Search Results for: Review

The Bonds Beyond Language

AP Photo/Lynne Sladky

Brian Trapp‘s twin brother Danny had cerebral palsy and severe intellectual disabilities, which limited his speech to twelve words. Thanks to a devoted family who developed their own language of jokes and rituals, Danny could convey a range of ideas and emotions and participate in family life. But his limited language meant that people had to speak for him, guessing at what he would have wanted, what he did and didn’t understand, the full breadth of his personality — with only twelve words, there was so much about Danny that his loved ones could never know. Faced with the decision to take Danny off a ventilator, how could the family be sure they were respecting a wish he couldn’t express? In a stirring essay for the Kenyon Review, Trapp examines his deep relationship with his twin and the ways we communicate in general; we imagine and interpret who people are and project our own experiences onto them, including, in Trapp’s case, his survivor’s guilt.

There was a large gap between his receptive and expressive capabilities, so we had to make what disability advocates call the “least dangerous assumption” and assume his communicative intent even when we weren’t exactly sure what he was trying to say. This required his conversation partners to coconstruct his meaning, from his body language, context, and tone. We had to imagine what he was thinking, project ourselves into his mind. This might seem strange, but it is not that different from how people normally interact. Language, in general, is a flawed and limited instrument. We can never truly know what others feel or think, even if they spend hours telling us, even if they have a million words at their disposal. My brother just happened to have twelve. Rather than making him a freak or an alien, his disability helps us see the essential human truth of all our communication acts: We all construct other minds through this imperfect mediation of language. No one speaks on their own. We are all twins—we all finish each other’s sentences.

My name is a case in point. My brother multiplied its meaning with tone, context, and absence. He said “I-an” so I’d talk to him. He said “I-an” to tease me, repeated it every fifteen seconds while we rode in his van, an auditory Chinese water torture. He yelled “I-an” into my voice mail to call him back. He said “I-an” in response to questions like “Who’s ugly?” He yelled “I-an” at church, heckling the priest in the middle of a sermon, which might mean any number of things, both satirical and metaphysical. He said “I-an” softly before he nodded off to sleep, so that it might as well have been: I love you.

My name was the currency between us. When I said, “Danny, give me an I-an,” I was asking for a hand-slap, a bro-hug, if everything was all right, if he loved me. When he refused, “not-I-an,” the “absence of I-an” could have as much meaning. The silence might mean: Dude, screw you. It might mean: I’m too tired. I’m in too much pain. It might mean: You have to talk to me more. You’re an asshole. You’re a poor substitute for Mom. Withheld at the right moment, it might mean: I resent you.

Projection is a central theme in this essay, and into this essay I projected my own sadness. I cried as Brian lay in the hospital bed with his dying brother, letting Brian’s pain register as the pain I feel about my ailing elderly father and a recently deceased friend. Readers necessarily carry so much of ourselves to the stories we read; when I cried during Brian and Danny’s final moments together, I was also bracing myself for my own.

A white film covered his tongue, and his cough was wet. I put my finger in his hot hand. I asked my brother, “Do you love me?”

“Eh,” he said. He did not tease me. He knew.

I closed my eyes and held him to my chest. I pretended it was twenty-nine years ago, that we weren’t even born, still sealed in the womb. Where were our bodies? Were we like this, face-to-face? Were we turned around, back-to-back and rubbing spines? Was he upside down, his ass in my face? Where did I end and my brother begin? I pretended that his body wasn’t breaking down, that they had not cut tendons or poked holes, put in tubes or fastened masks, that I was never married, never had my heart broken. There wasn’t even language yet. We hadn’t learned a single word. Our cells were still blooming, getting ready. We would do it all over again.

Read the story

When American Media Was (Briefly) Diverse

Photo by Jessica Felicio, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Danielle A. Jackson | Longreads | September 2019 | 16 minutes (4,184 words)

The late summer night Tupac died, I listened to All Eyez on Me at a record store in an East Memphis strip mall. The evening felt eerie and laden with meaning. It was early in the school year, 1996, and through the end of the decade, Adrienne, Jessica, Karida and I were a crew of girlfriends at our high school. We spent that night, and many weekend nights, at Adrienne’s house.

Our public school had been all white until a trickle of black students enrolled during the 1966–67 school year. That was 12 years after Brown v. Board of Education and six years after the local NAACP sued the school board for maintaining dual systems in spite of the ruling. In 1972, a federal district court ordered busing; more than 40,000 white students abandoned the school system by 1980. The board created specialized and accelerated courses in some of its schools, an “optional program,” in response. Students could enter the programs regardless of district lines if they met certain academic requirements. This kind of competition helped retain some white students, but also created two separate tracks within those institutions — a tenuous, half-won integration. It meant for me, two decades later, a “high-performing school” with a world of resources I knew to be grateful for, but at a cost. There were few black teachers. Black students in the accelerated program were scattered about, small groups of “onlies” in all their classes. Black students who weren’t in the accelerated program got rougher treatment from teachers and administrators. An acrid grimness hung in the air. It felt like being tolerated rather than embraced. 

My friends and I did share a lunch period. At our table, we traded CDs we’d gotten in the mail: Digable Planets’s Blowout Comb, D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar, the Fugees’ The Score. An era of highly visible black innovation was happening alongside a growing awareness of my own social position. I didn’t have those words then, but I had my enthusiasms. At Maxwell’s concert one sweaty night on the Mississippi, we saw how ecstasy, freedom, and black music commingle and coalesce into a balm. We watched the films of the ’90s wave together, and while most had constraining gender politics, Love Jones, the Theodore Witcher–directed feature about a group of brainy young artists in Chicago, made us wish for a utopic city that could make room for all we would become. 


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

Sign up


We also loved to read the glossies — what ’90s girl didn’t? We especially salivated over every cover of Vibe. Adrienne and I were fledgling writers who experimented a lot and adored English class. In the ’90s, the canon was freshly expanding: We read T.S. Eliot alongside Kate Chopin and Chinua Achebe. Something similar was happening in magazines. Vibe’s mastheads and ad pages were full of black and brown people living, working, and loving together and out front — a multicultural ideal hip-hop had made possible. Its “new black aesthetic” meant articles were fresh and insightful but also hyper-literary art historical objects in their own rights. Writers were fluent in Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison as well as Biggie Smalls. By the time Tupac died, Kevin Powell had spent years contextualizing his life within the global struggle for black freedom. “There is a direct line from Tupac in a straitjacket [on the popular February 1994 cover] to ‘It’s Obama Time’ [the September 2007 cover, one of the then senator’s earliest],” former editor Rob Kenner told Billboard in a Vibe oral history. He’s saying Vibe helped create Obama’s “coalition of the ascendent” — the black, Latinx, and young white voters who gave the Hawaii native two terms. For me, the pages reclaimed and retold the American story with fewer redactions than my history books. They created a vision of what a multiethnic nation could be.

* * *

“There was a time when journalism was flush,” Danyel Smith told me on a phone call from a summer retreat in Massachusetts. She became music editor at Vibe in 1994, and was editor in chief during the late ’90s and again from 2006 to 2008. The magazine, founded by Quincy Jones and Time, Inc. executives in 1992, was the “first true home of the culture we inhabit today,” according to Billboard. During Smith’s first stint as editor in chief, its circulation more than doubled. She wrote the story revealing R. Kelly’s marriage to then 15-year-old Aaliyah, as well as cover features on Janet Jackson, Wesley Snipes, and Whitney Houston. Smith was at the helm when the magazine debuted its Obama covers in 2007 — Vibe was the first major publication to endorse the freshman senator. When she described journalism as “flush,” Smith was talking about the late ’80s, when she started out in the San Francisco Bay. “Large cities could support with advertising two, sometimes three, alternative news weeklies and dailies,” she said.

‘There is a direct line from Tupac in a straitjacket [on the popular February 1994 cover] to ‘It’s Obama Time’ [the September 2007 cover, one of the then senator’s earliest].’

