Search Results for: NPR

Fighting the Vanilla Thieves of Madagascar

Longreads Pick

Demand for vanilla from Madagascar has skyrocketed in recent years, but the process of exporting the spice to markets around the world is fraught with risk, unpredictability, and — increasingly — violence.

Source: BBC
Published: Aug 16, 2018
Length: 11 minutes (2,967 words)

Twelve Longreads for Aretha Franklin

NEW YORK - JANUARY 09: Soul singer Aretha Franklin reviews a copy of her album "Aretha Franklin - Soul '69" at Atlantic Records studios on January 9, 1969 in New York City, New York. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Aretha Louise Franklin was born in a small house on Lucy Avenue in Memphis, south of where the Mississippi River borders the city, on March 25, 1942. By the age of 2, she moved to Buffalo, NY, and then by 4, Detroit, where she’d live most of her life and where she died this Thursday morning, at the age of 76. Her father, Rev. Clarence LaVaughn Franklin presided over a congregation at the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit. Aretha began singing there as a child, and through his connections, she met Sam Cooke, Dinah Washington, Clara Ward, and Mahalia Jackson, all innovators who would influence the kind of musician she became. At 18, Aretha Franklin signed to Columbia Records, the recording home of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. She released seven albums, then moved to Atlantic in 1967, where she released the string of recordings for which she is most well known, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, Lady Soul, and Aretha Now. 

Franklin became commercially successful and critically lauded. She earned 18 Grammy Awards and dominated the now defunct category for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance with 23 nominations and 11 wins. (Anita Baker won it the second most, with 5 wins). What a female vocalist was and could be, inside and outside the soul tradition, was and is forever altered by what Aretha did behind her piano. “She is the reason why women want to sing,” Mary J. Blige told Rolling Stone.

I love ethereal Aretha, when she sang atop the flutes in “Daydreaming.” But I also love how the bridges in  “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and “Ain’t No Way  sound like a crisis, a love panic, and the slow build and back and forth with her backing vocalists in “Mary, Don’t You Weep.” Aretha Franklin’s catalog is vast and deep, spanning decades, registers, genres. Here is a list of my favorite longreads for and about her so far.

1.“Aretha Franklin, the ‘Queen of Soul,’ Dies at 76,”  John Pareles, New York Times, August 2018.

The New York Times’ official obituary, with full exposition of the chapters of her life. 

2. “The 50 Greatest Aretha Franklin Songs,” Rolling Stone, August 2018.

“Respect,” recorded in 1967, penned originally by Otis Redding, is number one.

3. “How Aretha Franklin Created “Respect,” Carl Wilson, Slate, August 2018.

It’s not much of a stretch to suggest that Aretha’s flip of Redding’s more conventional, male-dominant song of domestic conflict and desire into a hymn of sexual and political liberation paralleled the creative subversion in those sermons. Her most distinctive rewrite, the addition of the “R-E-S-P-E-C-T/ Find out what it means to me” bridge—which it’s still shocking to recall was completely absent from the original—has a touch of a preacher’s pedagogy, the moment when the celebrant might focus in on a scriptural passage and muse, “Think of this word, ‘respect.’ What does the Lord mean when he uses it? What does it mean, for example, within your own home?” But to keep proceedings from getting too heady, she immediately cuts in with language from the street: “Take care, TCB” (meaning “take care of business”) and “sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me” (meaning … well, that’s up to you).

4. “Aretha Franklin’s Astonishing ‘Dr. Feelgood,'” Emily Lordi, The New Yorker, August 2018.

Emily Lordi, author of Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and American Literature, walks us through a live performance of Franklin’s “Dr. Feelgood” at the Fillmore West.

5. “Aretha Franklin Was America’s Truest Voice,” Ann Powers, NPR, August 2018.

In this tribute, Ann Powers says, “Everything popular music needs to be is there in Franklin’s songs.”

6. “A Song for Aretha,” Nell Boeschenstein, The Morning News, February 2011.

The author recalls a life of listening to and watching Aretha.

I don’t claim to know what a woman’s got to do to make it in America these days, or ever. I am still only beginning to feel my way in that darkness. That said, when I look at, listen to, or think about Aretha Franklin, I recognize in her person what I want one day for myself. In her I see a certain awareness that life is difficult and life is wonderful and that, either way, you pick up and carry on with your shoulders as square and your voice as strong as you know how to make them. Either way, you pick up and carry on with an awareness that the world out there is larger than any me or you, her or him, but also that you and me, he and she is where it all began in the first place. In her I see a way of living that is equal parts heart and head, a way which never loses sight of priorities. She has remained stalwart in her conviction of self. And that means something these days, as I sometimes wonder whether being oneself even matters anymore.

We all have people we feel this way about. One friend says she learned to live from listening to Ella Fitzgerald. My mother says she learned from reading Eudora Welty. Joan Didion certainly showed an uncharacteristic amount of admiration for someone when she wrote of Georgia O’Keefe, “Some women fight and others do not. Like so many successful guerrillas in the war between the sexes, Georgia O’Keefe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove it.”

For me, Aretha reigns with the strength she finds in vulnerability. Flaws, heartaches, mistakes, the stuff of life: These are the things she takes to heart, claims as her own. By claiming, she can then turn them around and offer back to us what she has learned. She can say, “Look at this. Feel this. This is us, don’t you see?” I wish for my own voice what Aretha’s has had from the beginning: a sense of self so strong that she had to open her mouth and sing to keep from exploding, to keep herself whole.

7. “Soul Survivor,” David Remnick, The New Yorker, April 2016.

Remnick’s profile of Franklin includes thoughts from former President Obama and a recollection of her December 9, 2015 performance of “A Natural Woman” at Kennedy Center Honors.

8. “Aretha Franklin, 1942-2018: Long Live the Queen of Soul,” Kelley Carter, The Undefeated, August 2018.

A heartfelt recollection from Detriot native writer and documentarian Kelley Carter:

I had backstage credentials and I wanted to see if I could get some time with her — just one quote for my would-be story. Because of the story about her failure to pay bills, she’d cut the Free Press off. No interview requests were granted. Not even to talk about her iconic song and its forthcoming anniversary. But in a room backstage at an awards show, I could be somewhat anonymous.

I raised my hand and she called on me. I’d heard a rumor that she loved the version of “Respect” that this blue-eyed soul group from Ann Arbor, Michigan, The Rationals, had recorded. A crew of white boys from Washtenaw County had taken an Otis Redding track and somehow did something to it that made Franklin and her sisters, Erma and Carolyn, take notice. It was my chance to get something from her. And I would have taken anything from her to help push whatever my story on her ended up being.

I remember her looking out at me as I asked. I purposefully coughed over my affiliation’s name because I knew the disdain she had for the Free Press. She gave me what I was looking for. It was a quick reply; she was humored. “We added the sock-it-to-me’s to it,” she said, looking down on me from a stage in that small room. I could tell for a brief moment that she was thinking of her sisters, who had died long ago: Erma from throat cancer and Carolyn from breast cancer. I saw it in her face. The memory was dancing in her mind.

When I asked my mother, a longtime Detroiter, to tell me what the summer of ’67 in Detroit was like during the thick of the riots, the summer Franklin’s song hit No. 1, I was taken aback as she shared with me how men and women were running in the streets, shouting back at police officers, “Sock it to me!” as they were trying to stay alive, clearly inspired by Franklin’s anthem, which had hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in early June.

9. “The Man with the Million Dollar Voice: The Mighty but Divided Soul of C.L. Franklin.” Tony Scherman, The Believer, July 2013.

This deep dive into the life and preaching artistry of Rev. C.L. Franklin, Aretha’s father, casts a light on the talents of her parents.

If Aretha did grow up unhappy, her relationship with C.L. would have played a major role. The favorite child bore the weight of a demanding father’s expectations and constant, intrusive attention. Aretha craved C.L.’s approval. “[She]… would do anything to please [her father],” said a later friend. It was far from a healthy relationship. But as a performer, Aretha couldn’t have asked for a better teacher and model than the Rabbi. The tonal variety, for instance, that he wrung from his big voice found an echo in Aretha’s virtuosic shading. No less an authority than Ray Charles saw little difference between the two Franklins’ styles. “She’s got her father’s feeling and passion,” said Brother Ray. “When C.L. Franklin, one of the last great preachers, delivers a sermon, he builds his case so beautifully you can’t help but see the light. Same when Aretha sings.”

10. “Aretha Franklin Was More Than Just A Great Voice,” Tomi Obaro, Buzzfeed, August 2018.

11. “Aretha Franklin Was a Revolutionary Act in Pop,” Rashod Ollison, Virginian Pilot, August 2018.

I don’t remember my life without the sound of Aretha Franklin’s voice. It was a constant in my home. Her music was something of an altar for my mother, as she returned to Franklin through good and bad times. This became true for me as well. No matter the song, be it the mournful wail of “Ain’t No Way” or the stomping funk of “Rock Steady,” Franklin’s voice gave me a solid sense of place. This was especially true, given that my family moved so much when the rent became too high. But one thing never changed: Franklin providing solace through the surface noise of well-worn vinyl. Her 1972 “Amazing Grace” album, the legend’s glorious return to gospel during the peak of her pop career, has been a musical balm for years. I have never been without a copy.

12. “Lady Soul, Singing it Like it Is,” Time, June 1968.

In her first Time cover story, its writers try to understand soul.

