4.5 billion years old.
The belief is strong, but, as with so many research communities, it’s not uniform or unaffected by controversy. In the past few years the UFO world has been afflicted by the kinds of conspiratorial cracks that have appeared throughout American culture: Who can be trusted? What is true? What constitutes an acceptable standard of proof? Who is a spy, a plant, an agent? Is the government engaged in covert actions to disrupt communities it deems dangerous?
Dolan has been a respected UFO researcher for a long time, which means the same thing here that it means in a lot of conspiracy subcultures: You might not know who he is, but he’s indisputably a giant in his field. He is far from the first of his kind to suggest that the government has planted misleading information to throw the field into chaos. And MUFON itself is frequently accused of pursuing and promoting pseudoscience. The Center for Skeptical Inquiry wrote in 2013 that local MUFON chapters were following “decidedly unscientific” avenues of inquiry, scheduling “talks on alien abduction, conspiracy theories, human-ET hybrids, hypnotic regression, and repressed memories.”
“There are a few very conservative people who want to just talk about the nuts and bolts of the crafts,” Jan Harzan, MUFON’s executive director, told me, referring to spacecraft. “But this is what people are interested in: the whistleblowers. They want to know what’s really going on.” The whistleblowers, as Harzan and others call them, are the men in the UFO world, Goode among them, who make colorful and eye-popping claims about the roles they played in the government’s secret space programs.
More Americans believe in UFOs than believe in natural selection or that the earth is 4.5 billion years old.
In conspiracy subcultures, “whistleblowing” is a common phenomenon. For every government plot and dark scheme, someone will eventually show up claiming to have been part of it. That happened during the 1980s Satanic panic; it began to occur with Pizzagate; and in the mid-2000s the newest crop arrived in the UFO world, when a man named Andrew Basiago claimed to have gone on a series of missions to Mars with a young Barack Obama. In 2014, Goode appeared on the scene. A year later, the two whistleblowers were joined by another man, Randy Kramer, who claims to be a former marine who served on Mars for 17 years and on a secret spaceship for three more.
Among earlier generations of UFO whistleblowers, the most famous was Bob Lazar, who maintained that he worked as a scientist at a subsidiary facility of Area 51 called S-4. His task was to “reverse-engineer” alien spaceships to figure out how they worked. But the new whistleblowers are in a league of their own, having apparently been to reaches of space that humans have never touched before, having had repeated and direct interaction with aliens, and, if I understand Basiago’s assertions correctly, having been chased around by dinosaurs on Mars. (I admit to leaving his lecture early due to a sudden, inexplicable headache.)
Goode has an unusual skill — the ability to make outlandish claims but to weave them together with common and popular UFO positions. Among the more fantastical threads that he manages to pull in: The engineers who work on secret space technologies are part of “secret societies and occult rituals.” But he also peddles the more traditional beliefs: The government isn’t just hiding what it knows about aliens and UFOs, but also about the advanced technologies that aliens have revealed to humans. Those include “healing and anti-aging technologies” and “zero-point energy,” or free energy.
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Next to the lecture hall where the talks took place, there was a big room filled with tables and merchandise. As I walked among the misshapen ceramic aliens and chatted with the vendors, it occurred to me that UFO lore might represent conspiracy culture at its best: our interest in the hidden, the unknown, the ineffable, the magic of what’s yet to be revealed. “The UFO mystery holds a mirror to our own fantasies,” famed UFO researcher and computer scientist Jacques Vallée once wrote. “It expresses our secret longings for a wisdom that might come down from the stars in new, improved, easy to-use packaging, to reveal the secrets of life and tell us, at long last, who we are.”
The alien world wasn’t always that exalted. Alien mythology was born, as many people know, in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, when something … crashed. One summer morning a ranch foreman working close to Roswell found something bizarre while walking the property. It was what Kathryn Olmsted in Real Enemies describes as “a pile of sticks, tinfoil thick paper, and smoky-gray rubber, all stuck together with scotch tape.”
The foreman called Roswell’s sheriff, who sent out two deputies, then phoned the Roswell Army Air Force Base, wondering if it was something of theirs. The base’s public information officer announced that a “flying disc” had been recovered. But by the next day, the story had changed: The region’s commanding general reported that what had actually been recovered was a “high altitude weather balloon.”
For every government plot and dark scheme, someone will eventually show up claiming to have been part of it.
Public interest in the story faded. But by the late 1970s, alien researchers started to suspect there had been a cover-up at Roswell. Around 1991, Glenn Dennis, a self-proclaimed eyewitness, came forward, saying that he had worked at a Roswell funeral home at the time and that the military had requested “child-sized caskets” for tiny alien bodies. Dennis’s version of the story took off, transforming the Roswell story as we all commonly know it. In later years, popular imagination moved the location of the little gray bodies, iced over like mysterious pearlescent fish sticks, to Area 51.
In 1994, a genuine conspiracy came to light: An Air Force report commissioned by the federal General Accounting Office revealed that the downed balloon was probably debris from a top secret surveillance program known as Project MOGUL, which sought to record audio evidence of Soviet atomic tests. And in 1997, a second report found a possible explanation for the witnesses who reported seeing alien bodies pulled from the wreckage: The crash-test dummies routinely dropped during other military test operations involving high-altitude balloons.
Most mainstream news sources presented the reports as evidence that there were definitively no UFOs. “No bodies. No bulbous heads,” wrote William J. Broad of the New York Times News Service in 1997. “No secret autopsies. No spaceship. No crash. No extraterrestrials or alien artifacts of any sort. And most emphatically of all, no Government cover-up.”
But the 1994 report did provide proof that the Air Force had lied about a top secret program, which fed certainty among UFO researchers that there were other cover-ups yet to be discovered. The history of UFOs is a perfect illustration of the way in which genuine government secrecy feeds citizen paranoia. The disclosure of hidden Air Force programs made just about anything seem possible, and over the next few decades, it was joined by wave after wave of revelations, some of them real and some imagined, until the field of ufology became a morass of competing claims and high suspicion that everyone is a government agent and no one is to be trusted. Read more…
Anne Thériault | Longreads | April 2019 | 23 minutes (5,836 words)
From the notorious to the half-forgotten,Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on badass world-historical women of centuries past.
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When we left the future Empress, she was 32 and had just completed her third transformation — and name change — in as many decades. First she had been Yeyette, the coarse, uneducated girl from the colonies struggling to find her place in Paris society; then she had been Marie-Josèphe, the beautiful and popular estranged wife of a Revolutionary hero with a whiff of the courtesan about her; now she was a survivor of the Reign of Terror, a Merveilleuse famous for her revealing clothing, and a semi-professional mistress to the rich and powerful. It was in this latest incarnation that she was christened Josephine by her newest bedmate, a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte.
The young lovers had met through Paul Barras, who was both Napoleon’s boss and Josephine’s sugar daddy. After being aggressively pursued by the famously uncouth Corsican for months, Josephine had, for her own inscrutable reasons, decided to give in to his advances.
If she’d hoped that sleeping with him would somehow slake his obsession with her, she was wrong. Very wrong.
Napoleon’s fixation on Josephine only deepened once they became lovers, and often it tipped over into vicious fits of jealousy. In a letter to a friend, Josephine wrote, “I am afraid, I admit, of the empire he seems to want over all those who surround him.” She also wrote that the “force of [his] passion” made her uncomfortable, although she couldn’t quite articulate why; she knew that she should find his devotion to her attractive, but it creeped her out. Still, after weighing the pros and cons, she eventually gave in to his marriage proposal. She was getting older, and she wanted the security of a husband. Plus, he did seem to genuinely love her, even if his particular brand of love sometimes had a frightening edge.
The wedding was set for March 9, 1796. Since Catholicism was still banned in France, it was a civil service held at a small town hall. Napoleon arrived two hours late, a total asshole power move. The rest of the event was as messy as its beginning: the ages on the marriage certificate were wrong, one of the witnesses was too young to legally be a witness, and everyone was in a bad mood. It almost certainly wasn’t the wedding Josephine had expected, but she grimaced her way through it. When they got home, Josephine refused to move her beloved dog Fortuné off the bed to make room for Napoleon. When his mistress’ new husband tried to push him aside, the pug bit him. Sometimes dogs just know.
If Josephine found one bright spot on her second wedding day, it might have been the inscription on the wedding band Napoleon placed on her finger: “au destin,” to destiny. Both husband and wife believed that they were marked by fate, and nothing could have been a more fitting motto for them. Their shared faith that their marriage — and, indeed, their entire lives — had been predestined would shape many of their choices in the coming years.
* * *
Two days after the wedding, Napoleon left for a military campaign in Italy. His letters from this time are textbook examples of the cycle of abuse, heady declarations of love alternating with vicious scolding for not writing back often enough or with the right emotion. That being said, Josephine’s reasons for not replying in a timely fashion were less than virtuous: she’d begun an affair with a beautiful young soldier named Hippolyte Charles and, through him, had become involved with some shady backroom arms dealing. In Josephine’s defense, taking a lover or two on the side was a normal part of the world she lived in; after all, it hadn’t been that long since she’d been a fixture at Thérésa Tallien’s orgies. Still, she must have known that Napoleon expected monogamy. She must have known that she was playing a dangerous game.
While Josephine was ignoring her husband’s letters and living the high life in Paris, Napoleon was growing more and more anguished, and when he told Barras that he hated all women and was consumed with despair, the older man decided that he needed to step in. Napoleon had been racking up astonishing victories in Italy, and Barras couldn’t afford to have him distracted from his work. So one night, after a dinner given in her honor, he muscled Josephine into a carriage bound for Milan. She cried and begged him to let her stay, but Barras was adamant. He was going to give Napoleon whatever he wanted, including, once again, Josephine.
When they got home, Josephine refused to move her beloved dog Fortuné off the bed to make room for Napoleon. When his mistress’ new husband tried to push him aside, the pug bit him. Sometimes dogs just know.