The industry has collapsed and remade itself many times since then. Pew reports that between 2008 and 2018, journalism jobs declined 25 percent, a net loss of about 28,000 positions. Business Insider reports losses at 3,200 jobs this year alone. Most reductions have been in newspapers. A swell in digital journalism has not offset the losses in print, and it’s also been volatile, with layoffs several times over the past few years, as outlets “pivot to video” or fail to sustain venture-backed growth. Many remaining outlets have contracted, converting staff positions into precarious freelance or “permalance” roles. In a May piece for The New Republic, Jacob Silverman wrote about the “yawning earnings gap between the top and bottom echelons” of journalism reflected in the stops and starts of his own career. After a decade of prestigious headlines and publishing a book, Silverman called his private education a “sunken cost” because he hadn’t yet won a coveted staff role. If he couldn’t make it with his advantageous beginnings, he seemed to say, the industry must be truly troubled. The prospect of “selling out” — of taking a corporate job or work in branded content — seemed more concerning to him than a loss of the ability to survive at all. For the freelance collective Study Hall, Kaila Philo wrote how the instability in journalism has made it particularly difficult for black women to break into the industry, or to continue working and developing if they do. The overall unemployment rate for African Americans has been twice that of whites since at least 1972, when the government started collecting the data by race. According to Pew, newsroom employees are more likely to be white and male than U.S. workers overall. Philo’s report mentions the Women’s Media Center’s 2018 survey on women of color in U.S. news, which states that just 2.62 percent of all journalists are black women. In a write-up of the data, the WMC noted that fewer than half of newspapers and online-only newsrooms had even responded to the original questionnaire. 

* * *

According to the WMC, about 2.16 percent of newsroom leaders are black women. If writers are instrumental in cultivating our collective conceptions of history, editors are arguably more so. Their sensibilities influence which stories are accepted and produced. They shape and nurture the voices and careers of writers they work with. It means who isn’t there is noteworthy. “I think it’s part of the reason why journalism is dying,” Smith said. “It’s not serving the actual communities that exist.” In a July piece for The New Republic, Clio Chang called the push for organized labor among freelancers and staff writers at digital outlets like Vox and Buzzfeed, as well as at legacy print publications like The New Yorker, a sign of hope for the industry.  “In the most basic sense, that’s the first norm that organizing shatters — the isolation of workers from one another,” Chang wrote. Notably, Vox’s union negotiated a diversity initiative in their bargaining agreement, mandating 40 to 50 percent of applicants interviewed come from underrepresented backgrounds.

“Journalism is very busy trying to serve a monolithic imaginary white audience. And that just doesn’t exist anymore,” Smith told me. U.S. audiences haven’t ever been truly homogeneous. But the media institutions that serve us, like most facets of American life, have been deliberately segregated and reluctant to change. In this reality, alternatives sprouted. Before Vibe’s launch, Time, Inc. executives wondered whether a magazine focused on black and brown youth culture would have any audience at all. Greg Sandow, an editor at Entertainment Weekly at the time, told Billboard, “I’m summoned to this meeting on the 34th floor [at the Time, Inc. executive offices]. And here came some serious concerns. This dapper guy in a suit and beautifully polished shoes says, ‘We’re publishing this. Does that mean we have to put black people on the cover?’” Throughout the next two decades, many publications serving nonwhite audiences thrived. Vibe spun off, creating Vibe Vixen in 2004. The circulations of Ebony, JET, and Essence, legacy institutions founded in 1945, 1951, and 1970, remained robust — the New York Times reported in 2000 that the number of Essence subscribers “sits just below Vogue magazine’s 1.1 million and well above the 750,000 of Harper’s Bazaar.” One World and Giant Robot launched in 1994, Latina and TRACE in 1996. Honey’s preview issue, with Lauryn Hill on the cover, hit newsstands in 1999. Essence spun off to create Suede, a fashion and culture magazine aimed at a “polyglot audience,” in 2004. A Magazine ran from 1989 to 2001; Hyphen launched with two young reporters at the helm the following year. In a piece for Columbia Journalism Review, Camille Bromley called Hyphen a celebration of “Asian culture without cheerleading” invested in humor, complication, and complexity, destroying the model minority myth. Between 1956 and 2008, the Chicago Defender, founded in 1905 and a noted, major catalyst for the Great Migration, published a daily print edition. During its flush years, the Baltimore Afro-American, founded in 1892, published separate editions in Philadelphia, Richmond, and Newark.

Before Vibe’s launch, Time, Inc. executives wondered whether a magazine focused on black and brown youth culture would have any audience at all.

The recent instability in journalism has been devastating for the black press. The Chicago Defender discontinued its print editions in July. Johnson Publications, Ebony and JET’s parent company, filed bankruptcy earlier this year after selling the magazines to a private equity firm in 2016. Then it put up for sale its photo archive — more than 4 million prints and negatives. Its record of black life throughout the 20th century includes images of Emmett Till’s funeral, in which the 14-year-old’s mutilated body lay in state, and Moneta Sleet Jr.’s Pulitzer Prize–winning image of Coretta Scott King mourning with her daughter, Bernice King. It includes casually elegant images of black celebrities at home and shots of everyday street scenes and citizens — the dentists and mid-level diplomats who made up the rank and file of the ascendant. John H. Johnson based Ebony and JET on LIFE, a large glossy heavy on photojournalism with a white, Norman Rockwell aesthetic and occasional dehumanizing renderings of black people. Johnson’s publications, like the elegantly attired stars of Motown, were meant as proof of black dignity and humanity. In late July, four large foundations formed an historic collective to buy the archive, shepherd its preservation, and make it available for public access.

The publications’ written stories are also important. Celebrity profiles offered candid, intimate views of famous, influential black figures and detailed accounts of everyday black accomplishment. Scores of skilled professionals ushered these pieces into being: Era Bell Thompson started out at the Chicago Defender and spent most of her career in Ebony’s editorial leadership. Tennessee native Lynn Norment worked for three decades as a writer and editor at the publication. André Leon Talley and Elaine Welteroth passed through Ebony for other jobs in the industry. Taken together, their labor was a massive scholarly project, a written history of a people deemed outside of it.

Black, Latinx, and Asian American media are not included in the counts on race and gender WMC reports. They get their data from the American Society of News Editors (ASNE), and Cristal Williams Chancellor, WMC’s director of communications, told me she hopes news organizations will be more “aggressive” in helping them “accurately indicate where women are in the newsroom.” While men dominate leadership roles in mainstream newsrooms, news wires, TV, and audio journalism, publications targeting multicultural audiences have also had a reputation for gender trouble, with a preponderance of male cover subjects, editorial leaders, and features writers. Kim Osorio, the first woman editor in chief at The Source, was fired from the magazine after filing a complaint about sexual harassment. Osorio won a settlement for wrongful termination in 2006 and went on to help launch BET.com and write a memoir before returning to The Source in 2012. Since then, she’s made a career writing for TV.  

* * *

This past June, Nieman Lab published an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic since 2016, and Adrienne LaFrance, the magazine’s executive editor. The venerable American magazine was founded in Boston in 1857. Among its early supporters were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. It sought to promote an “American ideal,” a unified yet pluralistic theory of American aesthetics and politics. After more than a century and a half of existence, women writers are not yet published in proportion to women’s share of the country’s population. The Nieman piece focused on progress the magazine has made in recent years toward equitable hiring and promoting: “In 2016, women made up just 17 percent of editorial leadership at The Atlantic. Today, women account for 63 percent of newsroom leaders.” A few days after the piece’s publication, a Twitter user screen-capped a portion of the interview where Goldberg was candid about areas in which the magazine continues to struggle:

 

GOLDBERG: We continue to have a problem with the print magazine cover stories — with the gender and race issues when it comes to cover story writing. [Of the 15 print issues The Atlantic has published since January 2018, 11 had cover stories written by men. — Ed.]

 It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males. What I have to do — and I haven’t done this enough yet — is again about experience versus potential. You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going!

That’s one way to approach it, but the other way to approach it is, huh, you’re really good at this and you have a lot of potential and you’re 33 and you’re burning with ambition, and that’s great, so let us put you on a deliberate pathway toward writing 10,000-word cover stories. It might not work. It often doesn’t. But we have to be very deliberate and efficient about creating the space for more women to develop that particular journalistic muscle.

My Twitter feed of writers, editors, and book publicists erupted, mostly at the excerpt’s thinly veiled statement on ability. Women in my timeline responded with lists of writers of longform — books, articles, and chapters — who happened to be women, or people of color, or some intersection therein. Goldberg initially said he’d been misquoted. When Laura Hazard Owen, the deputy editor at Nieman who’d conducted the interview, offered proof that Goldberg’s statements had been delivered as printed, he claimed he had misspoken. Hazard Owen told the L.A. Times she believes that The Atlantic is, overall, “doing good work in diversifying the staff there.”

Taken together, their labor was a massive scholarly project, a written history of a people deemed outside of it.

