It’s been over a decade since the parents left. I still don’t say they died, because they didn’t. Not to me. All my American friends whose parents are still alive console me, “It’ll get easier, Madhu,” — shortening my name with the casual authority most non-Indians have — “it’ll get easier with time.”
I have been waiting for that ease for years now.
When I moved to America a quarter of a century ago, what hit me wasn’t what I saw but what was absent on the streets, in neighborhoods, near the ocean, in movie theaters, in parks. The absence of older people. Everywhere, there were only young families, young singles, children, and animals. Lots of well-dressed puppies and even more tottering, unbalanced children. The older generation was hidden in assisted living behind decrepit malls, in high-rises facing lakes for exorbitant rental prices, or in Florida around golf courses.
I used to tell Baba when I’d call home every other weekend for 15 minutes at $2.05 per minute on an MCI calling card, “It’s as if they are afraid of seeing old people, Baba. Like that reminds Americans of impending death.”
He’d reply, laughing, “Ah, but it’s more than death, though. The previous generation guides the newest generation. The stories pass from the previous generation not to their children, but their grandchildren. The white people seem to have forgotten that, shotti, such a shame.”
I laughed with him, our favorite pastime, rolling our eyes at the follies of ‘these Americans.” But then, it was 1993 when I arrived in America with two suitcases and two hundred dollars in travelers’ checks. In 1993, I was invincible, young and convinced that my Baba would live forever. Read more…
Actress Fan Bingbing poses for photographers upon arrival at the opening ceremony of the 71st international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Tuesday, May 8, 2018. (Photo by Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP)
Fan Bingbing is one of China’s biggest movie stars, if not the biggest, with her combo of high glamor and girl-next-door accessibility. Everyone knows her, everyone loves her. And so everyone was worried when, in August of last year, she just … disappeared. No public appearances. No social media activity. For almost six weeks.
Then, on October 3, Fan reappeared as suddenly as she had vanished. According to the South China Morning Post, she had been held under a form of detention known as “residential surveillance,” at a holiday resort in a suburb of Jiangsu. The system was instituted in 2012, under President Xi Jinping, making it legal for the Chinese secret police to detain anyone charged with endangering state security or committing corruption and hold them at an undisclosed location for up to six months without access to lawyers or family members. Sources close to Fan told me that she had been picked up by plainclothes police. While under detention, she was forbidden to make public statements or use her phone. She wasn’t given a pen or paper to write with, nor allowed any privacy, even when taking showers.
The problem? Making too much money, and not paying enough in taxes. As May Jeong explains in her Vanity Fair story about Bingbing’s brush with state security, her behavior was par for the course in the Chinese film industry and her notoriety made her the perfect target for a government that wanted to deliver a powerful message, fast: things aren’t going to be like this anymore, and no one’s too popular to get caught.
Under Xi’s crackdown, tens of thousands of people have disappeared into the maw of the police state. An eminent TV news anchor was taken away hours before going on air. A retired professor with views critical of the government was dragged away during a live interview on Voice of America. A billionaire was abducted from his private quarters in the Four Seasons in Hong Kong. Other high-profile disappearances include Interpol president Meng Hongwei in September, photojournalist Lu Guang in November, two Canadians who went missing in December, as well as the writer Yang Hengjun, who went missing in January. “The message being sent out is that nobody is too tall, too big, too famous, too pretty, too whatever,” said Steve Tsang, who runs the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
Taken together, Xi’s moves represent a dramatic rollback of the economic reforms and relative freedom that enabled the film industry to flourish in the time before his reign. “Deng Xiaoping kept everyone together by promising to make them rich,” said Nicholas Bequelin, the East Asia director of Amnesty International. “What keeps things together under Xi is fear. Fear of the system, where no matter how high you are, from one day to the next you can disappear.”
The Philippine Constabulary Band at the 1904 World’s Fair. Grace’s great grandfather, Pedro Navarro, stands in the front row second to the right holding a piccolo. Photo courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis / Restless Books
Grace Talusan| an excerpt from The Body Papers | Restless Books | April 2019 | 16 minutes (4,046 words)
“Did I ever tell you about the dog I had in the Philippines?” my father asked me when I was younger.