But what is soul? “It’s like electricity —we don’t really know what it is,” says Singer Ray Charles. “But it’s a force that can light a room.” The force radiates from a sense of selfhood, a sense of knowing where you’ve been and what it means. Soul is a way of life —but it is always the hard way. Its essence is ingrained in those who suffer and endure to laugh about it later. Soul is happening everywhere, in esthetics and anthropology, history and dietetics, haberdashery and politics—although Hubert Humphrey’s recent declaration to college students that he was a “soul brother” was all wrong. Soul is letting others say you’re a soul brother. Soul is not needing others to say it.

Where soul is really at today is pop music. It emanates from the rumble of gospel chords and the plaintive cry of the blues. It is compounded of raw emotion, pulsing rhythm and spare, earthy lyrics—all suffused with the sensual, somewhat melancholy vibrations of the Negro idiom. Always the Negro idiom. LeRoi Jones, the militant Negro playwright, says: “Soul music is music coming out of the black spirit.” For decades, it only reverberated around the edges of white pop music, injecting its native accent here and there; now it has penetrated to the core, and its tone and beat are triumphant.

For more:

The Future of Decisions

Unisphere
Children ride their scooters in front of the Unisphere in New York. (Photo by Gary Hershorn/Corbis via Getty Images)

“How to live in a world where profound uncertainty is not a bug, but a feature?”

In a Wired UK excerpt from his new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari argues that we must teach our children how to develop the mental and emotional flexibility to navigate decades of unprecedented change.

[Schools] assumed that as long as we give students lots of data and a modicum of freedom, the students will create their own picture of the world, and even if this generation fails to synthesise all the data into a coherent and meaningful story of the world, there will be plenty of time to construct a good synthesis in the future. We have now run out of time. The decisions we will take in the next few decades will shape the future of life itself, and we can take these decisions based only on our present world view. If this generation lacks a comprehensive view of the cosmos, the future of life will be decided at random.

As strangeness becomes the new normal, your past experiences, as well as the past experiences of the whole of humanity, will become less reliable guides. Humans as individuals and humankind as a whole will increasingly have to deal with things nobody ever encountered before, such as super-intelligent machines, engineered bodies, algorithms that can manipulate your emotions with uncanny precision, rapid man-made climate cataclysms, and the need to change your profession every decade. What is the right thing to do when confronting a completely unprecedented situation? How should you act when you are flooded by enormous amounts of information and there is absolutely no way you can absorb and analyse it all?

Technology can help you a lot, but if technology gains too much power over your life, you might become a hostage to its agenda. Thousands of years ago, humans invented agriculture, but this technology enriched just a tiny elite, while enslaving the majority of humans. Most people found themselves working from sunrise till sunset plucking weeds, carrying water buckets and harvesting corn under a blazing sun. It can happen to you too.

Technology isn’t bad. If you know what you want in life, technology can help you get it. But if you don’t know what you want in life, it will be all too easy for technology to shape your aims for you and take control of your life. Especially as technology gets better at understanding humans, you might increasingly find yourself serving it, instead of it serving you.

Read the story

On Not Being Able to Read

Kaimantha / Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Tajja Isen | Longreads | August 2018 | 14 minutes (3,869 words)

They told me I wouldn’t be able to read anymore. That the pleasure of the text, like a lover in a non-law degree, would slowly grow opaque to me — if pleasure were something I even had time to consider. In exchange, I’d learn how to do other things with words: plow through pages of bad legal prose and extract the principle like an animal’s delicate skeleton. Hold up the skull to the dim courtroom light and proclaim its equivalence to the fossils of a different era, a strange phrenology. Memorize the divots in the bones of critters past. Legal education calls this “learning to think like a lawyer.”

After a few weeks of living that story, my body and I revolted at cross-purposes. The stresses of the program congealed into physical illness, which offended me; more often, panic meant productivity. Rather than resting, I hauled myself to a campus book sale I can only recall in feverish splashes — an indiscriminate hunger to grab and possess; the close press of bodies in airless rooms; violent shivers that kept sending my stack of books askew — and somehow came home with a shelf’s width of volumes: Stendhal and Dickens and DeLillo and Mann; Maugham and Poe and Davies and Irving; Gallant and Munro and Atwood and Moore. Mostly men, all of them white, and completely in violation of my network of rules for used book condition. More striking still was that nothing in the stack seemed to call to me, which was likely strategic. Even fever-drunk — a state in which, apparently, I backslid into canonical reverence — I sensed that it would lessen my feelings of loss if the books I kept around me were not ones I burned to read. Loading up my shelves was more gestural than practical; a finger to the mythos of the law school and a memorial to a version of myself that I refused to let disappear entirely. Read more…

Finding True North

Illustration by Kevin Whipple

Amy Bracken | Longreads | August 2018 | 27 minutes (6,729 words)

Samuel* bears the scars — above his mouth, on the top of his head, on both arms, on one leg — six bullet wounds in all. They’ll be considered as evidence when he goes before a Canadian immigration judge and he’ll have to tell the story that still makes his voice shake, about how gunmen attacked him at a Port-au-Prince intersection in 2013 and left him for dead. As a young police officer, he had witnessed men transporting weapons and drugs hidden in a truckload of plantains. Two of Samuel’s colleagues who were also present at the time have since been killed, he says, and when Samuel was shot at again in 2015 while taking his children to school, he knew he “had to leave Haiti.”

Thus begins the story of how Samuel, his wife, Darline, and their 1-year-old boy found themselves in a basement apartment on a chilly fall day in a quiet neighborhood of Montréal. They are part of a massive influx of asylum-seekers — mostly Haitian — who fled the United States for Canada last summer. They came at the peak of that influx, in early August 2017, when every day more than 200 people took a bus to upstate New York, then a taxi to the border, where a country road ends in grass and a well-worn dirt path. They breached the invisible boundary and turned themselves in to a Canadian Mountie, setting in motion the long process of trying to start a new life in a new country.

The urge for so many to leave the United States began to build with the election of Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant rhetoric. Then, in spring 2017, John Kelly, Secretary of Homeland Security at the time, announced that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians would expire in January 2018. TPS had been granted to some 50,000 Haitians living in the United States, protecting them from deportation, after a massive earthquake struck their country in 2010. Although Secretary Kelly said that renewal of TPS was possible, he suggested it was unlikely, and he urged recipients “to use the time before January 22, 2018, to prepare for and arrange their departure from the United States.” (In November, the Trump Administration announced that TPS for Haitians would instead end in July 2019.)


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


Canada became the destination for TPS recipients and many others when, in June, social media messages encouraging Haitians to apply for residency here, some even falsely claiming that the Canadian government would cover all fees, went viral. The messages spread feverishly among Haitians across in the United States and beyond.

The number of asylum claims at the Québec border had climbed since the start of 2017, but then it shot from 975 in June to 2,775 in July, and more than doubled again to 5,650 in August. Most of those claimants were Haitian.

A so-called “safe third country” agreement between the United States and Canada, in place since 2004, means that anyone presenting himself at a U.S. border station crossing to seek asylum in Canada must be turned back — with few exceptions made for some, like those with close family ties in Canada. The rule does not apply to those who cross between official ports of entry, have themselves arrested, then apply for asylum in Canada. With much of the U.S.-Canada border dominated by lakes, rivers, and remote fields, and with much of the U.S. Haitian population based on the eastern seaboard, the accessibility of the New York–Québec stretch made it the chosen entry point for the vast majority of migrants.

Samuel* bears the scars — above his mouth, on the top of his head, on both arms, on one leg — six bullet wounds in all.

As the number of irregular border-crossers mounted, public officials, service providers, and the media focused heavily on the misleading social media messages that encouraged them to come north, suggesting that deception was largely responsible for the influx and that those messages were setting migrants up for disappointment.

Indeed, most of the travelers I interviewed for this story said they had been inspired by WhatsApp and Facebook posts. One said that fellow travelers were startled by the sight of a police officer arresting people at the border, and most were unaware that in 2016, Haitian asylum claims were only accepted about 50 percent of the time.

However, newcomers’ assessments of whether or not coming to Canada was the right choice goes well beyond merely weighing the odds of getting residency or considering the fees. By other measures, there is enormous benefit in coming north.

For one, immediate deportation from Canada is unlikely for most. The fate of many who entered last summer will still be unresolved months or years from now, thanks in large part to a backlog. More than 50,000 asylum claims were made in Canada in 2017more than double the number in 2016. One result is that many saw their scheduled eligibility hearings pushed back indefinitely. A spokesperson for Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board said in February 2018 that projected hearing delays were about 20 months — despite efforts to step up capacity, such as the temporary designation of 17 Refugee Board members to focus specifically on processing the claims of recent border-crossers. The process will be longest for those whose claims are rejected, as they are entitled to appeal multiple times, dragging the process out for what might be several years.

Meanwhile, as they await a ruling on their fate, the life that Haitian asylum-seekers are able to live in Québec is often starkly different from what they had experienced in the States. Many quickly gained a foothold in Canadian society, are beginning to integrate, and are breathing easy in a way that they never could south of the border. But for some, the delays can be excruciating, for one reason above all: They prolong the time before they can send for family members they had to leave back home.

* * *

Samuel didn’t aspire to live in North America. He tried to make his way in Haiti as he was able. “I entered university but wasn’t able to finish,” he says. “I had to make a living, so I entered the police because it’s the one institution in Haiti that will hire anybody who is intelligent and physically fit.” It wasn’t a great job. He says his life was at risk on a number of occasions, yet he didn’t have a choice but to stick with it. Until he didn’t have a choice but to leave.

After Samuel was shot in Haiti in 2013, he spent two months in the hospital. Even today he has some pain in his right hand, and his fingers don’t work properly, jutting out awkwardly like sticks. And the violence did not affect him alone. He says it hurt his oldest child most.