Napoleon was overjoyed by his wife’s arrival. Their time apart had only heightened his obsession and when they met in Italy, he couldn’t stop fondling her, even in front of his staff. Josephine found his attentions overwhelming. “My husband doesn’t love me, he worships me,” she wrote to an acquaintance. Even though her life in Milan was lavish — she was staying in a literal palace — Josephine was miserable. She missed her life in Paris, she missed her children, she missed her freedom.
Napoleon had to return to the front lines soon after Josephine’s arrival, from whence he sent her letters about her vagina, calling it “the little black forest” and writing that “[t]o live within Josephine is to live in the Elysian fields.” Truly, this man missed his calling as a romance writer.
JOSEPHINE: on the whole, Italy was kind of a wash
JOSEPHINE: I mean, the plundering part was pretty fun
JOSEPHINE: the Italians make great art, I’ll give them that
JOSEPHINE: but then Napoleon’s family arrived from Marseilles
JOSEPHINE: I mean, they basically moved in with us!
JOSEPHINE: and there are not enough Correggio paintings in the world to make it worth putting up with them
Napoleon’s family had been less than enthused to learn about his marriage. Josephine was infamous by this point, and her scandals well-known. Napoleon’s mother opposed the match from a moral standpoint as well as a financial one — her son had been supporting the family ever since his father’s death several years earlier, and she didn’t relish seeing that support drained away by a depraved slattern from the colonies. In spite of Josephine’s attempts to charm her new husband’s family, they would openly loathe her for the rest of her life. His 16-year-old sister Pauline was especially heinous to Josephine: she referred to her as “la vielle” (the old woman), stuck her tongue out at her behind her back, and did her best to outdress her sister-in-law on every occasion.
Josephine left Italy in November, ostensibly bound for Paris. Napoleon left at the same time, but headed to peace talks in Austria first. He was shocked when he returned to Paris in December and his wife still wasn’t there. Instead of going straight back, Josephine had met up with Hippolyte in Nevers, and the two were leisurely fucking their way across France. A ball dedicated to her was organized by Napoleon’s ally Talleyrand in Paris for December 25th, but when she still hadn’t arrived it was postponed until the 28th. Josephine didn’t show up until January 3rd, by which point organizers had been forced to throw out two rounds of food and flowers. The event went grimly ahead but Napoleon was furious, as Josephine must have known he’d be. Josephine and Napoleon reconciled with a Big Dramatic Scene, a completely healthy relationship dynamic they both seemed to relish. This was something that played out over and over again throughout their time together: Napoleon would stomp around and yell, while Josephine wept and begged for his forgiveness. Eventually he would play the part of Big Merciful Daddy and take her into his arms and comfort her; nothing made Napoleon feel more secure in his masculinity than reducing his wife to tears and then comforting her. Josephine, for her part, seemed to feel like she could get away with almost anything as long as she cried hard enough about it later.
In 1797, Napoleon began planning his next big military campaign.
NAPOLEON: babe, I’m going to conquer Egypt
JOSEPHINE: can I ask why?
NAPOLEON: for the empire
JOSEPHINE: sure, but, why Egypt specifically?
JOSEPHINE: I mean, isn’t it kind of … out of the way?
NAPOLEON: Alexander the Great conquered Egypt
JOSEPHINE: I don’t know if that’s really a reason
NAPOLEON: it’s an empire-building thing, you wouldn’t understand
If Josephine had been reluctant to join Napoleon in Italy, she was now desperate to accompany him to Egypt: her involvement in Hippolyte’s shady business had been revealed and the resulting scandal had been deeply unpleasant; she wanted to have Napoleon’s baby and solidify her position as his wife; she owed a lot of people a lot of money. But Napoleon refused to take her, so instead she headed to the spa town of Plombières, where she hoped to recover her fertility. Both she and Napoleon were desperate for a baby, but lingering physical trauma from her time in prison coupled with years of using what then passed for the morning-after pill (highly toxic douches, mostly) had left her unable to conceive. She hoped that “taking the waters” would improve her reproductive system. Instead, her time at Plombières made her chances of getting pregnant even more remote when a balcony she was standing on collapsed, leaving her with a broken pelvis and a severe spinal injury. Although she would go on to make an incredible recovery, the incident almost guaranteed that she would never have another child.
Meanwhile, things in Egypt weren’t going so great. The British were sinking Napoleon’s ships, and his friend Junot was sinking his hopes by telling him what everyone in Paris already knew — that Josephine was fucking Hippolyte. You would think Napoleon might have figured this fact out on his own, but denial is a powerful drug. Admitting that Josephine had betrayed him shook not only his relationship with her, but also his relationship with himself: maybe he wasn’t actually the most virile and powerful man in the world, but a cuckold and a laughingstock. He swore to divorce Josephine, and for once she wasn’t there to weep and rend her garments and beg forgiveness.
And then the unthinkable happened: the British seized a French mail ship containing a letter from Napoleon to his brother about Josephine’s unfaithfulness. Then, like an 18th-century WikiLeaks, the London Morning Chronicle published selections from the letter. If the French had been tittering behind their hands about the military genius and his cheating wife, the English were outright guffawing.
* * *
Now the entire world knew about Napoleon’s humiliation.
Josephine, ever practical, decided that this would be a great time to buy a house. Actually, not just a house — a proper country estate called Malmaison (a name that roughly translates to “bad house,” which is … a choice). Josephine’s reasons were twofold: she wanted somewhere to live if Napoleon divorced her, but she also hoped that a beautiful property like Malmaison might lure him back. Barras, who obviously had a vested interest in her marriage, loaned Josephine the money she needed. She moved in almost as soon as the sale was completed, and quickly realized Malmaison was a great place to carry on her relationship with Hippolyte away from prying Parisian eyes.
Napoleon didn’t return to France immediately after finding out about his wife’s relationship with Hippolyte, partly because he preferred to bury himself in his work, partly because the situation he’d started in Egypt was still unstable, and partly because he wanted to have his own revenge affair. Josephine spent the better part of a year on tenterhooks, waiting for her husband and praying that she could pull off the most audacious weep ‘n’ beg of her life. Finally, in October of 1799, while dining at a friend’s house, she received word that Napoleon was back in the country. She dashed from Paris to Lyon, hoping to get to him before anyone else could, but arrived to find that he had already left by a different road. When Napoleon arrived in Paris and found his house empty, he assumed Josephine was off with her lover. Furious, he ordered his staff to begin packing up her clothes.
When Josephine finally got back to Paris she went straight to Napoleon, but he had locked himself in his room and refused to see her. She sat on the floor outside of his door and cried all night, but her old tricks failed to move him. At 5 o’clock in the blessed morning, Josephine sensed she would need stronger ammunition, so she roused Eugène and Hortense. The two sleepy teenagers, still in their nightwear, joined their mother and begged their stepfather not to abandon them. Napoleon was genuinely fond of Josephine’s children, and it was their pleading that finally softened his heart. He allowed Josephine to come into the room and then, not long after, into his bed. Plus ça change!
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Napoleon did not live to regret this decision. Josephine’s ability to wield soft power — flattery, distraction, general diplomacy — soon came in very handy. While Napoleon was in Egypt, several of his sources informed him that the current government was deeply unpopular and France was in dire straits. The rumors were not an exaggeration. He plotted with Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, one of the five leaders of the Directory — the committee that had governed France since the end of the Revolution — to overthrow the other four. As soon as that was done, Napoleon immediately double-crossed Sieyès and declared himself First Consul of France, an authoritarian title that basically put him in complete control of the country. Like many two-bit despots, Napoleon claimed to be acting in the interests of liberty and democracy; like many two-bit despots, he felt that this was a personal victory that he had earned because he was destined to rule. But the truth was that Josephine had done much of the backroom work for him: hosting dinners, inflating egos, and diverting attention. Without her, it’s unlikely that the rough-mannered general would have succeeded.
Shortly after his coup, Napoleon decided that he needed a residence more befitting a ruler. First he and Josephine moved into the Luxembourg Palace, and a few months later into the Tuileries. The latter was a symbol of the ostentatious excesses of the French monarchy; built by Catherine de’ Medici in the 16th century, the Tuileries was where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were kept after their removal from Versailles. Napoleon’s choice to align himself with the kings of the Ancien Régime was obviously intentional, and he immediately installed his wife in Marie Antoinette’s old chambers. Josephine, though, was ill at ease. She hated the stiffness and formality of her new role, and complained to Hortense that she felt haunted by the dead queen’s ghost. Still, she did her best to fulfill her new role as consuless, even though her heart longed to return to Malmaison.
She soon had her chance, as Napoleon gave her permission to renovate Malmaison to use as a country estate for entertaining guests. Once that was completed, Josephine began working on the estate’s grounds. She discovered that she had a natural aptitude for horticulture, and began cultivating as many species of plants as she could. Tired of the formal gardens of Paris, Josephine hired an English gardener to achieve the jardin à l’anglaise look, much to Napoleon’s horror; she also used her husband’s connections to solicit seeds and plants from around the world, delighting especially in the rare and difficult to grow. Although she was entirely self-taught, Josephine’s botanical knowledge and ability impressed even the experts, and gardening was a passion she would keep up for the rest of her life. She even convinced Napoleon to let her import plants from England during the trade blockades that would mark the wars between Britain and the Napoleonic Empire.
JOSEPHINE: I also built a giant greenhouse and started importing exotic animals
JOSEPHINE: I had llamas and an orangutan that could eat with a knife and fork
JOSEPHINE: I know this all sounds ridiculously expensive
JOSEPHINE: but if life has taught me anything, it’s that you should spend money while you can
JOSEPHINE: because tomorrow you could go to jail
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: seriously, that’s your takeaway from the Revolution?
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: not that monarchy is oppressive, or that we should strive for freedom and equality
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: you’re as bad as any of those Bourbon kings
JOSEPHINE: stay away from my fucking llamas, Robespierre
* * *
Josephine succeeded in building an estate that both she and the First Consul could love. Napoleon began to use Malmaison to meet with all kinds of dignitaries and officials; in the early years of his rule, much of his government business was conducted at the country estate. They hosted days-long events that involved outdoor dinners and games, and even theatrical interludes starring Bonaparte family and friends. Josephine had transformed herself once again, from sexually adventurous good-times Merveilleuse into a consuless at the height of sophistication and good taste. Unfortunately for her, this state of affairs couldn’t and wouldn’t last long.