As a boy, my father lived in Tondo, the most densely populated area of Manila, infamous for its slums and high crime rates. Before it burned down, his family lived in a house above their sari-sari store, where they sold prepared foods, snacks, soda, and other convenience items. You could buy single sticks of cigarettes and gum, a dose of aspirin, or a packet of shampoo good for one wash. When he shared stories about his childhood, my American sensibilities were always shocked.
One day, a street dog followed him home and joined the other dogs already living in his family’s yard. The dogs didn’t have names; they were all called aso, dog. “Our dogs were not for petting,” my father explained. “They were low-tech burglar alarms and garbage disposals.”
But this dog was special. Totoy named his dog, “Lucky,” after, Lucky Strikes cigarettes. This detail still astounds me: At eight years old, my father had a favorite brand of cigarettes.
Chris Outcalt | Longreads | March 2019 | 13 minutes (3,723 words)
The helicopter took off from a narrow patch of grass off the side of Route 2 about 30 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska. The two-lane highway runs like an artery through the heart of the Alaskan interior, connecting the state’s third-most populous city to the outer reaches of North America. I’m riding shotgun in the lightweight, four-passenger chopper; Colorado State University (CSU) archeologist Julie Esdale is seated behind me. Esdale, who earned her Ph.D. in anthropology at Brown University, has spent more than a decade in this part of the state, exploring centuries of soil with a community of other social scientists whose aim is to weave together the tangled origins of humanity.
Fifty feet up, as the booming whop-whop of the propeller blades cuts through the air overhead, we crest a row of trees along the edge of the road, revealing a spectacular view: a massive, tree-lined valley framed to the west by the peaks of the Alaska Range, one of the highest stretches of mountains in the world. These jagged hills formed millions of years ago; shifting tectonic plates collided along the Denali and Hines Creek Faults, pushing the earth 20,000 feet into the air. Our destination lies about 10 miles into this lowland known as the Tanana Flats. Esdale and her colleagues believe the spot, a vestige of a 14,000-year-old hunter-gatherer encampment hidden deep in the earth, could hold important clues to better understanding the behavior of North America’s earliest inhabitants.
Esdale helped discover and excavate this important ground known as McDonald Creek, which turned out to be one of the oldest archeological sites in the country. Field crews found fragments of stone tools, charcoal dust left behind by ancient firepits, and remains of bison, mammoth, elk, and waterfowl. Admittedly, I hadn’t spent much time thinking about those who pioneered the landmass I’d lived on my entire life, let alone the particulars of their livelihood; but my interest piqued at the thought of these scientists dedicating their professional lives to better understanding those who came before us, like a detective unit attempting to solve one of the first mysteries of mankind.
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Esdale, who’s in her mid-40s and has straight, shoulder-length blond hair she often tucks under a ball cap out in the field, explained that Alaska is a hot spot for this research — that it was both a matter of history and geography. The last ice age took hold about 2.6 million years ago. When it began to melt around 12,000 years ago, it covered a well-documented land bridge between what is now Russia and Alaska. But before the glaciers thawed, causing water levels in the Bering Strait to rise, submerging the area known as Beringia, early humans wandered east to west across this continental divide. They were the first people to set foot in the New World, and they walked straight into what is today central Alaska.
…my interest piqued at the thought of these scientists dedicating their professional lives to better understanding those who came before us, like a detective unit attempting to solve one of the first mysteries of mankind.
“Early sites are hit and miss in the lower forty-eight,” Esdale told me. “But in the interior, we’ve got lots and lots of them.” Still, perhaps too far-flung to have slipped into the mainstream, she said Alaskan archeology was often overlooked in favor of research in the continental United States. Esdale’s husband, Jeff Rasic, also an Alaskan archeologist, told me he’d attended numerous national meetings of top researchers in the field and had often been struck by how little they tracked new findings in Alaska. “These are full-time academic archeologists,” Rasic said, “and they’re behind.” If I ever wanted to have a look up close, Esdale said she’d be happy to show me around when I first contacted her by phone last year.