Still, it’s a difficult statement for a woman writer of color to hear. “You literally are looking at me and all my colleagues, all my women colleagues and all my black colleagues, all my colleagues of color and saying, ‘You’re not really worthy of what we do over here.’ It’s mortifying,” Smith told me. Goldberg’s admission may have been a misstatement, but it mirrors the continued whiteness of mainstream mastheads. It checks out with the Women’s Media Center’s reports and the revealing fact of how much data is missing from even those important studies. It echoes the stories of black women who work or worked in journalism, who have difficulty finding mentors, or who burn out from the weight of wanting to serve the chronically underserved. It reflects my own experiences, in which I have been told multiple times in a single year that I am the only black woman editor that a writer has ever had. But it doesn’t corroborate my long experience as a reader. What happened to the writers and editors and multihyphenates from the era of the multicultural magazine, that brief flash in the 90’s and early aughts when storytellers seemed to reflect just how much people of color lead in creating American culture? Who should have formed a pipeline of leaders for mainstream publications when the industry began to contract?

* * *

In addition to her stints at Vibe, Smith also edited for Billboard, Time, Inc. publications, and published two novels. She was culture editor for ESPN’s digital magazine The Undefeated before going on book leave. Akiba Solomon is an author, editor of two books, and is currently senior editorial director at Colorlines, a digital news daily published by Race Forward. She started an internship at YSB in 1995 before going on to write and edit for Jane, Glamour, Essence, Vibe Vixen, and The Source. She told me that even at magazines without predominantly black staff, she’d worked with other black people, though not often directly. At black magazines, she was frequently edited by black women. “I’ve been edited by Robin Stone, Vanessa DeLuca [formerly editor-in-chief of Essence, currently running the Medium vertical ZORA], Ayana Byrd, Kierna Mayo, Cori Murray, and Michaela Angela Davis.” Solomon’s last magazine byline was last year, an Essence story on black women activists who organize in culturally relevant ways to fight and prevent sexual assault.

Solomon writes infrequently for publications now, worn down by conditions in journalism she believes are untenable. At the hip-hop magazines, the sexism was a deterrent, and later, “I was seeing a turn in who was getting the jobs writing about black music” when it became mainstream. “Once folks could divorce black music from black culture it was a wrap,” she said. At women’s magazines, Solomon felt stifled by “extremely narrow” storytelling. Publishing, in general, Solomon believes, places unsustainable demands on its workers. 

When we talk about the death of print, it is infrequent that we also talk about the conditions that make it ripe for obsolescence. The reluctant slowness with which mainstream media has integrated its mastheads (or kept them integrated) has meant the industry’s content has suffered. And the work environments have placed exorbitant burdens on the people of color who do break through. In Smith’s words:

You feel that you want to serve these people with good and quality content, with good and quality graphics, with good and quality leadership. And as a black person, as a black woman, regardless of whether you’re serving a mainstream audience, which I have at a Billboard and at Time, Inc., or a multicultural audience, which I have at Vibe, it is difficult. And it’s actually taken me a long time to admit that to myself. It does wear you down. And I ask myself why have I always, always stayed in a job two and a half to three years, especially when I’m editing? It’s because I’m tired by that time.

In a July story for Politico, black journalists from The New York Times and the Associated Press talked about how a sophisticated understanding of race is critical to ethically and thoroughly covering the current political moment. After the August 3 massacre in El Paso, Lulu Garcia-Navarro wrote how the absence of Latinx journalists in newsrooms has created a vacuum that allows hateful words from the president to ring unchallenged. Lacking the necessary capacity, many organizations cover race related topics, often matters of life and death, without context or depth. As outlets miss the mark, journalists of color may take on the added work of acting as the “the black public editor of our newsrooms,” Astead Herndon from the Times said on a Buzzfeed panel. Elaine Welteroth wrote about the physical exhaustion she experienced during her tenure as editor in chief at Teen Vogue in her memoir More Than Enough. She was the second African American editor in chief in parent company Condé Nast’s 110 year history:

I was too busy to sleep, too frazzled to eat, and TMI: I had developed a bizarre condition where I felt the urge to pee — all the time. It was so disruptive that I went to see a doctor, thinking it may have been a bladder infection.

Instead, I found myself standing on a scale in my doctor’s office being chastised for accidentally dropping nine more pounds. These were precious pounds that my naturally thin frame could not afford to lose without leaving me with the kind of bony body only fashion people complimented.

Condé Nast shuttered Teen Vogue’s print edition in 2017, despite record-breaking circulation, increased political coverage, and an expanded presence on the internet during Welteroth’s tenure. Welteroth left the company to write her book and pursue other ventures.

Mitzi Miller was editor in chief of JET when it ran the 2012 cover story on Jordan Davis, a Florida teenager shot and killed by a white vigilante over his loud music. “At the time, very few news outlets were covering the story because it occurred over a holiday weekend,” she said. To write the story, Miller hired Denene Millner, an author of more than 20 books. With interviews from Jordan’s parents, Ron Davis and Lucy McBath, the piece went viral and was one of many stories that galvanized the contemporary American movement against police brutality.

Miller started working in magazines in 2000, and came up through Honey and Jane before taking the helm at JET then Ebony in 2014. She edits for the black website theGrio when she can and writes an occasional piece for a print magazine roughly once a year. Shrinking wages have made it increasingly difficult to make a life in journalism, she told me. After working at a number of dream publications, Miller moved on to film and TV development. 

Both Miller and Solomon noted how print publications have been slow to evolve. “It’s hard to imagine now, particularly to digital native folks, but print was all about a particular format. It was about putting the same ideas into slightly different buckets,” Solomon said. On the podcast Hear to Slay, Vanessa DeLuca spoke about how reluctant evolution may have imperiled black media. “Black media have not always … looked forward in terms of how to build a brand across multiple platforms.” Some at legacy print institutions still seem to hold internet writing in lower esteem (“You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going!” were Goldberg’s words to Nieman Lab). Often, pay structures reflect this hierarchy. Certainly, the internet’s speed and accessibility have lowered barriers to entry and made it such that rigor is not always a requirement for publication. But it’s also changed information consumption patterns and exploded the possibilities of storytelling.

Michael Gonzales, a frequent contributor to this site and a writer I’ve worked with as an editor, started in magazines in the 1980s as a freelancer. He wrote for The Source and Vibe during a time that overlapped with Smith’s and Solomon’s tenures, the years now called “the golden era of rap writing.” The years correspond to those moments I spent reading magazines with my high school friends. At black publications, he worked with black women editors all the time, but “with the exception of the Village Voice, none of the mainstream magazines employed black editors.” Despite the upheaval of the past several years (“the money is less than back in the day,” he said), Gonzales seems pleased with where his career has landed, “I’ve transformed from music critic/journalist to an essayist.” He went on to talk about how now, with the proliferation of digital magazines:

I feel like we’re living in an interesting writer time where there are a number of quality sites looking for quality writing, especially in essay form. There are a few that sometimes get too self-indulgent, but for the most part, especially in the cultural space (books, movies, theater, music, etc.), there is a lot of wonderful writing happening. Unfortunately you are the only black woman editor I have, although a few years back I did work with Kierna Mayo at Ebony.

 

* * *

Danielle A. Jackson is a contributing editor at Longreads.

Editor: Sari Botton

Fact checker: Steven Cohen

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

The Geography of Risk

AP Photo/The Philadelphia Inquirer, Clem Murray

Gilbert M. Gaul The Geography of Risk | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | September 2019 | 24 minutes (4,833 words)

 

It is the peculiar nature of hurricanes that they are both uncommon and utterly predictable. Depending on an island’s geography, it may have a one-in-ten chance of being hit, or a one-in-a-thousand chance. Those are only odds, of course, but they are important because hurricanes are best understood as numbers and probabilities. Some areas are simply more vulnerable than others — Southeast Florida, Puerto Rico, the Florida Panhandle, and the Gulf states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. While you may reassure yourself that you have only a one-in-a-hundred chance of being leveled by a devastating storm in a given year, it’s highly likely that there will be a hurricane in one of these geographies, and someone’s house will be destroyed.

Moreover, the chances appear to be increasing, though not necessarily for the reasons you might imagine. Even accounting for years with lots of hurricanes, including 2004, 2005, 2017, and 2018, the number of hurricanes has held relatively steady for centuries, dating back to the founding of the nation. What has changed is the amount of property at the coast, which amplifies the opportunities for damage and the likelihood that federal taxpayers will spend ever-larger sums to help coastal towns rebuild after hurricanes.

Read more…

One Man’s Poison

Richard Baker/via Getty Images

Kyoko Mori | Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents | University of Nebraska Press | September 2019 | 19 minutes (3,670 words)

 

Before my mother’s suicide the year I turned twelve, my father and I seldom saw each other. An engineer who became a board director at a steel-manufacturing conglomerate, Hiroshi traveled all over the country on business. Even when he worked in his office in Kobe, he left early and came back — if he came back — past midnight. My mother waited up, but he often called from some noisy bar to claim he was leaving on a business trip. Other phone calls, from women looking for him, made clear that my father had several girlfriends who vied for his attention. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that he was a liar and a cheat and that women were attracted to him all the same.