“My daughter, who was four at the time, was shocked and traumatized,” he says. “When I returned from the hospital, she wouldn’t come near me, she was so afraid of me when she saw the scars.”

After Samuel was shot in Haiti in 2013, he spent two months in the hospital. Even today he has some pain in his right hand, and his fingers don’t work properly, jutting out awkwardly like sticks. And the violence did not affect him alone. He says it hurt his oldest child most.

When he was shot at the second time, the gunmen missed, but Samuel lost control of his motorcycle, throwing himself and his children to the pavement. Later, he says, “my daughter kept yelling, ‘Look, there’s the car that made us have an accident! Look at it, Daddy!’”

Like most Haitians crossing into Canada last summer, Samuel and Darline had entered the United States legally, flying in with five-year tourist visas. But they had been unable to get visas for their children, so they left them in Port-au-Prince with Darline’s mother. It was the hardest thing about being in Boston, but it was far from the only major challenge. Their visas did not allow them to work. Being broke, they couldn’t pay for an attorney to take Samuel’s asylum case — nor could they find one who would work pro bono. They couldn’t afford housing, so they stayed with a cousin until, Samuel says, “after six months, my wife and I needed to be independent, so we set out to find our own housing.” They wound up in a family homeless shelter an hour outside Boston, where they would spend the next year.

Samuel says messages kept circulating on Facebook about the promise of moving to Canada, but at first the couple ignored them, feeling that moving to a new country held too much uncertainty.

In July 2017, Samuel finally got his work permit, but Darline did not. And there was a drumbeat they could not ignore. “Trump was really applying pressure, sending messages that if you don’t have papers, you can’t stay in the country,” Samuel says. “I couldn’t return to Haiti. There was too much at stake. We decided it wasn’t worth [staying there]. We had to cross over to Canada.”

* * *

On an evening in August 2017, on a strip of highway in, Plattsburgh New York, near a Dollar Store, a Super 8 motel, and an A&W fast-food restaurant, a bus pulled into a Mobile station parking lot. Slowly, the front door opened, and a plastic toy truck tumbled down the stairs and hit the pavement. A family followed, lugging bags bursting at the seams. Then out came another, then another. About 20 Haitian men, women, and children descended from the bus and began looking around for taxis. Those days there were many more cabs than usual. After migration through the area exploded, new companies popped up, and old ones began working extra hours and longer routes. They also began charging astronomical prices. The New York Attorney General’s office fined a taxi company for charging migrants up to hundreds of dollars in excess of the going rate.

The cabs headed north on the highway, then along some country roads through vast stretches of cornfields punctuated by trailer homes, then down quiet, green, Roxham Road, until, at the end, beyond a thicket of vines and Queen Anne’s lace and signs that read Road Closed and No Pedestrians, a white canopy tent appeared. A Canadian police officer stood before it, poised like a nightclub bouncer, ready to check IDs at the door.

Matthew Turner had moved into a trailer home on Roxham Road in October 2016 and said that ever since then he’d been seeing taxis drive past his house to the dead end. Last summer it was a steady stream of cabs, often with names he’d never heard of. He said he found it annoying when cars unloaded in his driveway, especially if the travelers dropped trash. But he placed blame elsewhere. “All they’re trying to do is escape a pretty crappy system that we constructed because a blond wig got elected into office,” he said. “It’s sad, really. The whole Ellis Island thing just went out the window, and now they have to leave our country and seek it in a country that’s, honestly, at this point, better than ours.”

Turner, who lives with his wife and young son, works temp jobs, mostly loading and unloading for shipping companies. He said finding work is hard, but the best companies — in terms of safety, pay, and organization — are Canadian. He, too, imagines life to be better on the northern side of the border, in part because of universal health care.

As we spoke, a taxi marked WISH TRANSPORT passed, reached the end of the road, and deposited three people.

As we spoke, a taxi marked Wish Transport passed, reached the end of the road, and deposited three people. They formed a single-file line where the dirt path began. The middle-aged man at the back stood stiffly, clutching the handle of his zebra-print wheelie suitcase as he watched the others cross. I asked why he had come.

“I had problems in the U.S.,” he said.

“Is it because of TPS?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

In loud, slow English, the officer asked him, “Monsieur, do you speak English?”

“A little.”

“OK, this is the Canadian border right here. OK? Over there, you’re fine. As soon as you cross over here, you’ve entered Canada illegally, and you’ll be placed under arrest. OK?”

“OK.”

“Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“OK, so you decide if you want to enter Canada. If you come in here, you’re under arrest, and then whatever the consequences are, you’ll have to deal with them.”

“OK.”

With that, the man soberly approached the policeman, luggage scraping along the dirt path. The officer told him he was under arrest and had a right to an attorney. He didn’t handcuff the man, though. Instead, he pointed to a sanitizer dispenser and asked him to wash his hands, before escorting him into the tent for processing.

Where Roxham Road picks up again, as Chemin Roxham, cornfields give way to orchards and houses obscured by high hedges. At the corner, there’s a turtle-crossing sign, and the air smells of apples. From the white tent, a bus took the new arrivals down narrow country roads and across a highway to a camp at the official border crossing a few minutes away. In August 2017, with the number of new arrivals exploding, the Canadian military set up rows of green canvas tents at the official crossing, as well as at a conference center in Cornwall, Ontario, with a combined capacity of close to 2,000 people. The Canadian Red Cross was at this camp, handing out blankets and hygiene kits, assigning beds, and performing medical checks.

* * *

In late September, perhaps unaware that the military had begun dismantling the camp at the border because of a decline in the number of border-crossers, the anti-immigrant, right-wing Canadian group Storm Alliance had chosen the spot for a rally. Several dozen men and women, looking like a motorcycle gang in black clothing and bandanas, marched toward the border, between the highway and the tent camp, some waving signs with crossed out pictures of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But they were stopped short by a boisterous crowd, a bit larger than their own, of young anarchists and members of Solidarité Sans Frontières, who chanted, “Haitians in, racists out!” and held signs with slogans like Make racists afraid again, and a banner with a sketch of President Trump’s crossed-out face, and the words Resist the Far Right — some of many indications that these activists also worry about a threat from south of the border.

In the province of Québec, public sentiment about the new arrivals has been mixed. At the height of last summer’s migrant influx, a poll by the media agency SOM-Cogeco Nouvelles found that 51 percent of Québec residents believed migrants should be prevented from crossing the border into Canada. It also found that 39 percent of the Québecois surveyed believed the influx would make the province less secure.

Still, generally what the newcomers experience upon arrival is a relatively warm welcome by the Canadian government and key organizations working alongside it, like the Canadian Red Cross. When Samuel and Darline spent a few days at the border at the height of the influx, the military camp hadn’t opened yet, and they say the government was clearly not ready for such a flood of people. For them, it meant standing in long lines for medical checks, photos, and fingerprinting. But they’re quick to add that the welcome was generally good. “They don’t push you around,” Samuel says. “They don’t handcuff you. They speak with you intelligently and in a way that you can understand. Everything went really well.”

Still, generally what the newcomers experience upon arrival is a relatively warm welcome by the Canadian government and key organizations working alongside it, like the Canadian Red Cross.

The language helps. Although many of the Canadian police who are greeting and arresting people at the unofficial border do not speak French, most officials in Québec after that point do. And for Haitians who do not speak French, at some points there are Haitian Creole interpreters.

Last August, after spending a few hours to a few days at the border, newcomers were bused to an immigrant shelter in Montréal. Normally there is only one such shelter, a YMCA. Over the summer, 12 more were added. Now there are just four.

Samuel and his family were dropped off at the Y, where they were connected with all the information they needed about government services, such as health care, and then they went to stay at Samuel’s brother’s place in Montréal. On August 14, 12 days after crossing the border, they began getting their monthly check from the Canadian government — about $1,122 Canadian ($883, in U.S. dollars) for the family, and they began looking for their own place.

The apartment hunt was hard at first, with landlords demanding references and credit reports, but then a Turkish immigrant, who lived above a rental unit, “saw our temperament and saw what kind of people we are,” Samuel says, “and demanded neither credit nor references.” He charges $600 Canadian ($472 U.S.) for the one-bedroom. With the government stipend, it left the family a little over $400 a month for food and incidentals, but Samuel says they were used to being frugal.

It’s easy to understand the landlord’s assessment of the family. Samuel is thin, with delicate features, and a soft, contemplative air, defying any stereotype of a police officer. And when I visited, Darline smiled warmly from the couch, where she nursed a robust 1-year-old, before releasing him to trot around the living room, making eye contact with each adult before bursting into delighted laughter.

A paper banner on the otherwise blank wall proclaimed Bon Fet – a Haitian Creole birthday celebration to honor Samuel, turning 36, and his son, turning 1. The rest of the place was immaculate, with only a few objects — synthetic flowers adorning a shiny yellow varnished wood dining table.

After more than a year of being homeless, lawyerless, and jobless in the States, Samuel and Darline were able to get their own place in Canada in less than a month. They’d also been assigned a public defender, accessed basic health care, and started getting free monthly public transportation passes. “Everything is moving much faster here,” Samuel told me last September. He knew he might never get to bring his two older children here to Canada, and that they might instead end up back in Haiti, but at the time he felt he’d placed his bet on the right country. “I don’t know tomorrow,” he said, “but I don’t regret coming to Canada, because the three of us, we’re really comfortable here.”

After more than a year of being homeless, lawyerless, and jobless in the States, Samuel and Darline were able to get their own place in Canada in less than a month.