By chance, I flew into Fairbanks two days ahead of the summer solstice, which brings nearly 24 hours of daylight to the region. When I landed close to midnight the sky was bright enough it could’ve easily been noon. (Later, I overheard a popular American Legion baseball game was scheduled for the following night. First pitch: 12:01 a.m.) I met Esdale early the next morning. We stopped at the local Safeway for a coffee and to pack a lunch, then headed to the helicopter launch site. After about 15 minutes in the air, Esdale pointed to our landing spot, a prominent mound that jutted above the flat, wooded landscape.
As we approached, she explained the scenery would’ve looked a lot different 14,000 years ago; the ground was still recovering from the ice age’s deep freeze and the trees hadn’t grown in yet. Nevertheless, I could see what the people who camped here back then were thinking. Atop the high point of an otherwise flat area would’ve been a good place to lookout for predators, scout prey for their next meal, or to simply rest their legs and enjoy the view after a long walk. At least that last part, I thought, we had in common.
***
In Alaska, a state known for its expansive territory, the federal government is the largest landowner, controlling about 61 percent of the terrain. Most of that is allocated for public use and managed by the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service. There are other operators, however; notably, the United States Army oversees the use of about 1.5 million acres in the central part of the state.
Drawn to the open, undeveloped land and distinct climate, the military has maintained a presence in interior Alaska since the 1930s. Today, the local base is known as Fort Wainwright, “home of the Arctic Warriors.” During the frigid Alaskan winters, soldiers test gear, vehicles, and the limits of their own bodies in extreme cold. What’s more, with ample space, units can spread out and simulate wartime drills and construct practice bombing ranges. But although there are few neighbors to disturb, federal law — the National Historic Preservation Act and the Archeological Resources Protection Act — requires the military pay close attention to what might lie beneath the surface. In fact, given that the area is archaeologically rich, the Army funds a team of about half a dozen people who make sure it doesn’t trample any sensitive material — anything from stone tools or rock carvings to portions of structures or grave sites at least a century old. For the past eight years, Esdale has run the team.
Esdale first moved to Alaska in 2002 as a student, several years before getting the gig with the Army. She’d been conducting research for her Ph.D. in the far reaches of northwest Alaska when she met her husband out in the field. Not long after, Rasic got a job with the National Park Service based in Fairbanks; they made the move north together, two scientists in love headed for the Last Frontier. That first year they got a dog, a big, goofy lab who demanded a lot of time outside — even when it was 50 below and felt like your eyelids would freeze shut after a few minutes. Eventually, Esdale and Rasic had two boys and she got the contract with the Army. By then Fairbanks felt like home.
Although sharpshooting members of the armed forces and a crew of erudite scientists studying human history might seem like strange bedfellows, the partnership has identified hundreds of significant sites hidden in the Alaskan tundra. Take McDonald Creek, for example. Several years ago, the brass at Fort Wainwright proposed building a road through the Tanana Flats. A team headed by Colorado State’s Ned Gaines, which included Esdale, dug a few test pits while surveying in advance of the development. “Everywhere we put a shovel, we found artifacts,” Esdale said. The Army rerouted the planned road, and excavation of the site was turned over to Texas A&M researcher Kelly Graf.
Although sharpshooting members of the armed forces and a crew of pesky erudite scientists studying human history might seem like strange bedfellows, the partnership has identified hundreds of significant sites hidden in the Alaskan tundra.
I met Graf and her team of mostly graduate students last summer. From the clearing where our helicopter landed, Esdale and I walked a well-worn path to a sort of base camp — an area among the trees about 80 feet in diameter. The camp was surrounded by a small, pop-up electric fence designed to keep animals away, and there were dozens of water jugs and large plastic bear-proof storage containers that resembled beer kegs. About 10 people sat around in fold-out camping chairs and on tree stumps finishing their lunch. This was Graf’s fourth year digging at the remote location. One highlight, she said, was they’d recently found what appeared to be a bone from a dog. Graf said the discovery could amount to evidence of the earliest known domesticated canine in North America. While we were talking she wondered aloud whether these early people would have traversed Beringia via some sort of dogsled or used the animals to help shoulder the weight of their belongings.