Since his free time was devoted to playing rugby with former college teammates, Hiroshi seldom joined my mother, brother, and me on family vacations or outings. He did once attend a family reunion — for his side of the family — at a Chinese restaurant in downtown Kobe. My brother, Jumpei, four years younger than me, was still a toddler. When we got to the restaurant, our relatives hadn’t arrived yet, the banquet room wasn’t ready, and my mother had to take Jumpei to the bathroom. I was left to sit at the bar with Hiroshi while we waited. He must have had to help me up to the barstool, but I don’t remember him lifting me or holding me on that occasion or any other. What I do recall is the woman behind the bar placing a glass of soda pop in front of me, smiling in an exaggerated way, and saying, “You look just like your father. How lucky for you. He is so very handsome.”

Read more…

Better Late

CSA Images / Getty

Summer Block | Longreads | August 2019 | 11 minutes (3,179 words)

 
Here I am again, the only 40-year-old in the orthodontist’s waiting room. Dr. F works out of a strip mall in North Hollywood which, like every other business in North Hollywood, is across the street from an acting studio and a transmission repair center. In the waiting room a sullen teenage girl is frowning at her phone while her little brother drums the back of his heels against his seat. Four receptionists sit behind the front desk, each wearing perfect teeth and an embroidered lab coat, pointedly ignoring the drumming. Three large high-definition TVs are always on, and always playing Moana — but only the sad parts.

I have a significant overbite and a large gap between my two front teeth. As a child I wanted braces the way some girls want a pony. I was poisonously envious of all my friends’ braces, obsessed with the arcane magic of it: the little flat packets of wax, the seashell pink boxes of tiny rubber bands. Because my parents could not afford braces, I stopped smiling instead. In the last photo I’ve found of myself with teeth visible, I am 7 years old, posing beside my baby sister in a pale purple Laura Ashley dress, grinning a gummy, snaggled smile. In every photo since, my lips are tightly sealed, like a baby refusing a spoon. I’m not smiling in my senior pictures, nor at my college graduation, nor on my wedding day.

For years I planned on fixing my teeth when I could afford it, but by the time I finally could, I felt it was too late. I feared correcting an orthodontic mess as bad as mine would change the shape of my face. Would I still look like me when it was through? Did I want to? More than that, I couldn’t imagine living without constant low-level embarrassment about my teeth, like the roar of silence in a room after someone turns off the TV. I was used to my teeth. In some ways, I even liked them, in the way that all of us secretly treasure even the worst facts about ourselves just because they’re ours. Still I daydreamed about braces sometimes, about looking back at all my childhood photos and finding me in them now, smiling.

* * *

I didn’t learn to swim until I was a teenager. I didn’t learn to drive until I was 24. I didn’t learn to ride a bike until I was 37 and I got into graduate school 18 years after I finished my BA. I didn’t have my period until I was 17; I was still losing baby teeth in junior high. I didn’t drink until I was in college, and didn’t do drugs until after I’d left. I got my first tattoo at 30. I rode a water slide for the first time last summer; I played baseball for the first time last month. I didn’t find my first friend until I was in fifth grade, and I found my true love when I was almost 40.

* * *

At my first Invisalign consultation, I offered up an eager, toothy grin. The hygienist took my photo, printed it out, and stapled a copy to my chart, so whenever I return for checkups, I see it there. My hair is thin and friable, the color of damp straw, my neck ropy and straining. I look like an emu.

At my initial consultation, I explained to Dr. F that I was hoping to fix the large gap between my front teeth. Dr. F assured me brightly that the gap was just one of many, many things wrong with my teeth. A series of 3-D images and X-rays revealed that I had both a significant overbite and a crossbite, the latter responsible for the slight visible asymmetry of my chin. I had a major gap between my two front teeth, of course, but the spacing of my teeth was uneven throughout, crowded on the bottom and rangy on top. Several of my teeth were twisted, most uneven, and I had a chip in my front left. My front teeth were too big, or my gums too small — the effect was very horsey either way. 

I sat through this litany of my many imperfections, my face set in a tight, conciliatory grin.

“Your gums show too much when you smile,” he said.

My teeth were supposed to be done last July, but I’m still waiting. Forty-year-old teeth are stubborn.

I was made to sign a stack of waivers and disclaimers acknowledging what Invisalign could and could not do for my teeth. Invisalign is a purely cosmetic fix, not a structural one. Invisalign can shuffle your teeth within your jaw like Scrabble tiles in their tray, but it cannot change the alignment of your jaw itself. Traditional metal braces would go further to fix some of the issues with my teeth, if I chose them, but they are more effective on adolescents whose bones are still malleable. My bones had spent 39 years solidifying into their present shape. At this point I’d need major jaw surgery to correct my overbite, Dr. F explained, and even then it wouldn’t change the size and shape of my palate.

“I thought there were palate expanders and things, I remember when I was a kid —”

“Oh yes,” Dr. F interrupted cheerfully, “you can fix absolutely anything when you’re young.”

* * *

My father has held many different jobs in his life, from taxi driver to short-order cook, shipping clerk, retail salesman, janitor. When he met my mom he was working at a factory that made drapes. Eventually he fell into being a purchasing agent and he worked for various manufacturing companies until, at age 63, his employer outsourced all their manufacturing overseas and pushed him into early retirement. But he couldn’t really afford to retire, and so he went to work as a substitute teacher. It was simply expedient, at first, but he loved being a teacher and he was good at it. Kids loved him, fellow teachers loved him, parents loved him. He went back to school to get his teaching credential to become a full-time elementary school teacher. He was the happiest I’d ever seen him. At 63, after a lifetime of jobs that were simply jobs, he had found his calling.

I tell this story all the time — because I’m proud of my father, but also because it comforts the listener, and it comforts me. I usually sum it up with some pat sentiment like, “It just goes to show, you really can do anything at any age!” 

* * *

When my children were with their dad, Zac and I would stay downtown in the industrial conversion loft he shared with three roommates and a cat he loved like a baby because he’d never had a baby. The building was a hulking concrete and brick shell choked with vines, its interior walls thrown together by the many resident architecture students. We’d order pizza and go sit up on the roof, where his neighbors gathered on summer nights for concerts and parties, or just to look out over the rooftops of the city and feel good about Los Angeles. 

Then we’d climb down a ladder through the ceiling to his bedroom, a concrete cube only a few inches wider than his bed. His clothes hung from an exposed metal rack, and a small air conditioning unit was mounted unsteadily into the small window above our heads. The room was dark and cool — freezing in winter — and cars rolled over the 4th Street bridge all day and night.  

* * *

Invisalign is a system of clear plastic aligners, each a mold of your teeth, that you wear at all times except when eating. Every Sunday night I put in a new set of aligners, top and bottom, one slight correction closer to perfection. Every two months I return to Dr. F’s office to pick up my next set of eight aligners, each in its own resealable plastic bag. My treatment plan was supposed to take 18 months, or 78 little plastic bags.

This is my 48th week of Invisalign and the gap between my two front teeth is definitely closing. When I’m wearing the retainers, the space almost disappears, and I get a little preview of what I’ll look like when I’m done. I am still, for better or worse, recognizably me.

* * *

The truth about my dad is somewhat more complicated. He does love teaching, and he is great at it. But he’s 70 now, still taking night classes, still attending training workshops, still working with a mentor. He works the equivalent of three full-time jobs. He is subject to age discrimination in hiring, to exhaustion and chest pains and second-guessing. Not to mention the decades he spent doing things he didn’t love until he found, belatedly, the thing he did. 

* * *

It didn’t occur to me that Invisalign would hurt, perhaps because they were just flimsy plastic sleeves and not metal braces. The day I had them put in, Dr. F filed down some of my teeth and cemented anchoring brackets onto others, without any anesthesia. My jaw ached from holding my mouth open for so long. Then there was the actual movement of the teeth themselves, a part of me that hadn’t moved since infancy now subjected to a sudden geologic violence.

When I got back to our house after my first appointment, I was starving but it hurt too much to eat. Zac took a bite of a Snickers bar, chewed it up, and spat it into my mouth.


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

Sign up


Zac had three children but no babies. He was 29 and I was 37. He said that with or without babies, he’d still choose me. I said he might change his mind. We went on a 14-mile hike and we argued about it the entire way, 7 miles up and 7 miles down. 