Two months later, in November, the couple got their work papers, and Samuel found a minimum-wage job through a temp agency, scanning orders at a clothing-rental company.

But not everything was as fast as they’d like. It took months more for Darline to find work, and the asylum eligibility interview Samuel had scheduled for December was postponed indefinitely.

Most of the new arrivals stay at shelters for their first weeks in Montréal, until they start getting their monthly check and find their own place. When the provincial government saw that the YMCA would not be enough to meet the need, it cast around to see who had space, and managers of the Olympic Park, used in the 1976 Summer Games, offered up part of the stadium to eventually accommodate 900 people in rows of cots, while all around international competitions, concerts, and the renovation of the stadium’s landmark skyline tower whirled on. Other shelters opened around town, including in an old hospital and an old convent, but it was the image of refugees — mostly from Haiti, but also from around the world (other top asylum-seeker nationalities were Nigerian, Turkish, and Syrian) — being bused to the stadium that brought in waves of international media.

It also attracted activists. An anti-immigrant demonstration to be held outside the Olympic Stadium was canceled, but a pro-immigrant counter-rally went ahead, drawing hundreds of people, many carrying Réfugiées Bienvenues signs.

The stadium stopped housing migrants in September 2017, and today, due to the drop in new arrivals, the only shelters in use are an old hospital, an unused youth center on the grounds of what feels like a leafy boarding school campus, and the YMCA near downtown.

* * *

Jesula and James moved into the Y after coming to Québec in August. Their story is starkly different from that of Samuel and Darline, but it’s not unusual among new Haitian arrivals from the United States. For them, Canada is the eleventh country — and, they hope, last — on an odyssey that began more than a decade ago.

The two were high school sweethearts in the dusty northern Haitian city of Gonaïves. James remembers relatives who lived in the States coming back to visit and being treated like royalty. “I thought the sky over the U.S. was different from the sky over other countries,” he says with a laugh. Still, he never wanted to leave Gonaïves. He excelled in school, participated in a local debate club, and played on a national youth soccer team. But after their city was virtually wiped out by floods from a tropical storm in 2004, he decided to move to the Dominican Republic to live with his mother and continue his education there. His dream was to get a medical degree and return to Haiti to help meet a desperate need for doctors.

Jesula, meanwhile, stayed in Gonaïves. In the market, she sold goods imported from Canada with the help of relatives here. Assuming she had money because of her business, she says, thieves raided her house, stole her things, and raped her.

Asked if the perpetrators were caught, she laughs bitterly and says, “In Haiti, it’s not like it is here.”

Traumatized and fearful, Jesula fled to the Dominican Republic to live with James. But things didn’t work out there either. Both lacked the funds to complete school, and both were unable to find work.

Soon Brazil beckoned. Its economy was booming, and it needed workers to prepare for the World Cup and the upcoming Summer Olympics. In 2012 James made his way there, and in 2013 Jesula joined him. “There was no stress because from the moment we got there we were so lucky,” Jesula says. “I arrived in September, and in January I had residency. Imagine how comfortable we were.” Both found jobs easily, learned Portuguese, and settled in, forging strong friendships and a sense of community. But by 2015, the Brazilian economy was in serious trouble, jobs were lost, and Haitian migrants were no longer welcome.

Like thousands of other Haitians, Jesula and James made their way north, through Colombia, Central America, and Mexico, and finally to the United States. Once there, also like thousands of others, they were thrown in detention.

Their treatment by U.S. officials came as a shock. “I thought the U.S. was like Canaan, like paradise, like something out of the Bible,” James says. But as soon as they crossed the border, the couple was split up and sent to separate detention centers.

On an August afternoon in 2017, the couple sat in a park across the street from the Y, where they’d stayed for the previous four nights. Swing music blasted from a speaker nearby, and a man came over to ask if they want to join a free dance class. They politely declined.

Both said they felt at home in Canada. James dreamt of getting a doctorate in anthropology, and Jesula wanted to go to nursing school and learn to draw landscapes. She was pregnant for the third time. She’s miscarried twice — once in Brazil and once in the United States, but here she said she believed everything would work out. “I’m better here,” she said, “because I don’t like living in stress, and there [in the U.S.], the president would say something different every day, so I didn’t know where he really stood on anything. Here I can just be at peace.”

After arriving in the United States, they were detained for just a few days. They say they were lucky to be released much sooner than other Haitians, but the rest of their time in the States was hard. They moved to Boston, and eventually James got a work permit and a job, but the permit was set to expire last September, and he’d been unable to renew it. He also didn’t feel he was making progress in his asylum case.

Finally, Trump took office. “We heard about people being deported for nothing … people who went to see a judge and got deported,” James says. “We were afraid.”

Removals overall have slowed under Trump, but for Haitians they jumped from 300 in the 2016 fiscal year to 5,500 in 2017. That’s largely due to the end of a stay on deportations and a surge in Haitian migrants entering through Mexico. Meanwhile, arrests of immigrants with no known criminal conviction by Immigration and Customs Enforcement more than doubled from 2016 to 2017. Behind those stats are countless stories of men and women who have lived in the United States for decades being taken from families, jobs, and communities, often at a regular check-in at an immigration office.

* * *

Comparisons between the United States and Canada are constant, especially among those who entered both countries illegally. One man describes surviving a harrowing boat trip from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico only to be shackled at the wrists and ankles by U.S. border patrol agents. Others talk about being thrown in cold cells at the Mexico-U.S. border.

Elsie is a nurse and a resident of Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, in plateau farm country north of Montréal. She has been living in Canada for 30 years, but occasionally returns to her Haitian homeland. “I’m proud to be Canadian and proud to be Haitian, too,” she says. And she stays tuned in to the experiences of Haitian migrants around the region.

She spent a Sunday afternoon in October 2017 like she spent most Sundays: cooking rice and beans for family members and venting about what she’d been hearing. “There was that little Haitian woman who went to the U.S. from Brazil,” she said, “and she had to pay $20,000 to get out of prison! It’s a business! If people don’t pay $15,000 to $20,000, they put them on a plane.” Elsie understands that people are not deported merely for failing to pay the required bond, but she also knows that asylum-seekers are much less likely to get asylum if they are stuck behind bars. “Canada respects asylum law,” she said. “They don’t respect asylum law in the United States right now.”

In his first week in office, President Trump issued an executive order expanding the grounds for which immigrants can be detained, and limiting the use of parole for detained asylum-seekers. Over the first eight months of his presidency, according to a report by the nonprofit Human Rights First, parole rates for asylum-seekers appear to have plummeted, asylum-seekers are held for many months, and sometimes their release is contingent on payment of bonds as high as $15,000 to $20,000.

Canada respects asylum law,” she said. “They don’t respect asylum law in the United States right now.

Elsie’s Sunday gatherings now feature a special guest — her younger brother Yves. In July, Yves walked across the border at Roxham Road, then skipped the shelter by staying with his sister. He says he fled Haiti for the United States after “jealous” people attacked his business in Port-au-Prince. But with Trump in office, he says, he had a bad feeling about his prospects there. “He was withdrawing everything, banning refugees, talking about eliminating TPS, getting rid of protections for immigrants who came as children … so I didn’t know if I could get asylum.”

Like Samuel and Darline, Yves says he had to leave a child back in Haiti, so he’s anxious to get papers to bring her here.

Within a few months, Yves had his own place and a job at a pig slaughterhouse, but in April, a judge rejected his asylum claim, saying he should have sought protection in the United States. Yves is appealing the decision and says, whatever the outcome, he’s still convinced he made the right decision in moving to Canada. “Even if some of us are not qualified [for asylum],” he says, “the welcome is completely different here.”

* * *

In my conversations with asylum-seekers last year, I kept bringing up the statistic I’d seen, that only about half of Haitian asylum-seekers with cases finalized in 2016 were granted asylum. (For 2017, the acceptance rate dropped to 22 percent.) The response was usually a recognition that they might not succeed but an insistence that they made the right choice in coming to Canada anyway.

As Matthew Turner, the Roxham Road resident, suggests, “that Ellis Island thing” is more evident in Canada than in the United States today. This is certainly true in public discourse. In October, Canada swore in a new Governor General, an important Canadian figurehead selected by the Prime Minister. Trudeau chose astronaut Julie Payette, who delivered an installation speech in a mix of French and English, dotted with phrases in Algonquin. The speech seemed a delineation of what distinguishes Canada from its southern neighbor today. She talked about the importance of trusting science, of internationalism, tolerance, and compassion, and among her last words were these: “We are the true north, strong and free, and we should always look after those who have less, stand up for those who can’t, reach out across differences, use our land intelligently, open our borders, and welcome those who seek harbor.”

When it came to Syrian refugees, in the past couple of years, Canada has served to inspire and shame Americans wishing to be a more welcoming country. Since November 2015, more than 54,000 Syrian refugees have resettled in Canada, compared with fewer than 19,000 in the United States. Facebook video posts showed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greeting families at the airport with winter coats and words of welcome. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of regular citizens stepped in to help. Private sponsors actually brought in and supported 43 percent of those refugees for a year.

It would be hard to draw comparisons between pre-approved Syrian refugees flying in and Haitians crossing the border and being arrested. For one, there is no private sponsorship system in place to care for the new arrivals from the States. However, many private organizations in and around Montréal are committed to helping them get settled and integrated.

Take Christ en Action church. It’s in an unmarked brick box-shaped building in a quiet neighborhood, but on Sunday mornings the drums draw you through the open door and into a vast space packed with parishioners in a full spectrum of garb, from form-fitting dresses to suits in black, white, and shiny pastel damask. Several turn to greet unfamiliar faces, offering greetings in French.