After lunch, the group migrated to the nearby dig location, a large pit that looked as if someone had pressed a massive rectangular cookie cutter into the ground and discarded all the dirt in the middle. Excavating an archeological site is tedious work, a far cry from the escapades of the world’s most famous member of the trade, the fictional character Indiana Jones. Rather, it consists mainly of carefully scraping away layers of dirt with a trowel and cataloging any items for further examination and analysis. “Our goal as anthropologists — it’s not just about treasures, not just about finding stuff,” Esdale told me. “It’s to understand people.”
Scientists have learned a lot about the founding populations of Indigenous peoples who lived in this area, particularly about how they subsisted. These people were mobile, resourceful, and skilled — unquestionably successful big-game hunters who preyed on bison, elk, and maybe even mammoth. They used spears and a throwing device called an atlatl, a curved tool made from wood, bone, or ivory not unlike the plastic tennis ball throwers popular at dog parks today. Hunters used it to launch darts fashioned with a pointed stone tip. (The bow and arrow didn’t show up for another 12,000 years.) Flakes discarded during the sharpening of these points are often found in the soil at sites like McDonald Creek.
‘Our goal as anthropologists — it’s not just about treasures, not just about finding stuff,’ Esdale told me. ‘It’s to understand people.’
For her part, though, Graf hoped to find more than flakes. Carbon dating of charcoal left behind by campfires and preserved 10 feet underground suggested that people occupied this location three different times throughout history — 7,000, 13,000, and nearly 14,000 years ago — making it one of the oldest sites in Alaska. “It’s an interesting place,” Graf told me. “We’ve always been looking for the base camp of these people. There are a lot of hunting camps around, shorter-term sites, but somewhere they had to be hunkering down, where grandma and grandpa and the kids and the mom, where everyone was hanging out. That’s kind of what we’re wondering, because this is a nice, fixed spot.”
“So, this could be that type of place?” I asked.
“Could be,” she said. “Could be.”
***
On my second day in Fairbanks, Esdale introduced me to an archeologist in his mid-70s named Chuck Holmes. He had a full head of neatly parted gray hair and a trimmed white beard. Before we met, Esdale outlined Holmes’s long resume. He’d taught at multiple universities, enlightening undergrads and guiding Ph.D. candidates, and had held senior-level science jobs with both the state and federal governments. It all amounted to decades of research and discoveries in the region. Hearing Esdale, I got the impression she was describing a sort of grandfather of Alaskan archeology.
Holmes first came to Alaska via Florida, about as far away as you can get in the United States — a fact his mother made sure to note when Holmes told her he’d decided to enroll at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1970. Holmes had fallen for the state’s wide-open territory the year before. Thanks to a friend’s father who worked for one of the railroad companies, Holmes and his hometown pal landed summer jobs laying train track across the tundra. “My friend was a little less interested in doing that kind of work; I just saw it as an adventure,” Holmes said. “I got in good shape and got to see quite a bit of the state.” From that moment, aside from brief stopovers in Calgary, Canada, and Washington state, Holmes spent the rest of his life in Alaska.
Holmes told me that as a kid he’d always had a penchant for finding things, so it was perhaps no surprise that during his undergrad years in Fairbanks he found archeology. “I was hooked on Alaska at that point,” Holmes said. But it was something he discovered two decades later that Esdale wanted me to learn more about: another archeological site not too far from McDonald Creek. The spot was known as Swan Point, and it happened to be the oldest historical site with evidence of human activity not just in Alaska but in the rest of the United States as well.