The night of the company Christmas party, I made a joke about how we’d probably never have kids, and he went outside crying. I caught up to him in front of a tequila-themed sports bar whose patrons were sloshing off the patio and we fought while people all around us shouted at the TVs. We were blocking the valet line, him still crying and me begging him to come back inside, while the black-jacketed valets carried on indifferentl around us, edging SUVs right up to the backs of our knees. At last we made it into our Lyft and we spoke to our bedroom ceiling until the room lightened into dawn.

* * *

The last time I spoke to my dad on the phone, he was thinking of going back to manufacturing. There are a lot of temporary jobs in Reno now, he said, and he has the experience. He loves his students and the work he does, but the administrative wrangling is wearing him out. He got his certification through a program called ARL, or Alternative Route to Licensure, and now it turns out some routes are better than others.

* * *

Today, Moana was bidding her dying grandmother farewell, on mute, while Dr. F frowned over my incisors. There was a gap between the tooth and the aligner that would necessitate new X-rays, new scans, and everything starting all over again.

My teeth ache a little now all the time, under a steady and unrelenting pressure just this side of ignorable. The aligners force a pinched, disapproving expression that ages me 10 years. Then there’s the business of taking them out for every snack, every drink, every meal, and keeping them clean. Nothing makes you feel more like an old lady than slipping your teeth out of your mouth, except perhaps leaving them to soak in blue liquid in a bowl on the bathroom counter.

With all the extra brushing and flossing I do now, I have plenty of time to inspect my teeth. Before all of my ire was directed toward that one gap, but now that it’s improving, I’ve started really looking at all the other problems with my teeth, the problems Invisalign can’t fix. My front teeth are too long and my incisors too pointy. My teeth are too yellow. When I smile my eyes scrunch up too much and my sharp nose points like an arrow directing attention toward my asymmetric chin.

Still, I’ve been smiling more often, though tentatively, and not in a way I would exactly describe as natural. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to smile as effortlessly as people who’ve had four more decades of practice. At times I doubt whether Invisalign has done anything much at all. Are they like Dumbo’s feather, simply giving me the confidence to bare the teeth I might have bared all along? I suppose that might be considered an uplifting ending, but then Dumbo’s feather didn’t cost him $3,000.

* * *

We did everything at once. There wasn’t time or space to date casually, get serious, move in, calm down, get married and then have a baby. The first years we had so much living to do: moving once and then moving again, getting a pet, burying a pet, having sex until 2 in the morning and waking at 6 to pack the lunches, the ovulation test kits and love letters and the fractious night driving, the family vacation where all three children vomited in the car. Sometimes I think it’s easier to have young children in the early days of a relationship, when the fresh intensity of your attachment can mitigate all the stress and exhaustion. When the house is asleep I put my head on his chest and he sings to me, his low voice sounding far but not distant.

‘Oh yes,’ Dr. F interrupted cheerfully, ‘you can fix absolutely anything when you’re young.’

Strangers constantly stop us on the street to tell us we look so happy, excuse me, but they’ve just never seen such a happy couple before. 

The night we moved in together, into a three-bedroom rental house in Burbank, I cried because I wished I could have done all of it with him the first time. I sat on a hard-backed chair in the living room because we didn’t have a sofa yet. Zac moved in with only his books, his computer, and clothes. I had taken only a fraction of my things with me in the divorce, but still I had so much stuff: potted plants and a slow cooker, a sugar bowl from my old wedding registry, a box labeled “kids’ artwork,” plastic tubs of Christmas ornaments, and a 3-foot-tall wooden dollhouse.

That night Zac wandered into the empty living room in the middle of brushing his teeth. Through foam, he said, “I missed you.”

* * *

We got married at 3 in the afternoon on a warm day in June, 89 degrees and unusually humid for Los Angeles. I had ordered a dress for the occasion, pale blue tumbled with sprays of little red roses, but by the time it arrived I’d already grown too big to wear it, so about an hour before the ceremony I pulled on an old jersey dress with gray and white stripes that stretched over my pregnant belly like a dizzying optical illusion. My sister and her boyfriend flew down from Reno to be our witnesses.

Zac wanted a proper wedding, but I wasn’t sure. “I already had a wedding.”

“But I didn’t.”

We drove to the Los Angeles County Registrar’s office in Van Nuys. The office looked like a DMV, with linoleum floors and snaking lines of people clutching forms in their sweaty hands. The walls were painted avocado and lemon meringue, the colors of appetizers in a 1950s cookbook. A sign read “Birth, Marriage, Death” with an arrow pointing down the hall.

The couple in line ahead of us brought along a group of relatives, all dressed up and holding armloads of flowers. They went into the chapel for about 15 minutes and emerged looking excited. 

When it was our turn, we went in to find the justice of the peace, a short, energetic woman with dark brown curls wearing thick glasses and a black robe. She stood in front of a heart-shaped metal arch swathed in pale green tulle and fake flowers; on the wall behind her, little puff balls of orange, white, and yellow tulle hung from what appeared to be a giant coat hanger. The only other furniture in the room was a small table, covered in a white tablecloth and decorated with a vase of plastic flowers, and an empty office trash can. 

The wedding chapel was in a side room with its own door, but the partition wall stopped about two feet from the ceiling, so we could still hear the grumbles of the people on the other side, requesting certified copies of their birth certificate.

The justice of the peace asked if we had prepared any vows. We answered no and she politely carried on, as though she’d accidentally raised a sensitive topic and was now trying to tactfully change the subject. She asked if we had any rings to exchange. We said no again, and she made a comment about how we didn’t need rings — our real gift was the baby-to-be.

She asked us to hold hands and gaze into each other’s eyes, something we both found acutely embarrassing. She declared us man and wife. My sister took pictures and then we all went to Disneyland.

* * *

Our baby is named Margaret Héloïse. She was born on September 21 when I was 39 years old. September 21 is the start of a new season, but it’s a late season, too.

* * *

If you want to really surprise someone, try proposing to them a month after you’ve gotten married. We went out to dinner and Zac gave me his great-grandmother’s ring.

This summer we will have our second wedding. In the course of one year I will have gotten married, gotten engaged, had a baby, turned 40, and then gotten married again. Beatrice, 10 years old, has named herself a “junior bridesmaid,” a concept she read about in a bridal magazine. Five-year-old William will be the ring bearer, and we’ve dubbed Margaret the Baby of Honor. Arthur, 8, wants to pull her down the aisle in a wagon covered in flowers. 

My teeth were supposed to be done last July, but I’m still waiting. Forty-year-old teeth are stubborn. Each time I go in I tell Dr. F they’re good enough, but Dr. F is a perfectionist. The space between my two front teeth, the one that started all this, looks OK to me, but my crowded bottom teeth resist rearrangement. 

I’ve started printing out photos of me and Zac together, smiling. They’re mostly selfies, mostly not very good ones. Neither of us likes to have our picture taken, and it shows. But here’s one of us smiling in front of redwood trees, one at the beach. Some from his old apartment, one trick or treating with the kids. There’s one of us smiling at the Los Angeles County Registrar’s office, one at Disneyland, and a picture of me with Margaret, a few minutes old, wet against my chest — and I’m grinning wildly, artlessly, showing all my teeth.

* * *

Summer Block has written short fiction, poetry, and essays for The Awl, Catapult, The Toast, The Rumpus, and Electric Lit. She is writing a book about Halloween.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

‘The Survivor’s Edit’: Bassey Ikpi on Memory, Truth, and Living with Bipolar II

Space Frontiers/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Naomi Elias | Longreads | August 2019 | 24 minutes (6,573 words)

 

Bassey Ikpi remembers the Challenger explosion; she can recall the exact moment it happened, in 1984. She can remember, in exquisitely painful detail, how she felt watching that tragic accident unfold on live television, in 1984. Yet Google and the history books tell us it happened in 1986. “What is truth,” Ikpi asks, “if it’s not the place where reality and memory meet?”

The blurry line between emotional truth and fact is stylishly captured in an optical illusion of a book cover (designed by Matthew McNerney) for Ikpi’s new memoir-in-essays, I’m Telling The Truth But I’m Lying. The Nigerian-American author takes up the project of remembering, with great dexterity and compassion for herself. Ikpi opens up about living with bipolar II; “Imagine you don’t fit anywhere,” Ikpi writes, “not even in your own head.” We experience her life pre- and post-diagnosis; her adolescence in Stillwater, Oklahoma; her early twenties touring as a spoken word artist with HBO’s Def Poetry Jam; her sleepless nights; and her hospitalization.The latter proves to be a turning point, one that finally gives her a name for her mental illness and — as the book demonstrates — a framework for understanding the story of her life.