As Napoleon’s authority grew, so did his royal ambitions. He began to consider Malmaison beneath his station, preferring life at the Tuileries. Josephine was forced to spend more and more time in the city (and more and more time with her miserable in-laws). Napoleon, meanwhile, was sleeping with as many women as possible. These affairs — if you can call them that — took an odd form. The consul would have the women he chose wait for him, naked, in bed; he would be in and out (so to speak) in a matter of minutes. More than sex, he seemed to enjoy his ability to order his mistresses around, to control how they interacted with him. These liaisons also gave him another type of power, over Josephine: the ability to reduce her to tears, push her to the brink of despair, then soothe her like a fretful child.
Napoleon’s attitudes toward women oscillated between furious resentment and paternal infantilization. Both of these were reflected in his Napoleonic Code, which severely restricted the rights women had gained during the Revolution and even the few they’d held under the Ancien Régime. He also made chattel slavery legal again, in spite of his promises to uphold abolition, a decision many blamed on Josephine’s influence. Whether or not she advocated for the reinstatement of slavery, Josephine certainly didn’t seem to oppose it, writing to her mother that Napoleon was “very attached to Martinique and is counting on the support of the planters of that colony.” Josephine was uniquely positioned to understand both the brutality of chattel slavery — she had witnessed it firsthand, after all — as well as the Revolutionary arguments that had led to its abolition. Her entire personal brand was built on the indignities of losing her freedom during the Reign of Terror. She either knew on every level that slavery was a violation of basic human rights and didn’t care, or she found some way to rationalize it to herself, which is functionally the same as not caring.
To justify his regressive laws, Napoleon reinstated Catholicism as the state religion. He explained his rationale to the senator Pierre Louis Roederer succinctly: “Society cannot exist without inequality of wealth and inequality of wealth cannot exist without religion.” With the Catholic Church back in business, nearly every change wrought by the Revolution was undone.
* * *
As time went on, Napoleon became increasingly preoccupied with having a child. It was becoming clearer and clearer that Josephine was not going conceive, although she suggested that the problem lay with him — after all, hadn’t she already had two healthy pregnancies? Her fertility was, according to her, demonstrably fine. But still Josephine was terrified that her husband would leave her for a younger woman who might provide him with a baby. Eventually, she came up with an idea straight out of Aunt Edmée’s playbook: Hortense, now 18, could marry Napoleon’s brother Louis. The children of that union would bear both Napoleon and Josephine’s blood, and would make the perfect Bonaparte heir.
HORTENSE: but Louis is awful!
JOSEPHINE: well, we all have to do our duty
JOSEPHINE: to the empire, you know
HORTENSE: this feels more like me taking one for the team so that you can get what you want
JOSEPHINE: aren’t we all on the same team?
JOSEPHINE: really, you’re helping me to help yourself
Louis, like the rest of Napoleon’s extended family, hated Josephine and spent his wedding night reciting all the reasons why his new bride’s mother was a slut. In spite of this, Hortense gave birth to a son almost exactly nine months later, who she christened Napoleon Louis Charles. Her mother and stepfather were exultant.
Shortly before the birth of his heir, Napoleon was made “Consul for Life.” He officially moved his country seat from Malmaison to the Chateau de Saint-Cloud, one of Marie Antoinette’s former residences, where he did his utmost to recreate the court life of the Bourbon dynasty. He dressed his staff in red velvet and gilded everything in sight. He insisted that Josephine order extravagant new gowns for every occasion — including one covered with real rose petals — although he balked when her bills arrived. Few people remembered all the arcane rules and rituals of court, so Napoleon had Josephine consult with Henriette Campan, who had been Marie Antoinette’s First Lady of the Bedchamber, about things like who was supposed to bow when.
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: what was the point of even having a revolution??
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: did 40,000 people die in vain?? So that we could have another KING?
NAPOLEON: well, I didn’t start the Revolution, I just finished it
NAPOLEON: so that sounds like more of a you problem than a me problem
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: I’m dead, I don’t have any problems
NAPOLEON: with all due respect, Max, I would say that even in death you have a lot of unresolved issues
If Josephine had been overwhelmed by the grandeur of the Tuileries, Saint-Cloud was even worse. She missed the casual country vibes of Malmaison, not to mention the public affection her husband had showered her with there. His liaisons were becoming more and more public, and Josephine knew that pushing back against his infidelity would only put her position at risk; in spite of Hortense’s child, Josephine was still terrified that her husband would leave her. Napoleon wielded his new relationships like weapons — he loved to recount graphic details about his conquests to Josephine, demanding that she applaud his sexual prowess. If she got upset, he grew vicious, reminding her that she had been unfaithful first. By Napoleon’s logic, she deserved payback for humiliating him in front of the entire world.
In January of 1804, a plot to assassinate Napoleon was discovered. The Duc of Enghien, a nephew of Louis XVI, was arrested at his home in Baden (even though there was no evidence linking him to the plot), found guilty in a secret military trial, and summarily executed. The rest of Europe was appalled — Baden was a neutral territory, and the legal proceedings had hardly been fair. But in France, Napoleon successfully spun the story; he was the hero his country needed, protecting it from anarchy and the dregs of the Bourbon dynasty. Riding a wave of popularity, Napoleon launched a referendum and was elected Emperor of the French. “I am the man of the State,” he declared. “I am the French Revolution.”
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: I just want to say I totally called it that you would make yourself king
NAPOLEON: technically, an emperor is not a king
NAPOLEON: spiritually, it’s more in the tradition of the Roman Empire? Anyway, it polls well
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: I fail to see how the Roman emperors were less oppressive or corrupt than the French kings
NAPOLEON: Max, you know I always treasure your input
NAPOLEON: but don’t you have anyone else to haunt?
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: you know I don’t, I beheaded all of my enemies 10 years ago
Josephine was going to be “greater than a queen,” just as Euphémie had said — she was going to be an Empress. Or was she? Even though her husband was going to be Emperor, she didn’t have an official title. Napoleon himself didn’t seem to be too sure about which direction to jump. On the one hand, crowning Josephine as Empress would make it a lot harder to get rid of her if and when he wanted to take a new wife who would give him an heir. On the other hand, he was deeply superstitious and believed that his wife was his good luck charm; without her, he worried that his winning streak would break. Plus, every time he leaned toward not crowning Josephine his terrible family rejoiced, which infuriated him.
Josephine and Napoleon began playing a dangerous game of chicken. He told her that he was too loyal to leave her, and begged her to do the leaving for the sake of his dynasty. She retaliated by saying that she would separate from him as soon as he gave her a direct order to do so. Every time Napoleon was on the brink of breaking it off, something — his love for his stepchildren, his fear of a life without Josephine, her ability to lure him into the bedroom — stopped him. Finally, less than a month before his coronation, his family made up his mind for him. The Bonapartes, feeling triumphant, had spent weeks alternating between snubbing and teasing Josephine, sure that her downfall was imminent. Piqued by their disrespect, Napoleon publicly announced her coronation, then rubbed salt in the wound by telling his sisters that they’d be carrying Josephine’s train during the ceremony.
The night before the coronation, Josephine made the ultimate move to keep her husband at her side. The Pope was in town to do the coronating — although Napoleon actually ended up crowning himself, because despots will despot — and Josephine sought a private audience with him. She confessed that her wedding to the Emperor had been a civil service, which meant that they weren’t truly married in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Horrified, the Pope refused to participate in the coronation unless Napoleon and Josephine were married in a religious ceremony. Knowing that the Pope’s support was key to legitimizing his reign, Napoleon gave in. Josephine’s gamble had paid off.
* * *
On December 2, 1804, Josephine — heroine of the Reign of Terror, scantily clad Merveilleuse, former mistress of half a dozen men — was crowned Empress of France in front of the Pope himself.
All of this was, of course, set against the backdrop of Napoleon’s military career. He managed to spin even his defeats as successes, and used them to justify further expansion of his empire. In the summer of 1805, he turned his attention once more toward Austria, which was still salty about the whole Marie Antoinette thing and allied with Britain and Russia against France. Napoleon abandoned his plans to invade England in order to head east to quash the Austrian army, and he was hugely successful. The next year, he pressed even farther, into Prussia, and in early 1807, into Poland. He wrote to Josephine often, but even as he proclaimed his love, he was distracted by news out of France: one of his mistresses was pregnant. Josephine, who had traveled with Napoleon as far as Mainz, knew exactly what that pregnancy could mean for her marriage. She begged her husband to let her join him in Warsaw but he ordered her back to Paris, where she spent the winter white-faced and weeping, certain that orders for a divorce would come through any day.
Josephine had little reprieve from her unhappiness. In the spring of 1807, her grandson and heir Napoleon Louis Charles died. Hortense and the Empress were inconsolable; Napoleon, who thought they should be paying attention to his victories in the east, grew impatient with their grief. Less than a month later, Josephine’s mother died in Martinique. Napoleon refused to make the news of his mother-in-law’s death public, claiming that it would cast a shadow over his victories, and refused to name Hortense’s younger son his heir, which Josephine took as a further sign that he was about to leave her. When the Emperor returned to France after sealing an armistice with Tsar Alexander, his manner toward his wife was noticeably chilly.
Now that he was secure in his fertility, Napoleon began to consider a divorce in earnest. The idea of solidifying his new alliances with Austria and Poland with a marriage was deeply appealing and, he reasoned, the death of his heir was a good excuse to find and impregnate a new wife. Josephine, knowing she was about to be discarded, fell into an emotional spiral, dragging Napoleon with her: the more miserable she became, the more he resented her. But he still loved her, too, and couldn’t picture life without her gentling influence. Plus, he was sure that she brought him luck; his greatest victories had come after their wedding, and after all, what about “au destin”? Would his military winning streak continue without her? But in 1809, after learning that a Polish mistress was pregnant with another one of his children, he made up his mind: he had to divorce Josephine.