Back then, in the early 1990s, Holmes worked for the Office of History and Archeology in Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources. One summer, he led a group of students digging at an already well-established site in the Tanana Valley. A couple of the kids involved in the excavation wanted to venture out to look for something new, so Holmes pulled out a couple of maps and a compass, essential tools for an archeologist in the days before Google Earth. He identified what looked like a promising topographic feature: a hill off in the woods that appeared high enough to function as a lookout point, but not so high that it would’ve deterred a group of hunter-gatherers from climbing to the top. Holmes told the students to check it out, dig a few holes, and see what they found.
On their first attempt, the kids had trouble pinpointing the right location. Holmes sent them back the next day with additional instructions, and this time they returned with wide grins. First, they handed Holmes a couple of small plastic bags containing flakes likely cleaved from a stone tool. Not bad, Holmes thought. That was enough to suggest the site was worthy of further exploration. The students, however, had one more bag to show off. This one contained a scrap of ivory. The hard, white material, typically part of a tooth or tusk, is much more difficult to find in the wild, particularly in a shallow test pit dug at a somewhat hastily selected point on a map. It was like plucking a needle you didn’t know existed from a haystack the size of Delaware.
Holmes and other researchers excavated Swan Point on and off for the next two decades. Carbon dating placed it at about 14,200 years old. Scientists uncovered all kinds of gems, including stone tools, bones from a baby mammoth, food-storage pits, and hearths that campfires were built upon. The findings from Swan Point have been documented and published in numerous scientific papers, and in 2008 the government listed the site on the National Register of Historic Places. As it turned out, Holmes explained, much of the Swan Point technology was similar to what had been commonly found by scientists on the other side of the land bridge in Siberia, suggesting these people were related in some way. “These guys, we’re not really sure who the heck they are,” Holmes said, referring to whomever camped at Swan Point so long ago.
“They’re basically Asian; they are ancient folk,” he said. “But their genes carried into the New World.”
***
Later that day, after meeting Holmes, Esdale and I bumped along an overgrown, two-lane Jeep road that ran deep into the woods. We were headed toward another archeological site on Army lands, this one dating back about 13,000 years. The road dead-ended at a clearing atop a ridge with a view of a river and an open forest below. Esdale explained this location, aptly named Delta River Overlook, marked the first time that archeologists had found a Beringian site that humans appeared to have occupied in the winter. They could tell, she said, based on the existence of a specific tooth that had belonged to a baby bison — a molar that only erupts in the cold season.
Winters were lean times for humans 13,000 years ago. In addition to tracking larger animals and storing the frozen meat under rocks, hunters in these tribes also set snares to trap small game for times when the weather made it challenging to venture too far from camp; at Delta River Overlook, for example, there’s evidence of grouse and ground squirrel. Staying warm was another challenge. Furs from big-game animals helped, but scientists are still piecing together the picture of what their shelters might’ve looked like that long ago. Best guess from ethnographic evidence, Esdale told me, is that families constructed dwellings by draping animal skins over a dome of flexible branches and packing the outside with snow for additional insulation.
The excavation of the Delta River site was led by a professor of archeology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks named Ben Potter. Potter was in China on a research trip when I visited Alaska, but I spoke with him on the phone later. Like Holmes, he’s made a number of important contributions to the Alaskan archeological canon. Potter’s body of work, however, contains one particularly unique entry: He uncovered the oldest human remains to date at an archeological site in Alaska. The first finding occurred in 2010, after years of work at an 11,500-year-old site known as Upward Sun River.
Potter and his team were contracted in 2005 to conduct a survey ahead of a proposed railway expansion through Army lands 40 miles from Fairbanks. His crew dug a few test pits and found evidence of human activity. The rail project was eventually rerouted, and in 2009 Potter received a grant from the National Science Foundation to continue excavating and investigating the site. He made the startling discovery the following year. About a meter down, Potter’s crew found parts of a human skull; later analysis determined the bones had come from a 3-year-old cremated child. In 2013, they went deeper into the site, and the team found the remains of two infants. Extracting human remains from the ground in Alaska necessitates consulting with local Indigenous tribes, which maintain a notable presence in their ancestral lands in the state — about 100,000 people spread across at least four groups. With the support and cooperation of local tribal leaders, his team removed the bones and sent out a sample for genetic analysis. They published the results last year.