The churchgoers — largely Haitian and African — pride themselves on the warm welcome. At a service last September, Pastor Fofy Ndelo, who is Congolese, said a few words in Haitian Creole, then returned to French to give an update on which donations were now needed for “the refugees” — winter coats for adults and children, as well as furniture and bedding for those who’d found their own places to live.

About 15 so-called refugees sat in pews at the far end of the church, and after the service they filed into a back room for lunch. They found out about Christ en Action when members visited their shelters and brought them here on buses. While a number of them now lived in their own places, after their meal a volunteer would drive them all home. Later, another volunteer would pick them up to bring them back for dinner. These are services orchestrated by the church’s social action team, which, team member Shirley René told me, has 10 subgroups. “One group serves nonperishable food, a follow-up group sees what your needs are, another team gives clothes and bedding and furniture, another helps people find a place to live. … There’s a group that visits them in their homes,” and so on.

René, who is of Haitian descent and has been with the church for more than a decade, said about 50 new arrivals were regularly coming to the church, “because they love the way we welcome them.”

Many other Montréal churches also stepped up to help the new arrivals, especially in the heavily Haitian Saint-Michel neighborhood. So did Maison d’Haiti, a 46-year-old organization now housed in a modern, windowy, art-filled space that bustled last fall with Haitian men, women, and children, picking up and dropping off clothing and diapers, standing in line to get help with things like filling out asylum applications, or grabbing a Haitian meat pastry in the organization’s café.

A few blocks away, on Boulevard Crémazie, is CPAM, one of several Haitian radio stations here, and down the street is a towering, shining example of Haitian success in Montréal. Groupe 3737, named after its street number, inhabits some of the 12 floors in the curtain-glass-wall building, using them for start-up incubation and training. Frantz Saintellemy, Haitian-born and Saint-Michel–raised, founded the group with his wife, Vickie Joseph, with the intent of encouraging talented young people, mostly immigrants or children of immigrants — a reflection of the community — to invest in this long-depressed neighborhood.

Saintellemy wanted to help his community thrive by capitalizing on what is true in Canada as well as the United States: Immigrants are far more likely than the rest of the population to start businesses. And he sees particular promise in Haitian immigrants, who make up about a third of his group’s participants.

“If you’re from Haiti,” he says, “you were trading. It’s the number one business in Haiti. Trading is in their DNA, so a lot of them have an entrepreneurial mindset.” In Haiti, with so few formal jobs available, many people buy food or clothes in one part of the country — often on the Dominican border — to sell in another.

Saintellemy smiles as he speaks, sitting in a bright, spacious office behind a large desk cluttered only with some copies of Groupe 3737’s glossy bilingual magazine Black is Beautiful. He says in Montréal there are great prospects for new Haitian immigrants importing food and other goods from Haiti to sell to members of the diaspora here. There are also artists and artisans, and educated Haitians who spent years in the United States and are well-positioned to work as translators. What’s more, belying the image of asylum-seekers arriving on foot and staying in shelters, many actually have money to invest in a new business, Saintellemy says.

For those with tenuous status, he says, they’re particularly worth investing in for several reasons: For one, many employers are leery of hiring people without permanent status, and for another, creating a business could help them get asylum. “The quicker you can generate income [and] hire your own lawyer, your chances increase significantly,” he says, “and if you’re working and paying taxes, the harder it is for the government to tell you to leave.”

Saintellemy says that “without question” enthusiasm for starting a business is higher among people with tenuous status. He knows this because, in addition to doing clothing drives for new arrivals last summer, Groupe 3737 offered regular Business 101 classes for those living in immigrant shelters. Participants were taught about business laws and policies in Canada, specifically Québec, and given tips like how to advertise and bid on contracts online. Saintellemy says the courses drew up to 50 people.

Before founding Groupe 3737, Saintellemy spent years in the States, including studying electrical engineering at Northeastern University and taking a fellowship at MIT Sloan. I ask him about something James told me: that in Montréal, “the Haitians ahead of you help you,” but in the United States, not so much.

“Yeah,” Saintellemy says. “The Haitian community is very well organized here in Québec.” He says Haitians generally thrive more here. “I think it’s easier because of the French. Language isn’t as much of a barrier,” he says. “Second of all, the Haitian community is more financially secure here than in Boston or even New York or Miami … if you look at the percentage of Haitians doing well. … So it’s easier for them to help others when they’re doing well.”

James told me…that in Montréal, ‘the Haitians ahead of you help you,’ but in the United States, not so much.

Of course, many Haitians in Canada live in poverty and obscurity. But there are also plenty of Haitian luminaries in Canadian sport, arts, and politics — including several Olympic athletes; the novelist Dany Laferrière, inducted into the prestigious Académie Française; parliamentarian Emmanuel Dubourg; former Governor General Michaëlle Jean; and the deputy premier of Québec, Dominique Anglade.

* * *

Migration across the border into Canada has fallen considerably since last summer, and Haitians now make up a small portion of that population, down from more than 80 percent. By last fall, Nigerians were overtaking Haitians in number, with shelter residents talking of horrors in Biafra.

Jean Nicolas Beuze, of the UN refugee agency UNHCR, says the overall decline in numbers might be due to falling temperatures and the start of school (the summer’s migrants included hundreds of children), and he believes the particularly precipitous decline in the number of Haitians coming across is likely because messages were sent through consulates and visiting politicians to correct misperceptions about the ease of getting asylum in Canada.

However, with the Trump administration’s announcement on November 20 that TPS for Haitians will end in July 2019, officials in Canada prepared for more Haitian asylum-seekers, with 27 winterized trailers — able to accommodate 200 people — set up at the border. The TPS decision affects at least 50,000 Haitian-born people who’ve been in the United States for more than eight years, and their American-born children, estimated at some 27,000.

Canada’s own version of TPS for Haitians expired in 2014, but most of its recipients were not made to leave the country. The estimated 3,200 undocumented Haitians living in Canada at the time were given almost two more years to apply for permanent residency without threat of removal, and most have been able to get permanent residency through “H&C,” or humanitarian and compassionate grounds, which takes into consideration the ties one has forged to Canada while living here.

Still, coming to Canada does not make Haitian border crossers safe from deportation. Canada deported several hundred Haitians last year — a dramatic increase over 2016, and 120 just in the first seven months of this year.

James is well aware that deportation from Canada is possible, and it’s a terrible thought. “If I’m deported, it’s like the end of the world,” he says with a nervous shriek of a laugh. “Haiti has no work. And when you are overseas, you have like 20 people depending on you, who are waiting for your help. Imagine, if they deport me to Haiti, you’ll see how many people will suffer.” He says his brothers, sisters and some friends rely on him for school and other expenses.

James doesn’t wallow in the fear of deportation though. “We have to await a response, we have to pray, and we have to accept the response, whatever it is,” he says. “But for now we have to recognize how well Canada has received us.”

Haitians who left the United States to seek asylum in Canada essentially left one uncertainty for another. And yet, for now, there is a sense that they can breathe easy because there is reason and justice in the system, that the rules will be followed, and that meanwhile the tools are there for asylum-seekers to make a life for themselves while they wait.

For Samuel, the only problem with being in Canada is that his two older children aren’t with him. “That makes me feel really, really bad,” he says, “because I grew up without my father, and I don’t want the same for my children.” He talks to them on WhatsApp every day, but, he says, “It hurts to hear them say, ‘Papi, when are you coming back? Papi, come get us!’”

A year after coming here, Samuel still has no idea when he’ll go before an immigration judge. It’s clearly wearing on him. His life is better here in many ways, but even with both of them working — him during the day and Darline as a night caretaker for handicapped adults, the cost of living is harder to manage here. Meanwhile, their two older children are growing up in another country, and there’s no knowing when and where they will reunite.

Now, when I ask him if he regrets moving to Canada, he hesitates, but then gives a firm no. “It’s a choice we made, without knowing how things would go.”

*The names of all asylum-seekers in this article have been changed to protect their identities.

***

Amy Bracken is an independent reporter and radio producer. She covers migration, economic development, religion, and human rights. She’s based in Boston, but in recent years she’s reported from Europe and across the Americas, especially Haiti. Her stories have been aired and published by PRI’s The World, Latino USA, USA Today, and Al Jazeera America, among others. She’s a graduate of Columbia University’s Journalism School and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where she wrote her thesis on the detention of asylum-seekers.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Fact-checker: Matt Giles

Listening for a Way Out

Kathy Kmonicek / AP

Niya Marie | Longreads | August 2018 | 24 minutes (4,808 words)

After I wedged Whitney Houston into our conversation for the fifty-eleventh time, C. cut me down for every sixth grader at the lunch table to devour.

“Why do you talk about her so much?”

“What’re you, gay?”

And then:

The looks, the laughs at what was funny, in more ways than one.

The fire crackling in my chest.

The choking silence as every word in my defense turned to ash in my throat.

