Search Results for: The Awl

Smell, Memory

Chanel N°5. Illustrations by Tamara Shopsin

By Rachel Syme

Racquet and Longreads | January 2018 | 11 minutes (2,800 words)

Our latest feature is a new story by Rachel Syme and produced in partnership with Racquet magazine.

Tennis, to me, smells like chlorine and white sage and tuna fish. I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the courts always wheeze dust when you walk on them and the dry heat shimmers off the net in the middle of summer. Our family belonged to a tennis club, but not the kind with rolling hills and security gates—instead, our courts were somewhat dumpy and gray, down near the university area filled with tattoo parlors and ratty cafés that seemed progressive in the ’90s for their hummus-forward menus. The club was made mostly of cement and gravel and funnel cakes, and its pro shop featured six-packs of tube socks and fresh cylinders of key-lime-colored balls and not much else. It may very well be fancier now, but my family stopped paying dues two decades ago.

We moved to the base of the mountains when I was 13, and my father now plays tennis every day at High Point, a gym filled primarily with active seniors and women doing Zumba. When he does go downtown to play, he meets my brother at one of the college courts near the hospital, where my brother spends most nights sewing throats back together as a resident in facial surgery. My father, who also cuts people open for a living, started playing a lot more tennis when my brother became a doctor; it is how they communicate wordlessly about what bloody traumas they’ve seen during the day. I imagine hitting something really hard back and forth is useful in this regard. Read more…

Dance Me to the End of Love

Photo by Ahmad Odeh

Abigail Rasminsky | Longreads | January 2018 | 20 minutes (4,983 words)

We converged on New York City from every corner of the globe: from college dance departments in Ohio and Michigan and Minnesota, and conservatories in Florida and California and North Carolina; from Athens and Stockholm and Tel Aviv, and tiny towns in Brazil and Ecuador and Italy, all of us sweeping into Manhattan, that sliver of an island, from the outer boroughs for morning class. In our bags: cut-off sweatpants and bottles of water, tape to bandage split and bleeding toes, matches to soften the tape, apples and bags of tamari almonds from the Park Slope Food Coop, sports bras and tubes of mascara, gum, cigarettes, wallets full of cash from late nights working in bars and restaurants, paperbacks and copies of New York Magazine, and iPods for long subway rides. The bags weighed 10, 15 pounds.

Our lives were organized around class. We needed jobs that wouldn’t interfere with our real reason for being here. We heard rumors of people who had gotten Real Jobs — as temps, as school teachers, jobs with insurance and benefits and holidays off — who swore they’d keep dancing. There are plenty of classes after work! they’d say. This was technically true, but we knew that they’d get talked into going out for that one post-work drink, or be lulled by the security and predictability of it all, the paycheck and the summer Fridays, the day-in, day-out schedule; a full-time modern dancer’s life too eccentric, too chancy, too ridiculous. We knew that once that happened, it was hard to let go and dive back in. This was the time: you had to do it early; this career couldn’t wait until 28 or 30, couldn’t wait for you to get properly settled in the city, to hook up your safety net. There would always be a stronger, younger dancer on your heels. The time was now, only now.

Read more…

Hollywood and ‘Disaster Feminism’

LOS ANGELES, CA - DECEMBER 04: A view of the Hollywood Sign on December 04, 2016 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by PG/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

According to a recent piece in The New Yorker by Dana Goodyear, Hollywood’s most powerful women are joining forces in a bit of “disaster feminism,” a riff on Naomi Klein’s notion of “disaster capitalism” — when governments seize a moment of vulnerability after a natural disaster or political or economic crisis to pass sweeping changes that the polity otherwise wouldn’t agree to.

Goodyear’s sprawling “Letter From California” asks as early as its headline the critical question: Can Hollywood change its ways?

She delves into the past, through an incredible, expansive interview with an unnamed nonagenarian, a former child actress who left the business at 16 horrified by the things men expected her to do.

And she talks to myriad current Hollywood-based sources, some named and others not, who recount anecdotes ranging from office conversations to overheard “come to Jesus” moments among men at a birthday party. The snapshots come together to form a picture of the reckoning ravaging that industry over the last few months.

One of the most striking anecdotes involves an unnamed man who, like many men and women right now, sees a difference between, in his words, “those who have done something really terrible” and, in Goodyear’s words, “the murky, in-between behavior — remarks or innuendos that at the time seemed fine, to the one initiating them.”

“I’ve never done anything like those guys,” he says, reminiscent of the way Weinstein said he was no Bill Cosby, and of the commenter on a story about Warner Bros. exec Andrew Kreisberg, who in Kreisberg’s name, wrote:

Nobody has accused me of rape like Weinstein.
Nobody has accused me of drugging them like Guillod.
Nobody has accused me of groping like Landesman.
Nobody has accused me of abusing minors like Spacey.
Nobody has accused me of exposing myself like Louis CK.
Nobody has accused me of asking for favors in exchange for work like Ratner.