On November 30th, just two days before the 5th anniversary of their coronation, Napoleon and Josephine dined together. At the end of a nearly silent meal, the Emperor took his wife’s hand and told her that, while he would always adore her, he had to put the interests of France in front of his own wants. Josephine fell into hysterics, and Napoleon began to cry too, becoming even more upset when he realized that losing his wife meant losing his stepchildren. He had thought this through thousands of times, but faced with the reality of divorce, he blanched. In the end it was Eugène who insisted that the separation happen. He knew that a reconciliation would be brief and ultimately unhappy for everyone.
On December 14, 1809, Napoleon and Josephine convened a grand ceremony in the throne room to announce their divorce. The Emperor wept as he described what a wonderful wife the Empress had been. Josephine — whose face was a mess of tears and makeup — swore that Napoleon would always be her dearest love. Together, they signed the record of proceedings. That night they clung to each other in Napoleon’s bed, both sobbing, before Josephine retreated to her own chamber.
Josephine decamped to Malmaison, where Napoleon visited her. The pair continued to cry together over the dissolution of their grand love affair, more united in their separation than they had been over the last year of their marriage. But the Emperor’s grief didn’t stop him from marrying 18-year-old Marie Louise of Austria (who happened to be Marie Antoinette’s great-niece) on March 11th, 1810, just months after his divorce. He told Josephine that she would have to leave Paris before his new wife’s arrival, and at the end of March the deposed Empress set off for a chateau in Navarre.
Josephine did her best to rally her spirits, even though the lovely new home Napoleon had promised was a damp, drafty monstrosity, so hideous that people called it “la marmite” (the cooking pot). She began renovating its gardens, and occupied her evenings doing tarot readings for her ladies; years before, she had developed a close relationship with cartomancer Marie Anne Lenormand, and remained obsessed with Lenormand’s fortune-telling deck of cards for the rest of her life. Between her love of plants, her tarot fixation, and her (still ongoing) debt, Josephine was basically a prototype for the modern millennial lady.
* * *
In March of 1811, Marie Louise gave birth to a son. Napoleon was beyond exultant — he finally had a legitimate child and heir. In a fit of good temper, he allowed Josephine to return permanently to Malmaison (she had been there the year before, but was only allowed to stay briefly before traveling onward to Aix-en-Provence). She began to build a quiet life for herself — collecting art, hosting intimate soirées, and spoiling her grandchildren. She grew sugarcane in her greenhouse and let Hortense’s young sons suck on it just like she had as a child. Napoleon remained close to her, writing to her often and spending two hours visiting her before he left to conquer Russia; he even let her kiss and cuddle his son, although Marie Louise was furious when she found out.
I probably don’t have to tell you that things didn’t go well in Russia. Things never go well for invading armies in Russia. Over 500,000 French soldiers died; fewer than 100,000 came home. Napoleon was ousted from power in the spring of 1814, and Paris was soon overrun with triumphant Cossack forces. By the beginning of May, they would restore the Bourbon dynasty to the French throne. Napoleon, meanwhile, had been exiled.
Tsar Alexander, who was in Paris to ensure that Louis XVIII acceded peacefully, began visiting Josephine. He was fascinated by the legendary woman who had held his enemy in thrall for so long, and the former Empress, for her part, received him graciously. She understood that this man held her life — and the lives of her children and grandchildren — in the palm of his hand, and turned on the charm accordingly. Other conquering dignitaries began to visit her as well; she was, after all, one of the spoils of war. She belonged to them now.
Stay away from my fucking llamas, Robespierre.
In the middle of May, Josephine caught a chill while out walking around the grounds of Malmaison with the Tsar. By the end of the month, she was desperately ill with a high fever and a rash. On the morning of May 29th, delirious but still the same old Josephine, she insisted on being dressed in a pink satin gown and rubies in case the Tsar came. She was dead by the time the clock struck noon.
French public opinion had run hot and cold on Napoleon — mostly cold over the last years of his reign — but Josephine had been almost universally beloved. She represented so many things to so many people, from the wild hope of the early days of the Revolution to the desperation of the Reign of Terror to the grandeur of the French Empire. Perhaps above everything else, she represented pragmatism and tenacity; she’d never been ashamed to do what was necessary to survive. Thousands upon thousands attended her funeral, weeping for their Empress. Her legacy was complicated, but it was the legacy of their people.
And Napoleon? In his disgrace, he was abandoned by almost everyone, including Marie Louise; Eugène and Hortense were among the few that remained loyal to him. He died seven years later, exiled to the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic. His last word was “Josephine.”
There is a statue of Josephine in Fort-de-France, Martinique. In 1991, it was beheaded, just as she would have been if not for Robespierre’s timely downfall. It was a fitting tribute to the heroine of the Terror who had watched the restoration of slavery with the same secretive Mona Lisa smile she wears in all of her portraits.
Long live the dissolution of oppressive monarchies. Long live freedom. Liberté, fraternité, égalité forever.
Anne Thériault is a Toronto-based feminist killjoy. She is currently raising one child and three unruly cats. If she has a looming deadline, you can find her procrastinating on Twitter @anne_theriault.
Muchedumbre. Noun, feminine: An abundance of persons or things; crowd, horde Noun, biblical: Survivors, the chosen
* * *
When I fell for the video girl in Omarion’s “Touch,” I never thought I’d come to know her name. I loved her for her low-slung baggy jeans and spangled bustier. I loved her for the wave arranged across her forehead, her sly smile, and most of all, of course, for the way she moved. In the video, Omarion spots her with her girls as she’s leaving the club, and soon they involve each other in a pedestrian duet that elaborates the walk home along the lines of a Cuban rumba: frankly sexual, magnetically relational, but rarely, barely touching.
What won my attention was an unusual liberty in her movement — unconfined, it seemed, by a tightly choreographed routine or proper place in the staged urban environment — and a looseness in her waistline I can’t help calling Spanish. In Latin music, lyrics linger less over hips and ass, lavishing attention on la cintura atómica, la cintura sueltecita as the locus of sensual movement, maybe even the primary engine of Latin culture’s successive “explosions.” Marking the waist as specifically Spanish doesn’t check out in a diasporic vocabulary that includes wining, belly dance, even hula. But that’s how I responded to her body — with recognition. I followed the current that ran up and down her torso, briefly electrifying each gesture as if it were a spoken phrase that would resolve into a statement. I wanted to know where the meaning would land.
I didn’t expect to see this dancer again. Maybe I couldn’t see past the way she’d been cast: as a girl who appears, suddenly, in the chaos of the club, then slips back — a moment, an hour, a day later — into the city’s unsyncopated working rhythm. Blink.Touch. This was 2005, before the internet’s full power was at my fingertips, before I could feel confident that “Omarion video girl” would yield a name, a résumé, a world. I didn’t try. For years I’d return to her on YouTube, exhibiting her to friends and lovers, an avatar of erotic freedom, improvisational play, anonymous genius. I wanted her to be noticed beyond the terms the screen had set. And I wanted to be noticed for noticing her.
* * *
Pop culture teaches us that backup dancers are beneath notice. They’re not real artists, and the pleasure we take in them is primitive. They are not suitable emissaries of culture, even if culture wouldn’t be any fun without them. There are no prominent prizes for video girls, no credit roll at the end of the concert naming names. When we pick favorites and mimic their moves, our mothers make sure we know not to aspire. Backup dancing is not aspirational; it’s a no-man’s-land where brown girls are liable to languish, underpaid and overworked. It’s one wrong turn away from sex work. When Cardi B brags, “I don’t dance now / I make money moves,” she’s minimizing the difference between the kind of dancing she used to do on the pole and the kind of dancing done on other stages. Neither one, she seems to say, will pay. These messages have posed a problem for me, because I grew up in a time and place in which every Puerto Rican you’d ever heard of was — or had been — a backup dancer.
The distinction between was and had been didn’t matter that much, because the fact that certain individuals had achieved star status did little to reduce the stigma of salacious amateurism that lingered with them. Especially before Lin-Manuel Miranda, Sonia Sotomayor, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went to Washington, the prototypical Puerto Rican in U.S. consciousness was [Dancing Girl emoji, skin tone tan]. Probably, she still is. Even the nation’s youngest congresswoman is haunted — or rather, refuses to be haunted — by her younger body, bopping across the rooftops of Boston University in 2010. As a dweeby tween, I wasn’t ashamed: I liked being noticed in relation to something “sexy.” But I see now why my mother was. There’s an implied analogy between the backup dancer and Puerto Rico itself, as if the island exists first and foremost for the empire’s entertainment, as if Puerto Ricans can be famous, too, so long as we know our precarious, paradoxical place.
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Official policy refers to Puerto Rico as a commonwealth, but it’s really a shadow colony in plain view, hypervisible especially in relation to the colonies most Americans don’t know or name: Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands. The United States government sometimes refers to Puerto Rico as “the shining star of the Caribbean,” a phrase dreamed up for a midcentury publicity campaign designed to attract business investment to the island. But this special status has not protected Puerto Rico — or its diaspora — from myriad forms of colonial extraction. Puerto Rico is both empire’s “shining star” and, in the notorious words of U.S. Senator William B. Bate, “a heterogeneous mass of mongrels,” threatening the nation’s delicate racial and political ecosystem from the shadowy margins. There are too many of us (“mass”), and each one of us already contains too many (“mongrel”). When changes in U.S. economic priorities have displaced Puerto Ricans from Puerto Rico itself, we’ve become backup bodies in cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. By the late 20th century, Puerto Ricans made up the largest “immigrant” group in New York City. Life hasn’t been much better stateside, but there is still an important sense in which the Puerto Rican pseudo-citizen moves dique freely in relation to her cousins in the rest of the Caribbean and Latin America. She won’t be deported, exactly. Instead, she’ll spin in a perpetual motion machine.
All of these myths and policies converge on the body of the Puerto Rican backup dancer. The consolation prize for second-class citizenship — really, for lack of sovereignty — has been cultural nationalism. We can shimmy and shake all we like, get loud and proud about how well we do it. But even when the backup dancer gets to be a star, she’s on the blink, appearing and disappearing like the bright spot on the nocturnal satellite map before and after Hurricane Maria.