The diagnosis is clarifying; it allows her to see how mental health impacts her relationships to her family and friends, and to herself, often determining what she feels and remembers, and how she remembers it. In this way Ikpi also uses her book to interrogate the nature of memory itself — how fragile it is, how it can be colored and recolored by trauma and guilt and self-preservational drive. “I learned how to take the truth and bend it like light through a prism,” Ikpi explains in the book, “I learned to lie beautifully.” Rather than present readers with a sanitized cluster of biographical data, Ikpi offers a memoir that places the reader inside her mind, conflict and all. Read more…

The Little Book That Lost Its Author

Oliver Killig/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Amber Caron | Boulevard | Spring 2019 | 16 minutes (3,262 words)

 

In Roald Dahl’s 1953 short story, “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” Adolph Knipe, the story’s protagonist, invents a computer that can provide the answer to a math problem in five seconds. His invention is a technical masterpiece, and his boss sends him on a weeklong vacation to celebrate his good work. Knipe, however, doesn’t travel and doesn’t even celebrate. Instead, he takes a bus back to his two-room apartment, pours himself a glass of whiskey, and sits down in front of his typewriter to reread the beginning of his most recent short story: “The night was dark and stormy, the wind whistled in the trees, the rain poured down like cats and dogs.” It’s not a promising beginning, and Knipe knows it. He feels defeated, nothing more than a failed writer, when he’s suddenly “struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: That English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!” His fate isn’t to write stories, he realizes, but to build a machine that can write stories for him. Read more…

Looking for Carolina Maria de Jesus

Illustration by Bex Glendining

Tarisai Ngangura | Longreads | August 2019 | 18 minutes (4,506 words)

Here in the favela, almost everyone has a difficult life to live. But I am the only one who writes of what suffering is. I do this for the good of the others.

 Carolina Maria de Jesus, Quarto de Despejo

* * *

In 1960, at the age of 46, Carolina Maria de Jesus published her first book, Quarto de Despejo: Diário de uma Favelada (Child of the Dark in English). It’s comprised of diary entries written on scraps of paper and assembled into a memoir about life in Canindé, a favela community in the Brazilian city of São Paulo. The book sold more than 10,000 copies in less than a week, was eventually translated into 16 languages, and distributed in 46 countries, making Carolina Maria one of Brazil’s most widely read authors. And for a while, the most famous person in the country. 

Starting in the late 1800s, the very first favelas, known as bairros-africanos, were inhabited by formerly enslaved people. Today, the country’s Institute of Geography and Statistics calls them “sub-normal clusters.” Favelas lack basic sanitation, electricity, and health facilities and are located primarily in city centers. After Quarto de Despejo’s instant success, Carolina Maria became a fleeting cause célèbre for the rights of favelados.

Carolina Maria de Jesus was born in the state of Minas Gerais, about 500 miles north of Rio de Janeiro, and came into the world some time between 1914 and 1921. Like many Afro-Brazilians born during this time, she didn’t have a birth certificate. She grew up with her mother, grandfather, younger brother, and later her stepfather in the town of Sacramento, where most homes were small and functional, to guard from rain and sun. Her father was a street performer who abandoned the family soon after Carolina Maria was born. Her mother cleaned houses and washed clothes for white families who lived on farms bordering the city. She died when Carolina Maria was in her early twenties.

After her mother’s death, Carolina Maria moved around trying to find her footing before settling in metropolitan São Paulo. She also made a living cleaning homes for wealthy white Brazilians, but after becoming pregnant, she was barred from the house she worked at and forced to move to a favela. She chose the neighborhood of Canindé for its proximity to a junkyard, where she sold bags of collected paper and scrap iron for pennies. Black people who were lighter skinned were referred to as morenas and morenos and had a greater measure of respect and access to more jobs, better restaurants, libraries, and social mobility. Carolina Maria, a dark-skinned black woman, was an outsider in more ways than one.

After the surprise success of Quarto de Despejo, she traveled across Brazil’s states, signing books and giving public talks on the dire conditions of favelas. The press called her a rags-to-riches heroine: the one who had been born surrounded by garbage and yet became a writer. Carolina Maria became a reluctant (and ultimately unwilling) spokesperson for “bootstrap success” — her image vaunted to encourage others to let nothing keep them from their dreams. Not crippling debt or inaccessible education. Definitely not hunger, and most importantly, not racism. In the years after Carolina Maria’s debut, nine more books followed; six were published after her death in 1977. But the renown that came from her first frank writings on poverty wouldn’t be repeated.  


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

Sign up


In the afterlife of the global slave trade and colonialism, black history is a study of spaces, silences, question marks, and asterisks. Growing up in Zimbabwe in the early 2000s, I learned of colonialism as if it had been a momentary blip in my country’s history, not a profound interrupting occurrence whose effects would forever shape how I moved and saw the world. When I left home for university in Toronto, I learned of Canada’s history as a celebrated haven for runaway slaves, but did not hear of Africville, a historically black community in Nova Scotia destroyed by provincial and federal negligence. I noticed the same kind of erasure when I arrived in Brazil’s city of Salvador, the capital of Bahia state, which I’d chosen to make my home base as I started my career in freelance journalism in 2016.

Of the nearly 5 million Africans brought to the country during the transatlantic slave trade (10 times more than brought to North America), the first landed in Salvador, one of the oldest slave ports in the Americas. It’s where the Malê revolt erupted, which Brazilian historian João José Reis called “the most significant slave revolt in Brazil.” Brazil has more African descendants than any other country in the world except Nigeria — almost 51 percent of the nation’s population is black or mixed race. On a national scale, Salvador is the state capital with the highest number of Afro-Brazilians, with more than 80 percent of its people identifying as black or brown. The cadence and speech of Soteropolitanos (residents of Salvador) is audibly tinged with Bantu vocal patterns, and the moda (fashion) would not be out of place in pattern-rich Senegal. Local food is stamped with unmistakable West African flavors and beloved street snacks include acarajé, a deep-fried black bean bun that is also found in Nigeria and Ghana. Dende oil, an extract from the fruit of oil palms that leaves distinct orange marks on clothing, is an integral part of every meal and was also brought over from Africa’s West. 

Carolina Maria, a dark-skinned black woman, was an outsider in more ways than one.

In the months following my arrival, I searched for writers to guide me through Brazil. Yet the authors I discovered online and on bookshelves did not reflect the faces I saw around me. When I refined my search, specifically noting ‘Afro-Brazilian’ in my digital prompt, I learned about Maria Firmina dos Reis, a prominent abolitionist and teacher; Abdias Do Nascimento, the pan-Africanist, playwright, and founder of Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN); and Alzira Rufino, an activist and the first Afro-Brazilian woman to create a support service for female survivors of domestic violence. These writers exposed truths about their country’s treatment of black people, countering the myth of Brazil’s diverse, racial democracy. I also found Carolina Maria de Jesus, whose story was not only compelling, but was also to some degree a reflection of my own. I saw familiar breaks and patterns in her thoughts, dreams, doubts, and disappointments. 

Haunted by questions centuries older than her years, Carolina Maria constantly found equilibrium to be out of reach, even when it seemed as though she had finally achieved what she longed for. She landed at a crossroads so common to the “successful” black creative: a rapid abundance of opportunities contingent on total acquiescence, or nothing at all. She achieved renown for a season, then fell into obscurity and back, further still, into near poverty.  

It’s been more than 40 years since her death, and I wonder if anything has truly changed for black women anywhere who long for their art to be what takes care of them.

* * *

In 1962, The New York Times Book Review called Quarto de Despejo “a rarely matched essay on the meaning and feeling of hunger, degradation and want.” Carolina Maria’s debut pulled no punches and displayed no illusions about life in the favela. There was no long-suffering acceptance of martyrdom because a better life lay above. She’d hated where she lived, and even more so she hated those who allowed such places to exist. Quarto de Despejo literally translates to “room of garbage.” She wrote about culpability — whose fault was it that some people had to live among the garbage? Sometimes she blamed the people themselves, who, according to her, were lazy, drunk, vulgar, and illiterate. “I know very well there are contemptible people here, persons with perverted souls,” she wrote. This earned her no love from progressives, who found her sentiments self-righteous and demeaning to the poor. When she didn’t find fault with those around her, she chalked it up to sheer bad luck: “Is there no end to this bitterness of life? I think that when I was born I was marked by fate to go hungry.” More often, her mind would circle back to one answer — politicians. “When a politician tells us in his speeches that he is on the side of the people, that he is only in politics in order to improve our living conditions, he is well aware that touching on these grave problems, he will win at the polls,” she wrote. “Afterwards he divorces himself from the people. He looks at them with half-closed eyes, and with a pride that hurts us.” This was an entry she wrote on May 20th, 1955, a day she found herself particularly hungry and contemplating her place in a world where she was an “object banished to the garbage dump.”