The goal is just knowing more — to keep understanding.
The DNA makeup revealed an entirely new population of Native peoples, a group Potter labeled “Ancient Beringians.” There were other important findings at Upward Sun River. For example, they discovered fish bones buried in a hearth, where hunters would’ve cooked their meat, which helped Potter and his team establish the earliest known human consumption of salmon in the Americas. Previously, scientists had thought this occurred near the ocean. “It wasn’t on the coast, it was in the deep interior rivers,” Potter said. “That’s pretty exciting.” But the conclusions drawn from the DNA analysis were by far the most significant: a previously unknown branch of ancient humans.
It was a substantial addition to the archeology of the time. Although the general narrative about the early migration of people from Siberia to the Americas is mostly agreed upon, the specifics are subject to ongoing debate among social scientists. When exactly did these ancient people first arrive in Alaska? Did they settle down? If so, for how long? When did they colonize the rest of America? Did they travel inland or along the coast? What the DNA from Potter’s discovery and other analysis showed was that for a period of several thousand years the genetic code of early Indigenous people evolved in isolation, no longer mixing with the DNA of those who lived in eastern Asia. It also appeared that these Ancient Beringians were eventually separated from those who went on to colonize the rest of the Americas.
Two other groups of scientists have discovered new genetic evidence that he felt buttressed his work. The findings included, in part, a human DNA sample from a 12,600-year-old cave in Montana and a single tooth preserved from a 1949 dig at a 10,000-year-old site in western Alaska, hundreds of miles from Fairbanks. The tooth had long been forgotten, stashed away on a dusty shelf at a museum in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was found by, of all people, Esdale’s husband Rasic. Turned out, the genetic makeup of the tooth matched the children’s from Upward Sun River.
“This actually clarifies quite a bit,” Potter told me when I followed up with him after the new papers were released. He walked me through the scenario he saw taking shape: People were likely living in Asia around 16,000 years ago. The glaciers began to melt and tribes migrated from western Beringia to Alaska around, say, 15,000 years ago. Then you have a split: ancient Beringians sticking around Alaska and another group traveling south, either inland, along the coast, or both, entering the rest of the Americas. That second group, he said, looked to be a single population that spread quickly and later split into many lineages.
Talking with Potter about the DNA results and migration theories it reminded me of a conversation Esdale and I had on our drive out to Delta River Overlook, the day before I left Alaska and flew back to the rest of the United States. We’d been talking about how, based on the antique elements of the profession, archeologists are necessarily adept at spinning complex abstractions from limited evidence, whether it’s the shape of a microblade point or a scrap of an animal bone. It seemed to me, however, that that meant there was no endgame to this work — that it could go on forever, like trying to solve a massive jigsaw puzzle in which an untold number of pieces were destroyed eons ago. When I floated this thought to Esdale, she laughed. “Yeah, no, there’s never an endgame. The goal is just knowing more — to keep understanding.”
We continued along the Jeep road into the forest.
“I never really thought about it like that,” she said.
***
Chris Outcalt is a writer and editor based in Colorado.
I’d responded to the Author’s anonymous posting on Craigslist, and when I showed up to the interview, I still didn’t know who I’d be speaking with. I was 23, in grad school in New York, piecing together my rent with odd jobs. The month before, I’d replied to an equally opaque Craigslist ad and found myself wobbling over cobblestones in stilettos, club promoting for a man known to the Meatpacking District only as “Doc.” Doc had informed me that I was an “8” among regular girls, but in club world I was only a “4,” given my 5-foot-3-inch stature. He wondered: Did I have many girlfriends over 5-foot-11 I could bring around? They didn’t need to be actual models, just tall enough to be mistaken for models by drunk men from across dark, strobe-lit rooms. I needed a new job.