For years I’d return to her on YouTube, exhibiting her to friends and lovers, an avatar of erotic freedom, improvisational play, anonymous genius. I wanted her to be noticed beyond the terms the screen had set. And I wanted to be noticed for noticing her.
Over the years there are certain stars I’ve come to count on, that seem to have achieved a steady glow:Rita Moreno, for example. Rosie Perez. Jennifer Lopez. Invoking them in sequence, like this, suggests a progressive history, a lineage in which I secretly attempt to situate myself. But the more I read into it, the less it feels like history and the more it feels like a cut-rate carousel. I’m stuck on the constant costume changes these women have hustled through to appear, against the backup dancer’s odds, as names we know. Despite the individuality that stardom confers, they’ve passed through many of the same institutions and come to many of the same professional crossroads. Sometimes they have literally danced in each other’s footsteps or played the same roles. They stand out from and stand in for New York City itself — Nueva York, los niuyores — a few recognizable forms in what the performance scholar Jayna Brown calls “the multijointed body of the female tableaux.” She’s talking about black vaudevillians at the turn of the 20th century, but the image translates: there’s a complex pleasure to getting lost in the crowd. Brown goes on to quote a contemporary of Josephine Baker’s: “She was just a chorus girl, baby, we all was chorus girls.” But it’s hard to hear her tone. Is the chorus girl jaded, disabusing us of the glamour we associate with the star, implying that she can never really rise above her station? Or is taking the star down a peg a way to hold her close, to include her in movement’s “we,” movement’s “all”?
* * *
Growing up, I wanted to be included — even, especially, in the mass of mongrels. I knew Senator Bate didn’t mean to make it seem like so much fun, at least not on the face of it. But by the time we get around to the 1978 Rolling Stones song “Miss You,” Mick Jagger is sure the way to sound American on R & B radio — the way to sound black — is to growl “we’re gonna come around at twelve / with some Puerto Rican girls / that’s just dying to meet you.” I liked singing along — accustomed, like women of all backgrounds, to extracting pleasure and power from pop music’s misogyny. Sometimes I still do.
Maybe I was particularly vulnerable to crude seductions because our family was the opposite of a crowd: me and my mother in California, my grandmother in New York, no siblings, no husbands. Until I left the Bay Area for New York when I was 18, my direct relatives were the only Puerto Ricans I really knew. I was grateful for my Chicanx friends at the private schools we attended on scholarship — we began our political lives together — but culturally speaking they didn’t really know where to place me, and I wasn’t in a position to help them. If Jennifer Lopez implied an urban world teeming with around-the-way girls and spontaneous block parties, I was eager to be implicated.
In Zami, Audre Lorde’s erotic memoir, she articulates her mother’s longing for her natal island of Grenada: “She missed the music you didn’t have to listen to because it was always around.” When my mother danced around the apartment it became populous — with stories of her father’s famous footwork, Motown madness with her college boyfriend, José, the live drums from the New Rican village that seemed to fall in line behind her heels. We’d angle out the closet door with the full-length mirror so she could teach me her teenage moves: the Mashed Potatoes, the Watusi, the Jerk. And then she’d spin out where I couldn’t follow, spurred into a frenzy by the telltale cowbell in “Adoración.” She was multiplied at both ends: by everything that entered her and everything her dancing made me do, the movement she started in the living room. A culture of one. Given our isolation, it would take me years of living in New York to discern which of my mother’s gestures and behaviors were the product of her powerful personality, and which were Puerto Rican cultural commonplaces. It isn’t always easy, or explanatory, to name the difference.
In her self-titled memoir, published in 2011, Rita Moreno remembers moving to Washington Heights and “sitting on the wrought iron grille base beside an open window … while our new radio, shaped like a small cathedral, blared music to me and to any other appreciative Latinos within earshot.” With neighbor girls she “put on costumes and spun through living rooms [and] even ‘entertained’ on the rooftop.” Rosie Perez credits her early dance training to the long summers she spent with her cousin Cookie “in a dilapidated tenement that she kept clean as hell … doing the Hustle in the kitchen while my wet set dried.” I wonder if we’d call it training if we never came to see her dance on TV. Was I training, too, for the pedestrian life I have, in which I’m only famous for my dancing among the friends who follow my Instagram stories? For my gracelessly improvised life as a writer?
‘She was just a chorus girl, baby, we all was chorus girls.’
The New York I live in now is more densely Caribbean than it was when Audre Lorde’s mother suffered the unmusical noise of the north. Despite the city’s constant war on public space, the air at least stays thick, stays wavy. These days the uptown bodegas play bachata, and when I walk by I like to let it inflect the rhythm of my walking — the music I don’t have to listen to because it’s everywhere, the dance I don’t have to do because it’s always in my body. It’s a trope of black diasporic dance to start small, as if walking, as if merely shifting weight, hitching a skirt — the better to dramatize the smooth continuum between everyday life and the high fever of the mess around.
My mother sometimes worries about the way I walk, especially in Washington Heights, where my grandmother lives. She migrated — pregnant with my mother — 15 years after Rita Moreno, in what historian Lorrin Thomas describes as “the postwar boom … that nearly doubled New York City’s Puerto Rican population in two years.” We’ve come to call it “la gran migración,” taking a cue — as we often do — from African American history’s Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North. I still visit my grandmother in the same neighborhood — the same building — where my mother grew up.
And yet it isn’t the same. I was born post-crack and post-Reagan, so our block has always been that kind of hood to me. Now it’s gentrifying. I admit wishing we could keep the ancestral apartment, somehow, so I could live there with rent control. But she doesn’t think I understand the danger. Around here,Latinas are always the ones hit hardest by street violence, she says. I don’t know whether I am, in this case, her daughter or the daughter of my gringo father. So I ask. She thinks the corner boys can tell I’m Latin like them: You can’t do anything about the way you move. In the heat of conflict I feel a pleasurable frisson: the transmission alive in me. I wouldn’t wish that way out of my body, because I wouldn’t wish my body away. It feels safer, somehow, to stay close to my mother even when she says it isn’t.
I know that standing out can pose its own dangers, depending on how and among whom. Cue Zora Neale Hurston: I feel most colored when I am thrown against a stark white background. The image evokes the police precinct’s mugshot as vividly as the museum’s gallery wall. I also know that being singular — or at least, the idea of being singular — has mattered to both my grandmother and my mother because it’s mattered to their survival. Moving — out, away, up from poverty — is often easier alone, dissociated from the trope of the hungry horde. But even loneliness has a lineage, and I find myself feeling for it.
* * *
Rosita Dolores Alverío was not technically an only child; her mother had abandoned her younger child, a boy, when they migrated from Juncos, Puerto Rico in 1936.But in the wake of this desperate choice, Rosita was raised like one, with the intensity of attention I recognize from my mother’s only childhood and my own. Focusing on one child mitigates the economic limitations of working-class life — and of course, raises the stakes for a return on investment. Even by the impossible standards of an immigrant mother, it’s safe to say that Rosita made good as Rita Moreno, the first Puerto Rican to become a bona fide star in the United States. She’s won all four major prizes in American entertainment — the Oscar, the Grammy, the Emmy, and the Tony — and her 1962 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress as Anita in the musical West Side Story remains the only Oscar ever awarded to a Latina performer.
Over time, this distinction has become a bitter sign of how tightly U.S. culture seeks to control our conditions of appearance.But in her memoir, Rita conveys the animating thrill of matriarchal ambition that first set her spinning onstage as a child dancer. In certain moments, her descriptions of their shared labor sound almost utopic:
A happy home has its own music. The house hummed with Mami’s Singer sewing machine as she worked the foot treadle. This machine was so old; it was not an electric model. All the energy came from Mami, from her foot tapping and rising and falling. It sounded like the roll of a Spanish rrrrr! As if in accompaniment, I danced in time with its pulsing, while Mami was creating headdresses and costumes for me.
I didn’t demonstrate enough talent in ballet class to warrant such a scene, but my mother did make our home into a kind of studio, ready for whatever talent might emerge for cultivation. In the “happy” immigrant home, work and play are closely intertwined by necessity. Work must become play, or play must become work, if play is to survive as a vital practice. Like my grandmother, her sisters, and the majority of Puerto Rican women immigrants to New York City, Rita’s mother first worked as a factory seamstress. At home, she turned these same skills to the fanciful project of imagining new and dramatic ways for her daughter to appear. Rita was the chosen channel for this form of dreaming, but the dream itself was more general: to produce, with the means of production at hand, a range of possible lives and the freedom to move among them.
When the doors of Hollywood opened for Rita Moreno, they didn’t open for all her possibilities. They opened for a Slave Girl, an Indian Princess, a Dusky Maiden. It was one role, really: the temporary romantic interest of the white leading man led astray by her temptations before settling down with a suitable (read: white) wife. Who can blame Rita Moreno, then, for her profound ambivalence about so-called stardom? “Cold feet” kept her from auditioning for the principal role of Maria when West Side Story was on Broadway, and her anxiety persisted even after she secured the supporting role of Anita in the film adaptation. Though Anita animated contemporary anxieties about New York’s “Puerto Rican problem,” the role was also substantial, a rare opportunity she was sure she’d somehow squander: “A shadow followed me like a backup dancer, making me worry that it would only be a matter of time before I would lose everything.”
There she is: the backup dancer, making a cameo here as a sly, flexible metaphor. If Rita’s shadow is the backup dancer, then Rita herself is surely the star. But the metaphor seems to articulate the slippage between the two positions — the backup dancer is the star’s shadow side, the constant reminder of how precarious her visibility really is. She’s on her heels, grabbing hold wherever her body touches ground. Maybe Rita felt shadowed by the roles she’d been forced to play, unable to get out from under the sense of herself as an erotic extra. Or maybe she couldn’t escape the sense that her luck would always come at someone else’s expense: she was keenly aware of replacing another Puerto Rican dancer, Chita Rivera, who’d triumphed as Anita on Broadway. She was convinced she could “never, ever be as good as Chita,” that she’d never deserve the power of her position.