“Men are living as Jews in Germany,” the unnamed man tells Goodyear. Listening to the audio version of this story, I blurted out an expletive at this line, accompanied by a sound like a dog laughing through torture. I had to pause it to give myself a chance to recover.

But then a few minutes later, Goodyear interviews “a Hollywood sexual-harassment investigator” who says that the new “zero tolerance” approach to harassment, in which names of abusive men are taken down off of buildings and other sites that once exalted them, is resulting in a “Soviet Union-style erasure.” Goodyear then writes: “Siberia, in this case, might be defined by what one fired agent told a former client: he was ‘pivoting away from representation’ and planning to reinvent himself in tech.”

Sure, tech might still, for a little while at least, be a good refuge for those who would prefer to continue protecting and even exalting abusive men.

There has been significant attention paid to the fear that we might be swinging the pendulum too far in one direction, that we might be catching innocents in our angry, raging nets of comeuppance. But less attention has been paid to a consequence of focusing so heavily on obvious monsters: What about the abusers we are letting off the hook because they’re just not vile enough? Or because their abuse wasn’t sexual?

Suki Kim’s exposé of public radio’s John Hockenberry was an exception to this: she gave equal weight to his racism and bullying as she did to his sexual overtures. But it’s much more common lately to hear people make excuses for workplace bullies whose behavior isn’t sexual, especially in “creative” industries like Hollywood and the media, which often glorify people with “passion” and “tempers” and “big personalities.” A friend told me about an effort to address harassment in radio and podcasting, and how when one person suggested the harassment include all workplace bullying, not only of a sexual nature, another person said that was impossible. “The whole industry will die,” we keep hearing, as if it is somehow physically impossible to do these jobs without abusing the people around you.

Even focusing on bullying excludes other behaviors that engender toxic work environments. An editor friend of mine, when this reckoning began, speculated that the fixation with monsters would allow some of his peers to not have to scrutinize their own behavior — actions that seem benign but are damaging, such as only mentoring young male reporters.

Much of Goodyear’s piece, especially the latter half, is devoted to questions like this. How can real change happen? She interviews Katherine Pope, a television executive who interviews women and people of color as a rule when hiring directors, who points out that even in companies that have women in senior positions, “there are layers of white men with veto power above them.”

Pope highlights the problem of “unconscious biases” as one element that prevents companies from taking chances on women the same way they do with charismatic men:

“The women have to be the most qualified, brilliant, perfect people in the world, and men get to grow into the job,” Pope said. “You hear code—‘You have to mature. You’re still learning.’ Or ‘I know she’s a great development executive, but does she know the business?’”

Goodyear notes that studios and networks haven’t done much beyond “applying reactive zero-tolerance policies and adding a few hotlines,” and quotes a former studio head who says he’s urged old colleagues “to implement some quick fixes —s ay, no more meetings in hotel rooms, on pain of firing — but they have ignored him.”

This is a rare bit of good news. Quick fixes are not the answer. Quick fixes allow problems to be swept under the rug; they allow people to move on and pretend that everything is okay when it very much is not. That’s what’s so heartening about some of the measures being pursued and proposed by powerful women in Hollywood, like the “inclusion clause” Women in Film is pitching studios and agencies to change the skewed ratio of women and men in writing, directing and producing positions “with an accompanying stamp to signify “gender parity in decision-making.'”

Goodyear also reveals how some of Hollywood’s most powerful women have been meeting for months “in secret,” resulting in an “action plan” detailed in a Jan. 1 New York Times story. The action plan includes the push for gender parity, but also reaches beyond Hollywood to “fight systemic sexual harassment… in blue-collar workplaces nationwide.” These scions of culture are promising “a legal defense fund, backed by $13 million in donations, to help less privileged women — like janitors, nurses and workers at farms, factories, restaurants and hotels — protect themselves from sexual misconduct and the fallout from reporting it.” This is especially poignant in light of the letter written in November, signed by approximately 700,000 women farmworkers, in support of the women of Hollywood coming forward to name and shame their abusers.

An unnamed attendee at those secret meetings told Goodyear that the Hollywood women were inspired by Naomi Klein’s concept of “disaster capitalism.” “We’re doing disaster feminism,” the attendee told Goodyear. “In the chaos that is ensuing, how can we create institutional, structural change, so if the moment passes those things will be in place?”

My Daughter Died, But I’m Still Mothering Her

neo8iam via Pexels

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more…

Watching a Fall

AP Photo/Massoud Hossaini

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

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

He did not wear a necktie.

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Mrs. Thompson,

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

Your friend,
A.L. Hash

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

Can we imagine?