 The 1950s were, on the surface, an auspicious time for Brazil. Under the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira (like Carolina Maria, a mineiro, born in the state of Minas Gerais), the country’s economic and political stability grew. Edson Arantes do Nascimento, soon to be known as Pelé, became an international soccer star. Bossa nova was born and on its way to becoming one of the country’s most distinctive musical innovations, with Johnny Alf’s “Eu e a Brisa” drifting in and out of bars across the country. For Carolina Maria, none of this mattered. The police regularly intimidated, arrested, and detained favela dwellers. Corruption was rampant at social services, and social elevation was only possible if she married a white man and had lighter-skinned children. All this she wrote in her diaries, sharing her confusion, disgust, and anger. In her eyes, to be poor and hungry was an undeserved burden for anyone, and it was a national shame she cast a glaring light on.

* * *

Carolina Maria had three children, and her only daughter, Vera Eunice Lima de Jesus, born in 1953, is the writer’s closest living relative. As the public face of her mother’s literary works, Vera Eunice speaks at roundtable discussions where the work is featured, but she doesn’t own the rights to any of it. 

Vera Eunice also accommodates writers like me, who come to her for answers about her mother’s life of contrasts. It’s been more than half a century since she lived in Canindé, and while some memories elude her, others she recalls as though they happened yesterday. She told me she’d barely turned 7 when fame came knocking at their barraco. Made of pieces of discarded timber and asbestos, it was stuffed with bits of plastic and paper to act as both insulation and ventilation. Carolina Maria had built it herself. During the summer months, it was unbearably hot inside the cramped home, with the asbestos emitting heat all day. São Paulo is also known for its torrential rainfall, so when it poured the roof would leak, drenching their two mattresses. In that small shack Vera Eunice lived a life stifled by scarcity. “We would eat once a day. My oldest brother was a teenager and he was always hungry,” she said. 

These writers exposed truths about their country’s treatment of black people, countering the myth of Brazil’s diverse, racial democracy.

Like her mother’s writing style, Vera Eunice spoke to me in a direct, almost dry way — her voice strong and measured. “One day, my mother and I went out to look for food. We were passing this house and a white woman came running out and said she had a gift for us. My mother was so happy because we had not been able to find anything,” she said. “The gift was wrapped in newspapers so we rushed home and my mother quickly tore it open to see what it was. It was a pile of rats.” Carolina Maria had recounted this particular interaction in her diaries; it was a moment that scarred both mother and daughter. For the writer, particularly, this interaction showed that to outsiders she didn’t simply live amidst garbage, she too was disposable.

Audálio Dantas, a young journalist working for the newspaper Diário da Noite, spent a week in Canindé in 1958. He was researching life in the favela for what he hoped would be a story on the recently built playground donated by a politician soliciting votes from the poor. As the legend goes, he came across Carolina Maria threatening to put some neighbors in her diaries if they didn’t stop mistreating a group of children who were having fun on the swings. Intrigued, Dantas asked to see some of her work. He took a couple of her entries to his editor, and soon after, excerpts were published in the paper to great fanfare. Dantas later became bureau chief of O Cruzeiro, the leading weekly magazine from Rio de Janeiro. Although the newspaper exposure led to a book deal for Carolina Maria, it also attracted a barrage of harassment and a backlash that was unceasing.  

After the book came out, rumors began to circulate of Carolina Maria’s difficult disposition. Her politics during the book’s press tour failed to garner any favor when listeners realized that what she had written about sexism, political corruption, and poverty was not mournful musings, but rather her true convictions. She found it necessary to call out racial prejudice and in a country whose social stability and national identity was built on the idea of colorblindness through race mixing, her words were seen as not only inflammatory, but also blatantly false. When the novelty of a published black favelada wore off, the press coverage grew harsh; critics from well-known papers resorted to tabloid-like spitefulness. A writer from the paper O Globo called her “uncouth.” A literary critic from the largest newspaper in the country, Folha de São Paulo, found her work after Quarto De Despejo to be “pastiche,” and a later article would run in that same paper with the headline, “Carolina: Victim or Crazy?”

In the publishing industry, some writers are allowed to be all the messy parts of themselves, even when their behaviors and beliefs border on violent. The perceived strength of their work assures them a mythical cachet that leaves them faultless. This free pass was not given to Carolina Maria. She was not allowed to be mercurial and received little empathy. Some literary critics and political pundits questioned her competence, and she was forced to prove her legitimacy for the duration of her career. Those who want to protect her legacy face a similar interrogation. “Look, my mother wrote everything herself. We slept in the same bed and every night I would hear her get up to write,” Vera Eunice told me. “If we had no lights she would use candles and continue writing.” In 2012, Audálio Dantas talked about the events leading up to the publication of the first entries, which became the book Quarto de Despejo. “I had not written a single line. The story was in those books,” he said.

When her first press tour came to an end, Carolina Maria wanted to step away from diaries, to write novels, poetry, and to be taken seriously as an author. Her publishers, however, wanted her to keep doing what had amazed before. She refused, and for a while, she stuck to her guns, because for the first time she had the privilege to say no. Money had come in, and four months after Quarto de Despejo debuted, Carolina Maria and her children were able to leave the favela for the middle-class neighborhood of Santana, a 30-minute train ride from Canindé. 

* * *

To support Quarto de Despejo, Carolina Maria traveled so often and so extensively that airport workers would hug her at the arrival terminal. “Every day cards come from international editors who want to translate the book. Even I am astonished at the impact,” she wrote. She was happy, almost forcefully so. The kind of joy that’s laced with fear and doubt but is also desperately hopeful.

After settling down in Santana, Carolina Maria set about creating a haven for herself and her small family. In Canindé they’d lived without electricity, relying on candles when she could afford to buy them. In her new home, she put in 14 light fixtures. She bought shoes for Vera Eunice, who had always hated walking barefoot, and her two boys, João José and José Carlos stopped acting out. “I used to think João was rude. But now that we have food in the house he has transformed,” she wrote in Casa de Alvenaria, her second book, also a diary published just under a year after the release of Quarto de Despejo. “He has left rude João to be nice João. Hunger really makes people neurótico.” Memory of life prior to the book was still very clear and so too was the relief and gratitude for her new beginnings. As in Canindé, she still woke up before the sun, but now there was no hand-wringing as she worried about what she would feed her children. In Santana, when João José, José Carlos, and Vera Eunice woke up, they had breakfast with bread and their tea with milk and sugar. Once the children left for school, she would begin preparations for lunch, then dinner. She didn’t have to beg from people’s homes anymore or dig through the garbage, fearful of eating something dosed with poison by store owners attempting to dissuade favelados from searching for food. Carolina Maria could now go out to the butcher and choose any cut of meat that she wanted. She bought fresh fruit and vegetables from the market. “My life is now velvet. Now I have food. I have a house. I have things to wear,” she wrote. 

When the novelty of a published black favelada wore off, the press coverage grew harsh; critics from well-known papers resorted to tabloid-like spitefulness.

Carolina Maria could have chosen to write only the good things that came her way when she left the favela, but in Casa de Alvenaria, she wrote about her new life as bluntly as she had about her old one. She saw just how inflexible the middle-class reality was to her presence. The white maid she had hired constantly made it known that she believed their roles should be reversed, and Carolina Maria made note of her complaints: “My God in the sky. This is the end of the world. God is punishing me. The world has capsized. I, a white person, have a black boss.” Her new neighbors treated her with contempt and saw her presence as an eyesore. “I am sad and not content because when something happens here, everyone always blames my children,” she wrote. Outside of her problems at home, she also had trouble opening a bank account because she didn’t have the proper ID. She opened a joint account with Dantas, who was now not only her editor but also her agent. She had money, but anti-blackness does not dissolve with improved social status. It stings differently, but is noticeable all the same. 

While many critics saw Casa de Alvenaria as the inconsequential ramblings of someone with no direction, it was here I saw Carolina Maria most clearly. She was painfully aware of what both the press and her peers thought and said about her, so she attempted to tread the tightrope carefully. She knew people were watching and wilfully betting on her failure, so she wanted to write without risking the welfare of her children. “I am not crazy about this idea of writing my diary based off my actual life now. I am writing against the rich. They are powerful and they can destroy me,” she agonized. 