I’d been called a lot of things by then, but not that. Unlike my Kmart clothes, freckled nose, burning bush of unpressed, sun-reddened hair, and coke-bottle-thick glasses, that was not legible. Economics and genetics aside, I looked like all the other girls, donning fitted jeans and Ts, the occasional skort. And like all the other girls, I gabbed about an attraction to the smartest, sportiest boy in our class. I never fully committed to the act, though. The last classmate I kissed on the sly was two grades and one school ago — and not a boy. I would cup my hands around her ear and let my lips brush her lobe as if I were just whispering a bit of gossip. We’d kiss like that in plain view of an entire classroom and no one ever caught on. That was the thrill. At recess, we’d run off to the edge of the schoolyard, hide behind one of the gangly trees, and kiss on the mouth. There was no way for C. to know about my old kissing-friend, or the fact that I secretly wanted to make C. my new one. She didn’t know I was enamored of her height, her athleticism, the curl of her long lashes, the brightness of her big brown eyes, even that blade of a tongue. My actions, my appearance betrayed nothing. Yet here I was, giving myself away somehow.

C.’s irritation was understandable. We had homeroom and math together, P.E., then lunch. I had spent most of the day at her heels, in her ear, creating opportunities to bring up yet another item about Whitney that I had read or seen the night before. It was the My Love Is Your Love era, and Whitney was everywhere again. After a blockbuster world tour and three successful soundtracks, Whitney’s fourth studio album was highly anticipated. My Love Is Your Love was the first CD I ever purchased, and also the second after I overplayed that copy. Before my grandmother gifted me a modern stereo, I had a banged-up Walkman and a heap of cassettes with song titles reduced to flecks of unreadable white ink. I couldn’t wait to get home to watch every television appearance possible, especially when Whitney was a guest on Oprah. Two of my favorite people in the whole wide world in the same frame; two black female icons who’d cemented their place in history breathing the same air — this is what beholding God should feel like. When I wasn’t scouring the television for Whitney, I spent hours on my Gateway (another gift from my grandmother) downloading every bootlegged live recording I could manage with dial-up. At checkout in the supermarket, I would slip any magazine bearing Whitney’s face onto the conveyor belt, somewhere beneath the Lunchables, Fruit Roll-Ups, and Pop-Tarts. My mother never balked at buying these little indulgences for me. She never looked at me funny either; not even when I used to open every issue of Jet to the Beauty of the Week, spread them out at the bay window of our old single-wide trailer, and pick the fairest of them all.

C. could not have known about my private beauty pageant. Or my dancing with the mop instead of the broom. Or any of the girls I had kissed and touched in dark cellarways and dollhouses; against cinder blocks under trailers; in back rooms lit only by the blue-white glow of infomercial TV. Or all the things I used to do under the covers with my friend, T.

C. wasn’t there with me as I watched a scene in Sister, Sister play out my very own fantasy. In one episode, Tia and Tamera dream up their birth mother and Whitney’s face appears in their mutual thought bubble. If a stroke of real-life movie magic couldn’t make Whitney my mother, Oprah would do.

C. had it all wrong and all right all at once.

Maybe some girls dream of white knights on white horses stealing them away to safety. I dreamt of a golden-throated black beauty, the fairest of fairy godmothers, lifting me from my life and into the firmament that I imagined only her voice — “The Voice” — could ever reach. Could ever escape to. When the cords of her slender neck thickened and writhed like roots growing up and not down, threatening eruption, that’s what I heard: the way out.

* * *

The last time T. and I saw each other face-to-face, I’d shoved her so hard that she fell over and her head bounced off her bedroom floor like a basketball, abruptly ending the visit. My half-assed apology insisted that T. shared some of the blame. I can’t remember what I said I was getting her back for because, frankly, it was a lie. Something I’d concocted on the spot in an effort to rewrite the truth. Our friendship, at least for her, somehow remained unscathed. Maybe she believed I was sorry. Maybe she understood why I couldn’t tell the truth. Clearly, she’d forgiven me. Why else would she have been on the other end of that line, waiting for me to click over from a call that I’d lied about receiving? With my hand over the mouthpiece, I listened to her breathe, patiently waiting for her best friend to return, entirely unaware that she had run away from her months ago and was never coming back.

T. and I became fast friends when we were around 6 years old. We were next-door neighbors in an apartment complex in Camden, South Carolina. I had more bullies than friends in school, but at home, I had T., and we’d play for hours. About a year after we became friends, my mother overdosed. I remember trying to reach her through those faraway eyes moments before they shut me out. If I were to have tossed a penny into them, I would’ve never heard the splash. After her recovery, she, her second husband, my younger brother, and I moved into a single-wide about six miles away in Lugoff. One end of our street fed into a major highway. The other end was cut off by a strip of conifers. Our trailer sat between a day care center and an auto repair/car wash combo. Across from us was a huge plot of undeveloped land overrun with dandelions. My mother got a job at a gas station that was about a five-minute walk away. We were isolated; hopefully, so isolated that my mother couldn’t take “sick,” as she called it.

I had spent most of the day at her heels, in her ear, creating opportunities to bring up yet another item about Whitney that I had read or seen the night before. It was the My Love Is Your Love era and Whitney was everywhere again.

It was through my mother that I met an out lesbian for the first time when I was about 8 years old. They worked together at the register. G. was butch with flesh as white and dimpled as my grandmother’s dumpling dough. She had a slick, gray mullet that was yellowing from chain-smoking. Her curly-headed younger girlfriend didn’t believe in bras. The beaters she wore left nothing to my imagination.

G. and her girlfriend lived together in a trailer nowhere near the gas station. I can’t remember why we were even there, what necessity my mother had run out of. We never talked about lack, like the occasional need for an abundance of candles or boiled water for baths. Whatever the reason, I was happy to visit. I had so many questions that I dared not ask.

How could these two women get away with this?

Did they know black women who did this?

Are they happy?


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


I ear-hustled from afar like I was getting paid by the word. At some point, the girlfriend got one too many beers in her and treated my mother to a lively reenactment of how G. would squirm and squeal while getting finger-fucked. They laughed loud and hard, secure in the belief that I had no idea what they were talking about, especially not from the opposite end of the trailer. But I did know, and I felt like I shouldn’t have.

I wasn’t grateful for living in a single-wide, especially not one with outdoor paint you could wipe off with your fingers. Our cat killed the mice, but he couldn’t do a damn thing to the roaches. I would check my clothes and backpack obsessively before heading to school out of fear that one day, one of those little fuckers would crawl out of something I owned and I’d never live down the embarrassment. The girls at school whose acceptance I craved all lived in little single-family houses or apartment complexes that bore stately names like Pepperidge-something Manor. I never invited them over.

I didn’t have to front for T. She knew what I had come from because she was still there. She knew other things about me, too, that those girls at my new school never would. Those girls never witnessed my tomboyish side, the me who gladly climbed trees to fetch her cat, who tramped through the woods in steel-toe boots, their black leather shredded by detritus. Whenever T. came over, we would stay outside most of the day and slurp honeysuckle, eat wild berries on a dare, make mud pies out of red clay, and rove our conquered field of dandelion. At night, we’d explore each other’s bodies with the same zeal.

It had been like that between us since before the move. I gave T. no reason to believe the nature of our friendship would ever change. Until that day in T.’s apartment. We hadn’t seen each other all summer, and now we were brand new fifth graders. We retreated to her bedroom while our mothers caught up in front of a B movie. T. expected it to be like it was — handsy games of make believe that covered up an attraction we dared not name. I pushed her off her own bed and her head slammed into the floor. She cried harder than I expected, her face a map of heartbreak, red tributaries carving it up. I wanted to believe I’d only hurt her physically. I apologized for that and nothing more. T. didn’t know that while we were apart, I had been shown “the way, the truth, and the life”*; that I didn’t want to go on being fresh like a little heathen.

For most of my childhood, I split my time between South Carolina and a “chorus of mamas,”* 600 miles away in Philadelphia. Sometimes I’d go for leisure, sometimes for necessity. My maternal great-grandmother took me in for a spell before kindergarten so I would no longer have to witness my mother’s first husband beat the breath out of her. In the summer, I’d stay with my maternal grandmother, but not for long periods, because her second husband wasn’t comfortable having a girl around the house. I also spent time with my godmother, who was single. She had worked under my grandmother for the state government, and she’d been friends with my mother until their paths diverged. My godmother had a stable upbringing in a loving two-parent family on a nice swath of countryside. She also had a nice job, a nice house, a nice car, and a beautiful singing voice. I coveted that idyll, and she credited it all to Jesus. When fourth grade came to an end, I said my goodbyes to T. and headed north. That may have been the summer I attended Vacation Bible School with my great-grandmother. Or, it may have been the summer I went to my first amusement park, played miniature golf, and cleaved to my godmother’s hip as her rendition of “Amazing Grace” flowed through me like a crystal-clear spring. Either way, the message to me was unambiguous: there was refuge in religion.

On average, there were 2.4 Bibles per room in my great-grandmother’s row home: the KJV, the NIV, the NASB, etc. I used to flip to the concordance of each translation to find the most wiggle room for girls like me. None of them gave an inch. Her den housed my first personal library. The room overlooked her piece of yard out back, which was mostly cemented over, save for a small plot of tangerine-colored lilies. There were many Bibles, of course, and also books about the Bible. There was my little collection of slim Disney hardcovers, The Three Little Pigs, Thank You, God, and Charlotte’s Web. Every title was meticulously maintained. No dog-eared pages. No dust. I’d read there for hours. During the day, the sun would come through the window full force. At night, the potted jasmine would bloom and I’d lie out on the stiff, squeaky sofa as the fragrance swaddled me.