She was multiplied at both ends: by everything that entered her and everything her dancing made me do, the movement she started in the living room. A culture of one.
But if the backup dancer haunts the star, she also keeps her company. “Rita the Cheetah,” as she was known in the press, would never be lonely as Anita: the role activated a rhyme of substitutes, a small crowd of Puerto Rican hopefuls passing in and out of the spotlight. In fact, Rita deliberately “sought out a friend who had played the part of Anita on a coast-to-coast tour,” eager to learn a few steps for her audition. Every dance begins in — as — someone else’s shadow. That’s just how it is. However singular her performance would turn out to be, Rita became Anita in relation to the other women who had been her. A gang of Anitas gave birth to Rita’s Anita, the gang leader.
Ultimately, it is Anita, with her active — if contentious — relationship to group identity who is West Side Story’s brightest star. It is Anita, not Maria, who seems to summon the whole urban world into being with a swirl of her purple skirts and a clap of her hands: “Here,” said the New York Times review, “are the muscle and rhythm that bespeak a collective energy.” When I imagine a world ruled by Anitas, I get a festive feeling, as if I’m climbing the fire escape to the famous rooftop scene. I can almost smell the summer-softened tar, the beer going flat, the perfumed sweat rising as banter becomes music, becomes, suddenly, a dance battle. Maybe there’s a way to wiggle free from our collective confinement without leaving each other behind. Maybe there’s a way to argue over what “America” has made of us in our own language.
From the rooftop, these dreams seem don’t seem so far off. But in her memoir, Rita Moreno asks us to stay with her in closer quarters, to find freedom in a scene where her only company is her own shadow, in a moment that’s not right for shimmying. In one of West Side Story’s most tragic turns, Anita leaves Sharks turf to deliver Maria’s message to Tony, only to be intercepted by the Jets:
When I had to play the attack scene in the candy store, I wept and broke down— right on set. It was that incredible, amazing, magical thing that happens sometimes when you’re acting and you have the opportunity to play a part so close to your heart: You pass through the membrane separating your stage self from your real self. For a time, at least, you are one person.
The “attack scene” has always been understood as an implied gang rape, which heightens the intensity of her language in this passage: why should inhabiting a scene of traumatic violence be “incredible, amazing, magical,” a restorative moment of contact with her “real self”? Trauma is usually narrated using exactly the opposite vocabulary: splitting, sundering, shattering. But for Rita Moreno, to break down is to return to a truth about her experience in the industry that her usual performance of resilience obscures: being singled out for special treatment by Hollywood’s power players had a shadow side.
Rita’s first sexual experience was what she later came to recognize as rape by a man who claimed to want to work as her agent. Immediately after the filming of West Side Story, her long-running, emotionally abusive affair with Marlon Brando would drive her to attempt suicide. Of course, these biographical details do not exactly correspond to the violation implied by the candy shop scene. Rita was never a Puerto Rican gangbanger; her working-class Washington Heights was more like my mother’s than Anita’s. And yet, the projection of these fantasies onto her body — the stereotype of her body as essentially available, disposable, and replaceable — put her in the way of real violence, mostly at the hands of white men. Becoming a star required a dangerous risk: leaving her own turf for the way her turf was rendered in show business. The candy shop wasn’t real to Rita, but the candy shop scene did feel real, with its crowd of white men curtailing her movement with threats and demands. This time, she did not have to hide her fear and anger for the sake of her career; she could dance with them.
There’s a moment in Peter Pan when Peter’s shadow runs away and Wendy intervenes to carefully stitch it to the soles of his feet: a woman’s work. I think of Rita in West Side Story as her own Wendy, mending her relationship with the shadow that would follow her everywhere in the Neverland of American show business. It’s another kind of costura, more painstaking, maybe, than the dreamwork that produced her first costumes. Here, her desire to be “one person” is not the same as a desire to escape alone, to escape intact. Instead, it reflects the difficult knowledge that she is one person only when she can bear to incorporate the parts of herself she’s disavowed.
* * *
In an interview from 1998, Jennifer Lopez refers to Rita Moreno as “the original Fly Girl,” naming her the inadvertent matriarch of the Fly Girls featured on Keenen Wayans’s hip hop driven variety show In Living Color, where Jennifer got her first big break. She shifts the focus from Rita’s moment of semi-stardom as Anita to imagine her in relation to a small collective of dancers, most of whom did not move on to fame and fortune. It’s a complicated gesture, elevating the Fly Girls by saying they have a history while at the same time pluralizing Rita’s individual achievement. She was just a chorus girl, baby. We all was chorus girls. Every genealogy of Puerto Rican performers — including the one I’m moving through in this essay — will be intimate, idiosyncratic, and provisional. But if we’re talking about the Fly Girls, specifically, it’s fair to feel like someone’s missing.
In large part because of the narrative of competition forced upon them as two Puerto Rican stars in generational proximity, Jennifer Lopez has never been very good at publicly acknowledging her debt to Rosie Perez, the In Living Color choreographer who lobbied to make her a Fly Girl in the first place. I think a lot of Latinas who came up with and through hip-hop are just beginning to see what Rosie meant to us — to mend, like Rita with her shadow, the disavowal that has often accompanied our admiration. DJ Laylo, a Bronx Dominicana, put it this way in an interview with Remezcla: “It’s a little bit of a sore spot for me because whenever I’m in predominantly white spaces, I always have people coming up to me saying, ‘Oh my god you sound like Rosie Perez.’ And I know they don’t mean it because they’re paying tribute to all that she is.”
My mother was the first one to introduce me to Rosie — we checked out Do the Right Thing from the library on VHS — but she, too, was plainly unsettled by Rosie’s accent, which she insisted had been exaggerated to make her seem Extra Rican. The theory wasn’t far-fetched; Rita was made to invent an accent she didn’t have for West Side Story. But I wasn’t really listening to my mother’s critiques. I was too mesmerized by the film’s famous opening credits — red lights, then blue — which find Rosie pumping her chest and throwing hooks in front of Brooklyn brownstones to all four minutes of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” Whatever she was fighting I felt like I was fighting too, including my own resistance to her performance. Recently I’ve been asking friends how they remember feeling about the scene back in the day. The word “unapologetic” keeps coming up, which makes me wonder what — and who — we’ve grown accustomed to apologizing for. My friend Christina’s take is a little more specific: “She seemed like she wasn’t afraid of men.”
I can almost smell the summer-softened tar, the beer going flat, the perfumed sweat rising as banter becomes music, becomes, suddenly, a dance battle. Maybe there’s a way to wiggle free from our collective confinement without leaving each other behind.
In some ways, history supports Christina’s formative impression. In several interviews, Rosie recounts how she first met Spike Lee at the L.A. nightclub Funky Reggae, where he was hosting a big booty contest to promote School Daze. Rosie wasn’t having it; she’d come to the club to dance: “disgusted…I jumped on the stage — okay, so it was a speaker — and bent over shaking my ass.” It’s a parable of her performance philosophy: the speaker becomes the stage as she insists upon her objection to performance as part of the performance itself. When Spike’s bouncers came through to pull her skinny butt back down, the young director decided he liked that trash-talking Brooklyn Rican. He picked her out from the lineup and gave her an on-screen solo.
It would be a merciless eight-hour shoot that gave Rosie swollen knees and tennis elbow: he solicited the anger she’d once directed at him and worked it to the bone. It’s not an endorsement of his abusive techniques as a director to say that in the final cut her anger seems to exceed its conscription to become the sign and symbol of the borough’s unrest. In a movie that centers on the political struggles between black and white men in the world of work, that cannot imagine a role for anyone else in the battle for representation in the face of racist violence, it is a Puerto Rican woman’s persistent and plotless physical practice that frames the narrative. Who or what is her adversary as she trains for a fight we never see go down onscreen? We can’t call it. The block, the pizza parlor, the movie set itself — the site of struggle is always changing. Rosie is slick with the sweat of staying ready wherever it finds her.
Part of the reason I find myself saying “Rosie” instead of her character’s name, “Tina,” is because the scene unfolds in a liminal space between our world as spectators and the world of the film, where the story has yet to be told. When Do the Right Thing first came out, the conservative critic Stanley Crouch complained in the Village Voice that the scene was “amateurish,” nothing more than a music video. He’s wrong to complain, but right to see it like that. Rosie isn’t really Tina yet, she’s Rosie, recognizable if you know her from Soul Train, and just a Puerto Rican girl dancing if you don’t. Soul Train’spractice of using amateurs to bring the energy of the street to the screen was being developed in new directions by MTV, and Spike Lee was making major contributions to the same culture. He wasn’t the first one to cast Rosie Perez from the club floor; her “realness” had become a hot commodity in the emerging hip-hop economy. Of course, someone like Stanley Crouch was never gonna get Rosie. But his critique magnifies an anxiety about her performance shared by those who thought they did.
Soul Train’s director, Don Cornelius, liked Rosie so much that he had her dance down the line twice on her first night on set. She was out of place — a Puerto Rican in Los Angeles — which made her stand out, trigger a double take. Her light skin and tight little body gave her immediate mainstream market value. But the way she moved and spoke from within that body also seemed to threaten the investment. “Is that your real accent?” Don Cornelius asked the first time he heard her speak, turning an invisible dial down.In her 2015 memoir, Handbook for an Unpredictable Life, Rosie remembers: “Don Cornelius did not want to see how I really danced,” anymore than he wanted to hear how she really spoke.
On Soul Train Rosie was always trying to do the moves she’d learned back in the city: the Pee Wee Herman, the Roger Rabbit. At New York clubs like the Roxy and the Latin Quarter she had her eye on the male dancers “behind Whodini and Big Daddy Kane … all doing James Brown, Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, and the fabulous Nicholas Brothers moves, making them their own.” Don’s early objections to Rosie’s dancing took the form of gender management: “Nononono, you’re a girl!” Of course, the (imagined) friction between her conventional femme sexiness and her hip-hop intensity is what gave her performances heat. If her body was disciplined in a satin miniskirt, stockings, and a waist-cinching belt, her face was not: that self-possessed sneer. Louie Carr — “Cutty Mack” — remembers Rosie as “aggressive and sexy and a little street, like a machine gun.” Don Cornelius wanted the rhythm of the weapon without the war.