Her first book had kicked up the reactionary dust of white guilt, and she tried to settle what her words had stirred up, while making it known that her success did not end social inequality. Carolina Maria had written her second book while caring for her three children, showing up to book signings, pleasing her agent and publisher, and trying to maintain her own sense of self. She was exhausted. “Due to the success of my book I am now regarded as a bill of exchange. A representation of profit. A gold mine,” she wrote in Casa de Alvenaria. The freedom money should have purchased now felt like a cruel joke, and her feelings of despair culminated in one of the saddest thoughts present in her known works: “Looking at the sky, if I had wings I would lift my children up there, one at a time, and never again return to the earth.” She had few friends and those who came to see her would ask for money, which she usually gave. Carolina Maria had done what we’ve all been told needs to be done to be a good citizen, to be happy and fulfilled, far away from hardship: She had worked hard. And now here she was, uncomfortable in her own brick house. 

* * *

Carolina Maria de Jesus passed away in 1977 in Parelheiros, three hours from Santana and Canindé. She had moved there almost a decade earlier, after she could no longer afford to live in Santana. It was a poor, rural neighborhood on the periphery of São Paulo, known for its heavy pollution. She died from respiratory complications, exacerbated by the industrial waste sites surrounding her home.

When memorializing her life, the writer of her obituary in Jornal do Brasil called her vassoura de papel — a paper scavenger. This was in reference to her work collecting scrap paper and iron, which she’d had to start again after she moved. She’d kept writing and financed the three books published before her death with the royalties from her first book. But she died poor. Not like how she started, but not how she should have been. Carolina Maria had signed a financially crippling contract and she saw very little of the money received from the international licensing of her books. 

‘Looking at the sky, if I had wings I would lift my children up there, one at a time, and never again return to the earth.’

For Tom Farias, author of Carolina: Uma Biografia, a book on the writer released in 2017, Carolina Maria deserves to be highlighted in the same Brazilian canon as Jorge Amado, Clarice Lispector, and Paulo Coelho. “She was more than just her diaries, she wrote plays, songs, and poetry. She was an artist,” he said.

Since her death, she has been often acknowledged during Novembro Negro — Brazil’s Black History Month, when the achievements of living and dead Afro-Brazilian leaders are brought center stage. But on a day-to-day basis, it’s mostly other black women who have kept her memory alive. In Salvador, Denise Ribeiro taught a popular class at Universidade do Estado Da Bahia (UNEB) on the social relevance of Quarto de Despejo in 2008. A health and nutrition professor and former coordinator for the Municipal Health Secretariat of Salvador, she’s spent more than three decades studying health from a myriad of perspectives, with a focus on black feminism, traditional communities, and African spirituality. In her home, the names of well-known Afro-Brazilian women authors lined the spines of her library: Fatima Oliveira, Djamila Ribeiro, and Conceição Evaristo, alongside other voices from the diaspora such as Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Carolina Maria was a fitting addition among the company of black women whose work forced the world to center blackness, even when it seemed inconceivable. “Carolina Maria had such a hard life and so much happened to her in that time,” Ribeiro told me. “Because I teach health, her book was so relevant to the things that affect the way black people live, and the reality is that her life is the life of so many people today. Nothing has changed at all.” 

Not that long ago, in March 2018, Marielle Franco, a queer Afro-Brazilian city councillor from Rio de Janeiro, was assassinated in her car just hours after speaking at an event for black women’s empowerment. Franco was born in Complexo da Maré, a Rio neighborhood made up of 16 favelas. It’s considered one of the largest communities in the city with almost 150,000 residents. In 2017 and 2018, more than 40 young people, the majority of them black and under 24, were killed during police raids in Maré, which happen frequently. In May of this year, eight people were left dead after another police operation in the area, which forced children to search for cover so they wouldn’t be struck by bullets. Access to electricity remains a problem with many using what’s locally known as gato, or cat. This device, made up of manually inserted wires, is attached to city electrical supplies and it diverts energy toward the overlooked favelas. Six years ago, the monetary amount of the diverted electricity came to $500 million in U.S. dollars. Prone to explosions, gatos are dangerous creations, but for many families, it is too expensive to get onto the formal electrical grid. Carolina Maria faced the same dilemma while living in Canindé during the 1950s.

* * *

Stories of black women creators whose work shook the world but who died underappreciated never cease to raise in me a familiar madness and a self-contained rage. It’s a hollow pain and a fear that hovers over my own hopes and dreams. But there is also a separate, wild appreciation for the existence of things deemed impossible. It is utter madness that Carolina Maria was able to write books at all, and it is madness that she made it enough for a girl from Zimbabwe to one day discover her work and see herself. In Carolina Maria’s writings, I saw a life that was lived even when living felt more like fighting.

During my last conversation with Vera Eunice she asked me to help her petition for a Carolina Maria de Jesus archive in the southern city of Curitiba. She also wanted my help collecting original print photographs of her mother because she has none. Most are in the hands of Dantas’s grandchildren. “Dantas took a lot of pictures of my mother,” she said. “Before he died we had been negotiating about his giving them to me, and now it’s even harder.” When I reached out to the Dantas estate to ask about the photographs of Carolina Maria, his executor did not offer a response.

In one of the most recognizable shots I found of Carolina Maria online, she is looking directly at the camera, head slightly tilted to the side. Her black skin, deep and smooth, her hair under a loosely tied headwrap. She spent most of her life unseen, living in shadows, and even when the light came, it didn’t brighten as much it blinded. She was the mirror, and what she reflected about her world was so startling it took time to properly process what she had released. When the noise died down, her unexpected work became an appalling reminder of a reality many would have rather just forgotten. In this picture, it’s as if she knew that she would not have many opportunities to really be seen, so she made it count. She looks determined, a little sad, a little proud. She was still, and for a moment she forced us to be still. Without anyone expecting it, a woman from the favela wrote a book that read an entire nation.

 

* * *

Tarisai Ngangura is a journalist and photographer. She documents black lives around the globe — their histories, legacies and movements. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Jezebel, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, New York Magazine, Hazlitt, VICE and Catapult.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Fact checker: Samantha Schuyler

Conversations with My Loveliest

Photo by Loverna Journey

Melissa Berman | Longreads | August 2019 | 10 minutes (2,413 words)

 

I saw her through the slit of the partially open bathroom door. She left it slightly ajar because she’d started thinking about these things.

She didn’t tell me so, but the slice of light peeking into the hallway said it all. We were taking that turn, the one I never thought would come, though, how could it not?

She was out of the shower now, drying herself off. I walked into the den to casually pretend I was oblivious to the whole thing.

“Can you come here please?” she called out.

So it is happening, I thought.

I looked over to the chest of drawers, the emergency call receiver with the red button — the HELP in such big white letters. The button was bigger than her hand. And the special alert pendant she was supposed to have around her neck, in case she fell or something, sat next to it. The cord was perfectly coiled, looking pathetic, like an ugly necklace no one would ever wear.

“Hell-lo?” her impatient voice curled around the cracked-open door and floated down the hallway.

I picked up the necklace and put it around my own neck.

Read more…

What Does It Mean To Be Moved?

A Dutch Ship, a Yacht and Smaller Vessels in a Breeze, c. 1660, Willem van de Velde the Younger. Found in the collection of the National Gallery, London. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Jennifer Wilson | Longreads | August 2019 | 10 minutes (2,734 words)

 

“Why does a ripe apple fall?” Tolstoy asks in War and Peace. “Because the wind shakes it…or because the boy standing below wants to eat it?” Technically, the wind is the movement of air across space; but in our poetry, myths, and moving pictures, wind is something else entirely. For Tolstoy, it was the forces of nature tilting downward to meet man’s desire. For others, the wind is something that gives us permission, permission to move off course, to be blown away, to be held back longer from our destination, to act wild. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Aeolus, the divine keeper of the winds, hands Odysseus a bag containing all the winds of the earth. Aeolus conjures the west wind to send the men home. But just when they have Ithaca in their sights, Odysseus’s men, convinced the bag has gold inside, open it up. The winds escape and transform into a storm that sends their ship all the way back to Aeolus. However, this time he refuses to help them, certain Odysseus has been cursed by the gods.

We have rendered wind a metaphor for anger, passion, unreason; we use it as an excuse when we want permission to lose our minds. It is that extra push to be the person you really want to be, or to explain who we already in fact are. As Wallace Stevens put it “The wind shifts like this/ Like a human without illusions/Who still feels irrational things within her.” In Joan Didion’s Los Angeles Notebook, she writes about the strong, dry Santa Ana winds that leave coastal California in disarray, sometimes on fire. But for Didion, the Santa Anas are something else too; their arrival allows for a certain relinquishing of control. “We know it [is coming] because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air.” I remember reading these lines for the first time and wishing for a wind like that, something that I could surrender to. Read more…