After my great-aunt (whom I didn’t know well) died of cancer, the library grew more secular with the addition of her books. The only paperback missing its cover and spine beckoned me, though I wouldn’t have the courage to sneak it into my bedroom until high school. It was James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, furtively tucked between two books about prayer and healing. That is how I could remain in the fold: efface myself, then find a real man to blow my back out. No one ever explicitly said this, but no one ever had to. I gleaned it from the homophobic panic that took over my meek and mild great-grandmother when a female congregant pecked her cheek too often; from faggot falling as nonchalantly as a preposition out of my grandmother’s mouth to disparage men who weren’t macho or simply pissed her off; from never deciphering the mystery of my godmother’s sister who, in her muted masculinity, seemed to disappear in plain sight, as if she’d slipped the heart of herself under a cushion or behind a curtain, leaving only the husk in our midst. She could very well have been a single heterosexual woman who liked men’s clothes, close-cropped cuts, golf, motorcycles, and fading into the wallpaper, but I knew I could never ask.

I knew even before I got my first period that I was expected to marry a man and bear his children. More importantly, I had come to want that life for myself. When the weight of self-blame is upon you, oppression — cloaked in the raiment of redemption and purification — can be rather seductive. That den sustained my love of reading, but also my secret shame. It may have been the summer I was 7, or it may have been the summer I was 8. I do remember that these were still the days of pigtails and pink lotion for me. But not for ______. She was a teenager, and she was supposed to be my friend. I would let her in time and time again until I felt like some grubby plaything left out in the dirt. The shame festered, and the Good Book offered a salve.

By the second semester of fifth grade, my immediate family and I resettled in a different part of Lugoff. We moved into a brand-new double-wide on a dirt road hewn through God’s nowhere. We now had a fireplace, jacuzzi, stand-alone shower, dishwasher, ice maker, washer and dryer, and more trees than I could ever climb, all thanks to a massive loan from my grandmother. The roaches had moved in with us, so I still didn’t invite people over, but I was quite proud of the come-up.

T. wanted to see for herself. That’s why she had called. I lied, said my other line was beeping, then pretended to click over. I was stalling for a way to get rid of T. for good. I hoped she would get frustrated, hang up, and never call again. But she didn’t. I clicked back over and told her that I had to get off the phone and talk to another friend. Then I heard the sadness welling up. “You see her every day. Why do you want to talk to her more than me? Don’t you like me anymore?”

I think it’s telling that I can’t recall what I said in response. Who wants to remember herself as the villain? We hung up and never spoke to each other again.

In seventh grade, my family and I traveled to Philadelphia to celebrate my great-grandmother’s 80th birthday. It was there that I got saved. In the midst of talking, laughing, and eating, the Pastor Reverend Dr. turned to me and asked, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” How was I to reply to that? “No” seemed wrong. I fumbled for an answer as one would a light switch in the dark. I had been found wanting, and there was nothing I hated more than lack. Here I was, book-smart but spiritually bereft. He said all I had to do was repeat Romans 10:9–10. I did. Then I cried the River Jordan as family and friends rejoiced. Everyone assumed they were tears of joy, so I did, too. Surely, it was the joy of having been born anew, cleansed of all my wickedness.

Maybe some girls dream of white knights on white horses stealing them away to safety. I dreamt of a golden-throated black beauty, the fairest of fairy godmothers, lifting me from my life and into the firmament that I imagined only her voice, ‘The Voice,’ could ever reach.

That summer, my great-grandmother gave me a Bible of my own with silver-gilded page edges and a silk page marker. It was bound in dark-blue leather with my full name imprinted on the front cover in silver foil. I toted it to church every Sunday in a canvas cover, its black striking against the cream upholstery of a fellow deaconess’ evergreen Lincoln Town Car. As we inched down Stenton Avenue, I’d smooth the front of my skirt, willing it to be longer, or better yet, to be slacks. You don’t get much of a say when you don’t buy your own clothes. I could wear pant suits, occasionally. My grandmothers would say, “You got pretty legs like your mother. Why hide them?”

During the sermon, the Pastor Reverend Dr. would call out a scripture, and I would turn to it in a matter of seconds. I’d look forward, eyes eager, spine straight, while the freshly barbered, coiffed, and behatted heads around me were still bowed, brows creased in concentration, onionskin pages rustling like dead leaves in a fall wind. I would feel an approving smile beaming at me from among the sopranos. It’s not just about knowing the Old Testament from the New. You need to know the order of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and their greatest hits. You need to know that Acts is before Corinthians, and Hebrews before all the other Johns.

I would see T. one last time, in eighth grade, at some event at her middle school. I would see her dressed like a boy in baggy jeans, an oversize shirt and straight-backs, chasing some girl up an aisle. I would see her, but she wouldn’t see me. I was just another girl in tight bell-bottoms and butterfly clips. I didn’t stand out from any of my friends and that’s how I liked it. If T. had come to my school, she might have found me groping a ticklish football player’s abs.

* * *

I wouldn’t come out until sophomore year of college when I was 200 miles away and mentally prepared to maintain that distance if I had to. I told my mother, and she told her mother, and none of us told the church mother.

I am told that the first question my grandmother asked was, “Did somebody do something to her?”

My mother once told a therapist what happened to her as a child at the hands of a female cousin and his first question was, “So are you gay?”

And what did I tell myself, as the girl who likes girls who was taken advantage of by a girl and not the big bad wolf she’d learned to expect? I internalized sexual abuse as the consequence of my own aberrant sexuality. After all, who wants to remember herself as the victim?

* * *

The last time I stayed up to catch one of Whitney’s comebacks was in February 2009. It was my senior year of college, and I should have been working on my thesis. Instead, I was splayed out over my comforter with bleary, hungry eyes fixed on an online feed of Clive Davis’s annual pre-Grammys gala. Three years later, hours before that same event, Whitney was gone. At the time the news broke, I was living with my great-grandmother, jobless, hopeless, and contemplating suicide as my final way out. My family was unaware of this. My mother called to see how I was holding up, but Whitney’s death hadn’t hit me the way she’d expected it to. I’d already been dragged underwater by my own untreated mental health issues, so the death of my idol fell over me like a single drop of rain.

Truth be told, over the course of the previous decade I’d become less fanatical and more casual in my appreciation of Whitney. I could believe that she’d conquered the worst of her addiction even if Diane Sawyer wasn’t buying it. But the voice never lied. With the 2002 release of Houston’s fifth studio album, Just Whitney, even I couldn’t deny its considerable deterioration. The bottomless eyes later captured in tabloids were too hauntingly familiar, so I looked away. I know that I watched Whitney’s widely publicized interview with Oprah in the fall of 2009 the same way I know I ate food that day. By comparison, my memory of her appearance on the show 10 years prior is as vivid as the prints and pinks and greens of her Dolce & Gabbana wardrobe.

As a child, I had tethered my wildest dreams to Whitney’s fairy-tale rise to pop superstardom because, to me, she was invulnerable, inviolable, absolutely untouchable. My mother and I were not. I do not remember precisely every departure and arrival in my childhood, but I do remember when Whitney was there to get me through it. She was on the Greyhound bus with my mother and me, in a pair of headphones, lulling me to sleep with “Jesus Loves Me” as my leaden noggin fell onto the lap of the passenger next to us. She was on the radio shoopin’ as our white Pontiac cut through a sea of blackness. Whether my little elbows were propped up on a concrete floor, or a peel-away carpet, or some thick shag, there was Whitney soaring in The Bodyguard on broadcast TV at the end of the year. When Whitney finally fell down to earth, I couldn’t quite make sense of the conflicting emotions it stirred in me. Distancing myself was a way of bracing for how her story eventually ended.

* * *

I deliberately avoided all of the postmortems served up in the wake of Whitney’s death. The massive amount of coverage devoted to her drug addiction felt like an effect passed off as a cause. I dismissed celebrity interviews, prime-time specials, and Hollywood treatments like Lifetime’s Whitney (2015) as attempts to stitch up the pieces of a complex life, hide the seams, and use the result to repackage the shopworn trope of the self-destructive female artist. The recent documentaries — Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal’s Whitney: Can I Be Me (2017) and Kevin Macdonald’s Whitney (2018) — are not wholly exempt from this criticism.

In chronicling the megastar’s rise and fall, the directors exhibit a keen interest in the latter over the former. Broomfield and Dolezal open with footage from the day of Whitney’s death, complete with audio of the 911 call. It is clear from the first shot that her demise is the fuel for their vehicle. In an announcement for Whitney, the only film authorized by Houston’s estate, the director Macdonald expressed that he “approached Whitney’s life like a mystery story; why did someone with so much raw talent and beauty self-destruct so publicly and painfully?” I bristled at the premise and concluded I would have no interest in whatever incomplete or recycled theories came next, authorized or not. Then the Cannes Film Festival reviews broke my assumptions wide open.

When the cords of her slender neck thickened and writhed like roots growing up and not down, threatening eruption, that’s what I heard: the way out.

I was at work, sitting in an office that bore no trace of me as an occupant because I didn’t intend to stay much longer. It was nearing lunchtime, and I was surfing online as a distraction. I wasn’t even looking for it, but there it was in big bold letters: bombshell. Whitney allegedly had been molested as a child by her cousin, the late singer Dee Dee Warwick. My stomach began to pretzel to the extent that I lost my appetite for good.

And then I cried, as I reflected on that unbound and unmoored feeling that no refuge, real or imagined, ever managed to undo. Every time I had turned to the sheer power and pure emotion of Whitney’s voice to give me a sense of security, I’d been unaware that she might have been struggling to find that same security within herself. My desire to see Whitney when it opened on July 6th was borne of recognition.

The revelation of the abuse that dominated every headline after Cannes doesn’t appear until the end of the movie; every whodunit needs its pearl-clutching plot twist. Setting aside what may or may not have been Macdonald’s intentions, the placement of that particular information is an accurate depiction of how unassimilable trauma can be in relation to one’s life story. Trauma resists subsumption under our mythologies of self and has no respect for the boundaries of time. Instead, it hangs outside of our neat narratives like a bully waiting to ambush us after school. Except this bully, we can’t outrun.