Don’s struggle for control over Rosie — and here, he’s only an example — reveals the risk inherent in the aesthetics of realness. A musical like West Side Story was exciting, in its time, because it suggested an intimate relationship between the singing and dancing on-screen and the changing demographics of the city itself. Rita Moreno, the only actual factual Puerto Rican with a speaking role, was the linchpin of that seductive suggestion. In the plot, her dancing always starts a debate, a competition, a party. It always demands a reply. The delight we take in her call-and-response virtuosity implicates us in the project of imagining an urban world we can all inhabit. But the industry only let the provocation of Rita Moreno’s performance go so far. It didn’t matter that she mastered the choreography. That she waited her turn for dignified, complicated starring roles that never came. That she wore a white pleated skirt to the March on Washington. The game had rules for a reason: to make sure it never got really real.
But by the time Rosie Perez was born, whatever remained of the American Dream for Puerto Ricans was dead, and she was too black and too busy trying to survive an abusive childhood to play along. Rosie’s New York was post-Civil Rights: the War on Drugs had replaced the War on Poverty, and the collective trauma of ghetto life had already yielded several generations of black-brown collaborations including bugalú, salsa, and the beginnings of hip hop. White institutions were no longer the only gatekeepers crafting and legislating the representation of urban culture. Rosie’s class position and her historical position intersected to make it clear that she wouldn’t, couldn’t, and shouldn’t have to assimilate out of the world that made her.
Don Cornelius, with Soul Train, was a major player in that transformation. Starting in 1971, he opened the door to the creative power of regular-degular city kids, who brought their own bell-bottoms and hustles to set, collectively forming the living, breathing backdrop for some of the most iconic black performances of the ’70s and ’80s. But on Soul Train the backdrop was the real show — not the celebrity guests who mostly lip-synched anyway. The young dancers pulsed behind the permeable membrane of the screen. And on the other side the rest of us joined the party, turning the TV into a magic mirror. A girl who could be your half sister is doing the dance you do in the front yard on Sundays, and she’s making it famous. Next time, it could be your actual half sister. Next time, it could be you. In providing a major cultural platform to kids who rarely received the message come as you are, Don Cornelius modeled the possibility of an equivalent political platform.
In a movie that centers on the political struggles between black and white men in the world of work, that cannot imagine a role for anyone else in the battle for representation in the face of racist violence, it is a Puerto Rican woman’s persistent and plotless physical practice that frames the narrative.
But he also exploited the Soul Train dancers. Rosie remembers: “We didn’t get paid, just a Kentucky Fried Chicken two-piece lunch box — not kidding.” The prestige economy forced the dancers into a frenzy of competition, like “piranhas at feeding time.” Don Cornelius — and the other impresarios who followed in his footsteps — wanted to let in the feel of freedom, but carefully calibrated to align with market protocols and the agenda of their own enrichment. That’s life under racial capitalism, beibi. If he let Rosie move however she wanted to move, she might roll up the next night with her entire hip hop block demanding a living wage. On the other hand, if he didn’t, she might leave. One night, that’s what she did:
I walked back to the head of the line, paused, then strutted down as if I were Naomi Campbell on the runway, continued walking past Don to my seat, grabbed my things, and told him I was out.
It takes a special kind of grace to perform and stop performing in the same seamless gesture.The Soul Train line always pointed beyond the station; Rosie’s secret weapon has been her willingness to leave. In a 2017 interview with Desus and Mero, Rosie states it plainly: “I didn’t wanna be [in show business], so I wasn’t afraid of not getting a job. I was like, fuck this shit, I’m smart, so fuck y’all.” Almost nothing is more threatening to the star system than divestment from it. The star system often functions as an imperial structure of containment, a way to manage the unruly energy of a muchedumbre whose festivities incubate a revolutionary impulse. The Puerto Rican poet Luis Palés Matos warned everybody back in 1937: si … te picara un tambor de danza o guerra / su terrible ponzoña / correrá siempre por tus venas. Translation: if … you’re pricked by the drum of dance or war / that terrible poison / will run forever through your veins. This kind of inheritance doesn’t care who your mother is. This kind of inheritance could go viral.
* * *
Over time I find myself feeling disappointed in Jennifer Lopez, and this might be the moment to ask myself why. It’s a refrain among Puerto Rican women I know to say girls like that are a dime a dozen in my neighborhood. My mother says it, too — that her cousin Carmencita was more beautiful, with her heavy winged eyeliner and languorous way with a pencil skirt. Eyes like black coffee trembling in a cup. I’m not sure if we say so because we’re ashamed that she’s regular — the wrong one to represent our culture’s repressed powers — or if we’re ashamed that we’re regular, too, but without the will to say so what? Jennifer Lopez never claimed to be the most talented girl in the room. In her infamous 1998 interview with Movieline, she said, “I’m not the best … that ever lived, but I know I’m pretty good.” Being humble, for her, has never required being hidden — as we so often assume it must.
But Jennifer’s mediocrity is not the source of my disappointment. I don’t care that she can’t sing, or that she’s just okay at dancing. When I think about the fact that Keenen Wayans refused, at first, to hire her as a Fly Girl — “called her chubby and corny” — I’m grateful to Rosie for fighting for that “big-ass beautiful girl from the Bronx” with the “star smile.” I like the footage from that period, especially a little promotional clip for Janet Jackson’s “That’s the Way Love Goes” where Janet introduces her new dancers as “Jennifer, Shawn, and Nicky: three backed-up hoes!” It’s fun to watch Jennifer fire back, “Honey we’re here to wreck shop, what’s your problem?” Taken literally, the idiom suggests the end of buying and selling, the general damage “backed-up hos” intend to do with their dancing.
If these are the moments I love best, then maybe I’m less disappointed in Jennifer Lopez than I am in the nature of stardom itself. She’s achieved what long seemed impossible for a Puerto Rican performer: race-blind roles, multimillion dollar paychecks. But that doesn’t do anything to make me feel like part of an us. Her stardom feels far-off and joyless. When I try focusing on recent interviews with her, my eye always wanders from YouTube’s main screen to the little stack of further possibilities waiting in the wings, and I can’t resist clicking aimlessly. I’m more interested in the algorithm of associations than the record of any single personality.
That’s how I spot her: Omarion’s video girl, in a red crop top, striped shorts, and gold sneakers, dancing with Bruno Mars in the January 2018 video for “Finesse.” It’s a tribute to In Living Color, and Danielle Polanco — this time I can say her name — is the Fly Girl the camera loves best, leaning out from the fire escape with her girls to call down to Bruno and his boys, a Tony-and-Maria moment made plural for our pleasure. The family tree has many branches: later I learn that she danced backup for Jennifer Lopez, Janet Jackson, and Beyoncé, that she was the dance captain for the Broadway revival of West Side Story. She played Consuela, an even smaller role than Anita — a backup dancer’s backup dancer. Now, the core of her career is teaching boutique classes: “Heels” at Alvin Ailey Extension and Millennium, “Vogue Femme.” Virtuosity is not what determines a dancer’s destiny in the studio as opposed to the spotlight, and I don’t find myself wishing Danielle Polanco were a starjust because I could watch her dance all day. Genius has no proper place. Insisting on the absolute distinction between genius and mediocrity drags the party down; it disrupts the circulation of genius itself.
Maybe that’s why Rosie Perez felt weird when she went to the club with her friends from Soul Train and people pointed, stared: “Look, it’s the Soul Train girls!” Just a few years earlier Rosie herself had been the random amateur scouted from the crowd. What had changed, really? The club was still her home haunt, the uncanny valley between amateurism and stardom where her career played out. It’s not hard to imagine all the other Rosies on the dancefloor who’ve remained undiscovered, but still manage to steal the show when the beat drops. Then there’s the rest of us, shoulder to shoulder, an undulating wave of body heat that breaks, now and then, into open conflagration.
Genius has no proper place. Insisting on the absolute distinction between genius and mediocrity drags the party down; it disrupts the circulation of genius itself.
* * *
Three years ago in Brooklyn a new DJ night was born, spinning salsa and reggaetón and trap en español: “A Party Called Rosie Perez.” It’s organized by Christian Martír alongside DJ Suce and DJ Laylo, the same woman who bristled when the wrong people projected a resemblance. It’s gotten hot: when my friend Cassandra went, she spotted Residente from Calle 13. The first time I go, Bobbito Garcia, the legendary hip hop DJ, is at the turntables and I’m dancing with my friend Yohanna while a video projection of Rosie on Soul Train plays on the club wall. Now and then someone bumps the shaky projector and Rosie’s head gets cut off, so she looks like a doomed chicken flapping through her final bravura performance. I can see the bright shadow of her younger body pass over Yohanna’s, Rosie’s rapid pumping playing a polyrhythm over Yohanna’s more relaxed step and slide. Since we’re the party, are we Rosie Perez? Alive and moving inside the space her body’s made? The visual effect allows me to imagine that it’s possible to dance in someone’s footsteps without replacing her. To channel someone’s spirit without making her a ghost.
My reverie is interrupted when a young white boy dancing next to me taps on my shoulder and points to the screen, shouting who is that? In America, I remember, you can immerse yourself in Puerto Rican culture without knowing it. Without ever naming a name. Months later, I think of this moment while reading La raza cómica by the scholar Rubén Ríos Ávila, who offers some counter-questions: What is pleasure worth if it cannot be deciphered? What is the joy of dance good for if we can’t know its point of origin?
I understand the impulse behind the Party as my own: a form of feeling for history. In the absence of something so static or simple as a point of origin, a name is a portal — a way into the crowd as well as a way out of it.