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

* * *

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

‘Cat Person’ and the Young Person

(Remains/Getty)

The year of our Lord 2017 was an overfull one, in which many things, both wretched and good and sometimes wretched-but-ultimately-good, happened. It was also the year a short story went viral.

“Cat Person,” a short story by Kristen Roupenian published in The New Yorker, was an unlikely viral sensation. Countless outlets produced think pieces and reactions. There were hordes of women for whom the story resonated, juxtaposed against the men who had such an aversion to the story, many could not even recognize it for what it was, frequently referring to it as an “essay” or an “article” when it was clearly short fiction. A Twitter account popped up to chronicle some of the male takes. The Cut put together a delightful video of cats responding to the story and the Awl published a version of the story from the cat’s perspective. The photo accompanying the story was, to some, off-putting: An extreme close-up of two mouths about to kiss. After reading the story, I agreed that it is perfectly suited to the story, but every time it showed up in my Twitter feed, I shuddered, said a mental “HARD PASS” and scrolled hurriedly.

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No Más Fantasía

Illustration by Zach Meyer

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

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

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

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Server, Busser, Manager, Spy: Inside the High-Stakes World of Restaurant Oppo Research

With the rise of crowdsourced restaurant reviews on Yelp and its many peers, you’d think old-school, print-media critics would be a thing of the past by now. You’d think wrong: as Jessica Sidman shows in her Washingtonian story, restaurant owners go to incredible lengths to identify prominent critics like the Washington Post’s Tom Sietsema, in the hopes of manufacturing a flawless, multiple-star-worthy experience. A lot of the energy is spent preemptively, creating and updating dossiers with blurred photos of critics and detailed notes about their culinary (and other) quirks. But there’s also a field-level aspect to these operations — the intricate choreography that kicks into gear as soon as Sietsema or another top critic enters the house.

To communicate about a critic, some restaurants have their own code words. One Italian joint called Sietsema “Neapolitan,” because it didn’t sound too weird to say out loud in the open kitchen. Others, including the kitchens of Fabio Trabocchi, refer to Sietsema as “Papa Bear.”

“I heard ‘Papa Bear in the house,’ and it’s like a fire drill,” says a sous chef for one of Ashok Bajaj’s restaurants, which include Rasika and Bibiana. The sous chef was in the middle of butchering 150 pounds of salmon for a large banquet that night, but when the alert came in, sous chefs kicked line cooks off their stations and began preparing Sietsema’s lunch themselves. (In other kitchens, the executive chef might take over complete prep of a dish. That way, only one person is to blame if the review is terrible.) “It is a huge wrench in the operation, because what you’re basically doing is interrupting the regular flow of service to stop and concentrate on one table and the other tables surrounding.”

With the executive chef orchestrating, the sous chefs prepared triplicates of every component of every dish. Nerves, as always, ran high. “I’ve burned more shit trying to cook something perfect for Tom Sietsema than I ever would have if I didn’t know that he was there,” the sous chef says.

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My Secondhand Lonely

(Klaus Vedfelt/Getty)

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

How We Got There from Here

Michael Stipe and Peter Buck of R.E.M., 1985. (Paul Natkin/Getty Images)

Anna Armstrong | Longreads | December 2017 | 12 minutes (2,903 words)

 

“Jefferson, I think we’re lost.” — Little America, R.E.M.

The distance between Rodeo and Santa Cruz is just over 90 miles. For the most part the drive is unremarkable — urban, industrial cities and rural, unincorporated towns along the Eastshore Freeway, shaping the wasteland east of San Francisco Bay. But then the interstate gives way to Highway 17 and you begin the ascent to another world. The road is a thin, curlicue curved by the green Santa Cruz Mountains.

As a child I made this trip many times with my parents in our wood-paneled station wagon packed tightly with my five siblings and me — my gaze resting out the window, tracking the miles by the three-minute pop songs on the radio while an endless imaginary flat-panel saw tethered to my slight wrist sliced through the redwoods. Our destination? The historic Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

The winding highway was a signal that we were close to the magical unworldliness of rickety wooden roller coasters, salty ocean breezes, barefoot children, bikinied girls, sun-kissed boys, a symphony of voices, crashing waves, tinny arcade bells, the smells and tastes of corn dogs and candied apples — and far, far away from the broke-down, shuttered place of stillness, silence, and late-to-bloom fondness in the rearview mirror. What separated Santa Cruz from Rodeo was not just miles but a tangible joy you could hold in your hands. Coming home sunburned, exhausted, happy — sleeping through the curves of the highway, waking abruptly in time to see the straight line to home.

June 1985. I was 17 years old and newly licensed. I was preparing to make the trek from home to Santa Cruz in my very first car, a 1972 Chevy Malibu that braved a Black Flag bumper sticker in a town that just didn’t get it. The destination? A very different type of spectacle: A rock ‘n’ roll show. The Athens, GA band R.E.M were scheduled to play the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium.

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