* * *

My relationship with my mother had improved significantly after she responded to my coming out with, “You aren’t telling me anything I don’t already know. I just want you to be happy.” I called her after watching the film, angered and saddened in equal measure. Talking about it was my oblique way of tugging on a thread of conversation we tend to pick up only to put down in favor of sunnier subjects.

She listened as I sputtered from one topic to the next. After I finally took a breath, she opened up about her depression. “It’s trapping me in my own body,” she said. She confessed that she has survived four suicide attempts. I feared that she was trying to tell me there would be a fifth. I felt that it was not the appropriate time to tell her I’d tendered my notice of resignation three weeks prior so as not to leave anyone in the lurch. There I was, again, with my toes curled over the edge of my resolve to stay put.

The truth is, I have been dancing on that edge for almost 10 years. I still live in my great-grandmother’s home. She passed away in 2013. The Pastor Reverend Dr. who saved me and presided over her funeral has been succeeded by his son. The deaconess who used to drive us to church in an old Lincoln that took up two parking spaces is now driving a crossover. I know this purely by chance. A couple years ago, I was taking a long walk up the avenue, and when I was about 10 feet from the post office, she pulled up to the curb in a new car. As I was coming up on her passenger-side mirror, she rolled down her window, thrust a letter toward me, and asked me to put it in the mailbox for her. There was no polite preamble, no utterance of my name, just an instruction from an elder to a young’un. I don’t believe she recognized me, and that suited me just fine. The neighborhood kid who flees to the ivory tower only to return and linger for nine years and counting tends to be hyper-visible. I appreciate the times when I go unseen.

The house is almost exactly as my great-grandmother left it. Except the den. After she passed, a fresh layer of dust took up residence. Then the plants died. Too much sun and not enough water. The arms and legs of the rocker slipped out of their sockets. The threadbare couch began leaking straw. One night on a whim, I hauled the furniture out to the sidewalk for trash collection. I packed up the books and moved them into the basement. Then I swept and mopped the linoleum floor, and wiped down the baseboards. In 2015, I turned the empty space into a weight room.

I’d like to move someday for good. Until then, I make myself scarce. I have everything I need shipped to my front door. I wash my clothes up the street around 7 a.m. on a Sunday when the block is still asleep and the laundromat is deserted. I don’t take long walks up the avenue anymore; I run.

*John 14:6, KJV

*From Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.

* * *

Niya Marie‘s work has appeared in The Rumpus. She lives in Philadelphia.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

 

Happy, Healthy Economy

Francesca Russell / Getty

Livia Gershon | Longreads | August 2018 | 8 minutes (2,015 words)

In 1869, a neurologist named George Beard identified a disease he named neurasthenia, understood as the result of fast-paced excess in growing industrial cities. William James, one of the many patients diagnosed, called it “Americanitis.” According to David Schuster, the author of Neurasthenic Nation (2011), symptoms were physical (headaches, muscle pain, impotence) and psychological (anxiety, depression, irritability, “lack of ambition”). Julie Beck, writing for The Atlantic, observed that, among sufferers, “widespread depletion of nervous energy was thought to be a side effect of progress.”

Recently, there have been a number of disconcerting reports that one might view as new signs of Americanitis. A study by the Centers for Disease Control found that, between 1999 and 2016, the suicide rate increased in nearly every state. Another, from researchers at the University of Michigan, discovered that, over the same period, excessive drinking, particularly among people between the ages of 25 to 34, correlated with a sharp rise in deaths from liver disease. A third, by University of Pittsburgh researchers, suggests that deaths from opioid overdoses, recognized for years as an epidemic, were probably undercounted by 70,000.

Read more…

‘Country Music … Was Anything BUT Pure’: An Interview with Bill Malone and Tracey Laird

Longreads Pick

The co-authors of ‘Country Music USA’ – a revised edition of the genre’s definitive history – talk with music writer Will Hermes about the music’s African-American tributaries, its unpredictable politics, country radio’s woman problem, and working on Ken Burns’ forthcoming doc.

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 1, 2018
Length: 14 minutes (3,585 words)

The Toxic Legacy of Building 606

AP Photo/Eric Risberg

Between poisoned groundwater and heavy metals in the air, sometimes it seems that we’ll all eventually be living on a Superfund site. For The San Francisco Chronicle, Cynthia Dizikes and Jason Fagone report on San Francisco’s Superfund site, Hunters Point, and how the city and Navy knowingly leased office space on contaminated land.

The former shipyard on San Francisco Bay was once a major Naval facility, but its soil contains radioactive material from Atomic tests. The cleanup was expensive and ongoing. The shipyard did have one valuable asset, space, which is rare in the Bay Area, and the city wanted to capitalize on it. Police officers rented rooms in Building 606. No one told them that their new office stood on the site of a former contaminated laundry facility. Instead, officials dismissed the officers’ concerns as paranoid, until the police developed rashes and cancerous lumps. So how did these toxins get here?

On July 25, 1946, off Bikini Atoll, a set of small islands in the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. military performed one of the most dramatic atomic tests of the 20th century, known as Shot Baker. A large bomb was detonated underwater. The ocean heaved. In “a giant and unprecedented spectacle,” as one military account later described it, a million tons of water spurted up in a great white column a mile high, spreading into an incandescent dome of toxic moisture.

At the dawn of the Cold War, the military wanted to know how ships and people would be damaged by the deadly and long-lasting radioactive poisons spread by nuclear explosions. So they brought nearly 100 “target” ships to Bikini, some loaded with live pigs and sheep, and set off two atomic bombs at close range, the second of which was Baker.

The scale of destruction surprised the military. After the tests, the military didn’t know how to clean the ships of radiation, so they brought them to Hunters Point for decontamination and built the radioactive laundry to clean sailors’ clothing.

The 1940s and ’50s were a more lenient era, safetywise. Navy records describe the shipyard’s first radiological safety section as a “small band” of junior officers with equipment consisting “of one coffee pot and six Geiger counters, only two of which worked.” To illuminate the dials of instruments and base signage, the Navy used glowing paint made of radium-226, a powerful radiation emitter that decays into radon gas. Spills of radioactive materials were not uncommon. At the Radioactive Laundry, each wash cycle could flush more than 100 gallons of wastewater through the pipes and drains, potentially leaking into the soil.

The work left behind unknown quantities of what the Navy calls “radionuclides of concern,” everything from the radium in the dials to the components of atomic fallout and science experiments, including cesium-137, which emits harmful beta and gamma rays, and strontium-90, which mimics calcium and damages bone marrow, potentially leading to cancer.

Read the story

‘Country Music … Was Anything BUT Pure’: An Interview with Bill Malone and Tracey Laird

Carly Rae Hobbins / Unsplash, University of Texas Press; Anniversary edition (June 4, 2018)

Will Hermes | Longreads | August 2018 | 14 minutes (3,585 words)

Read an excerpt of Country Music USA.

First published in 1968, Country Music USA was basically a remix of the thesis Bill Malone submitted for his PhD at UT-Austin. It was, and remains, a staggering work of scholarship that became a cornerstone of American music history— anyone writing seriously about country must reckon with it.

Earlier this year, University of Texas Press issued an updated Fiftieth Anniversary edition, with additional material by scholar Tracey Laird. It includes a new chapter devoted in large part to country’s woman problem — from the excommunication of the Dixie Chicks from the mainstream after Natalie Maines’ 2003 dis of President Bush, through their controversial collaboration with Beyoncé on the 2016 CMA Awards and the rise of “bro country.” Laird writes about how country radio has been effectively black-balling women artists, a situation crystallized in the unfortunate words of a radio exec who described women artists as the “tomatoes of our salad.”

As a real and/or perceived banner of red-state, pink-skin culture, country music can seem purely that. But Malone and Laird document that, like most great things in America, it’s a melting pot of influences, attitudes and orientations, political and otherwise. And while the current landscape might not rival that of the Hank Williams-led halcyon days, artists like Sturgill Simpson, Margo Price, Jason Isbell, Kacey Musgraves, Brandy Clark, and others suggest we’re in a new golden era for the music, a renaissance Malone and Laird put in perspective.

We caught up with Malone in his longtime home of Madison, Wisconsin; Laird called in from Atlanta.

This book is an amazing achievement by 2018 standards — but Bill, you wrote the first edition a half a century ago in 1968! For the benefit of the youngsters, how do you go about researching a book like this without the Internet, let alone Spotify?

BM: Well, there were no repositories for country music either! In Nashville, the Country Music Foundation was just getting started; they didn’t have an archives yet. I just had to use whatever I could find, and that meant everything from Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs, where I read about instruments, to popular magazines, and interviews when I could get them — when a person came to town, or when I could get up enough resources and go and find somebody.

But indispensable were the record collectors. I would really have been lost had it not been for the work that they had done. That was a real starting point.

These were not academics, strictly speaking, but armchair academics, correct?

BM: Enthusiastic and very informed collectors.

Tracey, how did you approach this revised edition? What did you want to accomplish with it?

Tracey Laird: My main task was to take the story Bill has told and extend it into the 21st century. It was a little intimidating because, frankly, Bill is one of the heroes of my own scholarly story. But I decided early on that I couldn’t mirror his encyclopedic knowledge. And so what I tried to do was connect things going on in the 21st century with other, I think, significant dynamics — including new media that’s shaping the way people apprehend country music.

Read more…