When I leave the club my body’s still buzzing. For a moment I think I see Danielle Polanco, striking a pose on the subway platform. Up close, I see she’s just another cinnamon girl with a high bun and hoops whose skin is dewy from the sweat of a summer night. But I can’t help feeling we’re both backup dancers. Any sudden movement might start a number. We might already be in a number without knowing it, an elaborate social production we didn’t design, roles we didn’t choose, and for which we are probably not being properly compensated. But as backup dancers we’re always ready. Are you?
* * *
Carina de ValleSchorske is a writer and translator living between New York City and San Juan, Puerto Rico. She is currently at work on her first book, a psychogeography of Puerto Rican culture, forthcoming from Riverhead and tentatively titled NO ES NADA: Notes from the Other Island.
Back in the 1920s, my father’s brother, Donny, was killed at the age of seven in an accident of some kind. Exactly what happened has never been clear.
My father told many versions of this story. He used to say that an older boy had been playing with his little brother, and there was a rope around Donny’s waist. Donny was playing the part of the pony, and the older boy was riding him. In one version of the story, the older boy pulled the rope, and the little boy crashed into the curb and died almost instantaneously. In another version, Donny broke free and ran into the street, where he was hit and killed. Sometimes the older boy was my father; sometimes it wasn’t.
In a photo dated September 1983, my father stands alone, 30ish, and relaxed, with arms akimbo and a slight belly bulge on a porch outside Superior Baths in Hot Springs, Arkansas. In another image with the same timestamp, my mother reclines on a pink-framed bed and paints her nails. I’d call her posture dainty, how she holds her head at an angle, crosses one bare leg over the other. It is obviously shot by her lover. Before finding this memento of their getaway as an adult, in my mother’s apartment after my father died, I had only my own existence as proof they’d ever been romantic with each other.
I also had incomplete, fragmented memories that felt sharp, scattered about my mind like bits of glass. They are records of fact, but also, possibly, my imagination: a blue light of something lost yet unnamed and refracted back to me. In one, I stand near the front door of our first home as my parents, far away, on the other side of the room, embrace with hips and arms touching. I peek at them above the piece of newspaper I have found to hide my face. The heat of their embrace embarrasses me; their smiles seem private and new. In the other, they slow dance on our fluffy green shag carpet, but I cannot recall what music they dance to.
When I think of my father back then, the Luther Vandross album, Never Too Much comes to mind. Luther wears a leather jacket on the cover, opened to reveal a crisp white shirt and a grin that reaches his watery eyes and creases his forehead. It was his solo debut, after years composing, producing, arranging, and singing backup for, among many, David Bowie, Chic, and Roberta Flack. Luther’s weight fluctuated during those years. He battled hypertension and diabetes and tried to manage it by managing his waistline. Through his first decade of solo success, when records like, “Any Love,” and “So Amazing,” and “Anyone Who Had a Heart” burned through car stereos on my street, his weight was the subject of loving jokes from his fans. Big Luther’s voice was better, sexier, more supple than little Luther’s, people would say.
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My father’s weight went up and down during those years, too. When we were closest, he was merely portly, but he smoked and drank cans of Pepsi in rapid succession. This worried me, so with my mother’s help, I made a case for him to quit cigarettes. “Maybe you could eat more oranges instead,” I told him. Time passed and he became so obese it wore down his femurs, and he had difficulty walking a long block without losing his breath.
My Uncle Frank was a glamorous gay man who lived in California and worked as a hairdresser and stylist to many people in show business. Before he died in the mid-80’s, he told us Luther was gay, too. It was a rumor we held as truth and made space for without using language we would today, like “coming out” or “in the closet.” We assumed Luther knew longing. We knew his performances were made of great skill, but recognized in them something so tender and familiar, we speculated the personal stories that must have lived underneath.
* * *
When I fell in love in my 20s, “Never Too Much,” the single, made me dance an ecstatic two step whenever a DJ played a set of R&B from my parents’ time. My college boyfriend J. was the pride of black upwardly mobile DC — the local paper profiled him when he won a hefty scholarship to university. J. was more like me than many of the friends I made — I, too, was paying for college with lots of prayers and an academic scholarship. We spent entirely too much time together; for a while, I liked living without boundaries. “Never Too Much,” an uptempo song of romantic abandon, was us. Marcus Miller’s bass is warm and ebullient, but mostly, it’s Luther’s phrasing that propels it. He sings every line into the next like it’s all one sentence, a single breathless enjambment. I remember joy in the moments we danced, but I now believe the source of my joy was the full experience of sensation dancing and falling in love gave me permission to have.
Luther’s cover of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “A House is Not a Home,” is the most enduring single from his debut. Kanye built a number one hit out of it in 2003, and it remains a staple on The Quiet Storm withLenny Green, a syndicated show that runs out of New York’s WBLS on weekdays from 7pm to midnight. The most recent night I listened, they played New Birth’s “Wildflower,” released in 1973, then Guy’s “Goodbye, Love,” from 1988, which led into the Jackson 5’s 1970 Motown single, “I’ll Be There.” Then came Xscape’s recording of “Who Can I Run To,” an R&B #1 in 1995, and Ella Mai’s “Trip,” released just last August.
Before finding this memento of their getaway as an adult, in my mother’s apartment after my father died, I had only my own existence as proof they’d ever been romantic with each other.
Green has been on WBLS since 1997, but Melvin Lindsey and Cathy Hughes at DC’s WHUR, the Howard University affiliated station, created the Quiet Storm format in 1976. Hughes was managing the station and needed a replacement DJ. Lindsey, then an intern and Howard student, filled in, bringing records his family owned. The segment proved immediately popular, and when he graduated, Lindsey came on full time. It was a striver’s music, created specifically to reach the growing Black middle class of DC and its suburbs. Hughes had taken the name for the format from Smokey Robinson’s 1975 album, A Quiet Storm, which opens with soft, howling wind, flutes, congas and a cooing vocal, suggesting, Pitchfork wrote, “a deeper metaphysical connection between two intimate lovers.” It was definitely for people like my parents, who’d become adults in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education and civil rights legislation that changed the kind of work they had access to, but didn’t go far enough to protect them from the vulnerability a society stratified by race guarantees. My father climbed up the ranks with the state of Arkansas, while my mother worked at a city-funded hospital. Both knew what it felt like to dutifully train the new, younger white man who would eventually become the boss. They were people who deserved to relax after a long day.
Between my early childhood and my first adult romance, something about the soft, lovelorn cuts gave me comfort, too. At some point, I found a tape my sister made of Keith Sweat and Jacci McGhee’s “Make It Last Forever” — just that sole track, playing on repeat on both sides. Sweat’s lead vocal is sweet, vulnerable — it’s the first piece of music I remember giving me a physical reaction, a warm feeling, a fluttering. Now, probably because it was my older sister who brought it to me, who’d made the tape in the throes of her own early college romance, it sounds like what I imagine adolescence to sound like: rough at its edges, yielding and tentative deep inside.
* * *
Late in 1994, Madonna’s album Bedtime Stories came out. It had smooth, moody pop-R&B songs like “Take a Bow” and “Secret,” and songwriters Babyface, Dallas Austin, and R. Kelly were at the helm. The next year, the Whitney Houston-led film adaptation of Terry McMillan’s novel Waiting to Exhale released, and Babyface wrote most of the soundtrack. It was a commercial success, and with slow grooves from Whitney, Toni Braxton, Faith, Chante Moore, and SWV, an homage to the slow jam. In some ways, so was the film. In its first few seconds, we hear the low, dulcet voice of an actor playing a Quiet Storm DJ. We hear him again at the film’s ending, framing events in the lead characters’ lives over the course of a single year. I was 14 when the film came out and didn’t share the heroines’ middle-aged love panic, but they were glamorous and aspirational, and the story’s main romance seemed to be the one between the characters, the friendships among the women. In turn, the strain of black pop on the album, one of many pivotal 90s film soundtracks that made an imprint and endure, created a mood, an ambiance that was soothing, a place from which to have conversations and communion with my own friends. In letters we circulated between classes, in bleary eyed late-night phone conversations about our fears, we lived with each other, we lived with the music.
The term “slow jam” became widely popular when a song performed by Midnight Star and written by a young Babyface came out in 1983. Midnight Star was a slick funk band heavy into synths, and “Slow Jam,” a cut from the album No Parking on the Dance Floor, was a duet. The male narrator “asks” a partner for “her hand” and for the party’s deejay to play another slow jam / this time make it sweet. Brenda Lipscomb, the woman narrator, consents. It’s a forthright demand for intimacy, for private time, in a public setting.
It was definitely for people like my parents, who’d become adults in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education and civil rights legislation that changed the kind of work they had access to, but did not go far enough to protect them from the vulnerability a society stratified by race guarantees.
Obviously, “slow jams,” the sentiment and request inherent in them, both precede and extend beyond Midnight Star. My mother remembers swoony slow dances to Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” and “blue light” basement parties in Chicago during her adolescence in the 50s and 60s. She said the psychedelic lighting in tight spaces made the parties feel sexy. Smokey Robinson was one in a constellation of artists who made sensualist soul music in the 70s. The best singers know all about tone modulation, but Minnie Riperton, Syreeta, and Deniece Williams mastered a style of vocalizing that often settled into a soft hum or murmur. You can hear them in the colors and emotional frequencies Janet Jackson, Aaliyah, and Solange tap into in their recordings.
These soft, tender soundscapes are, for me, tightly woven with images of black intimacy. Of two black people tuning into themselves and each other. When my mother paints the picture with her memories, when Kerry James Marshall paints a dance in a lived-in room — they are images that demand humanity in a way we may not realize is a demand. They insist on the body, on its flesh and blood. They gather and soothe the nervous system. They allow for a tender masculinity. They are obsessed with survival, generations, and continuity.
We slow dance, or attempt any kind of social dance, less these days. I think that’s why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s dance videos made us stir. The comfort and delight she took in her body were, for some, profane, the antitheses of how a leader should comport herself. And yet, I do not need to return to any era that came before this one. There is no idealized black past: women and queer people have suffered too much for too long at the hands of those we love. This isn’t even about romantic love; it is about the impulse. This is a reminder that our desires for sweetness and connection are and have always been a salve. The urge means we are not dead inside.
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