The Author shuffled into our interview at his Upper East Side apartment, his velvet slippers whispering against the Oriental rugs. He was pushing 80, a small man with bushy white eyebrows and a bulbous nose that pressed flat against his face. He had a full, pouty lower lip and a thin upper lip that curled under when he smiled.
The Author had been a staff writer at an iconic American magazine for three decades and had written a remarkable number of books, mostly memoirs. He’d been blind since early childhood, and while his is surely a story of overcoming great odds, the Author was notorious for his poor treatment of assistants. He actually alluded to this in our interview, telling me there were some unsavory rumors out there and not to believe a word of them. I was dubious but desperate for money. And there was a small part of me that hoped he’d softened with age. Or maybe that he’d sense some unfulfilled potential in me. That he’d treat me with the care one gives to a rare find — plucked from the detritus at a yard sale, snubbed by foolish bygone handlers.
The Author, his wife, and their two adult daughters went to their house on an island off the New England coast every August, and I was expected to go along. The only way onto the island was a 20-minute ferry ride from the nearest seaside town. One road ran through most of the 14-mile island, a hamlet of spruce tree forests and rolling pastures. The island was a private sanctuary for the Northeast’s inconspicuous elite, and on the drive from the ferry station, mansions flickered through the trees. The Author’s house was at the end of a short, wooded drive. He’d built it in the ’80s, with the help of a Modernist architect who’d designed a few New York skyscrapers. By the island’s standards, the house wasn’t sprawling or flashy, but it was distinctively lovely, perched on an embankment above the frigid harbor. Down the hill toward the beach was a pool and a pool house, tucked into an alcove of trees. Past the pool, a pathway cut through high grass and down to the rocky beachfront. I stayed in a spare basement bedroom, with a window that looked out onto the harbor. Their cook, a Brazilian woman in her 80s, slept in a room adjacent to mine.
It didn’t take long to realize that my presence was more a thing to be tolerated than embraced by the family. I wasn’t asked many questions about my life aside from those necessitated by politeness. And to be fair, I can’t imagine what it would be like for your most intimate family memories to include a revolving cast of paid help, always on their way somewhere else. Anyway, it seemed like I was mainly there to enable the Author’s wife and daughters not to be there, so he and I were often alone. My job title was “editorial assistant,” though the only editorial skill required was basic literacy. I read the New York Times aloud to the Author every morning, then we perused headlines from The Guardian. Then we responded to his emails, of which there were generally few of note. Then there was lunch, his nap, a walk, and an afternoon activity. Aside from the nap, we did everything together. Read more…
It’s hard to know what would be a good place from which to imagine a future of bad smells and no privacy, deceit and propaganda, poverty and torture. Does a writer need to live in misery and ugliness to conjure up a dystopia?
Apparently not.
We’d been walking more than an hour. The road was two tracks of pebbled dirt separated by a strip of grass. The land was treeless as prairie, with wildflowers and the seedless tops of last year’s grass smudging the new growth.
We rounded a curve and looked down a hillside to the sea. A half mile in the distance, far back from the water, was a white house with three dormer windows. Behind it, a stone wall cut a diagonal to the water like a seam stitching mismatched pieces of green velvet. Far to the right, a boat moved along the shore, its sail as bright as the house.
This was where George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. The house, called Barnhill, sits near the northern end of Jura, an island off Scotland’s west coast in the Inner Hebrides. It was June 2, sunny, short-sleeve warm, with the midges barely out, and couldn’t have been more beautiful.
Orwell lived here for parts of the last three years of his life. He left periodically (mostly in the winter) to do journalism in London and, for seven months in 1947 and 1948, to undergo treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis. Although he rented Barnhill and didn’t own it, he put in fruit trees and a garden, built a chicken house, bought a truck and a boat, and invested numberless hours of labor in what he believed would be his permanent home. When he left it for the last time, in January 1949, he never again lived outside a sanatorium or hospital.
I came to Jura after a two-week backpacking trip across Scotland. My purpose was to drink single-malt on Islay, the island to the south, and enjoy two nights of indulgence at Ardlussa House, where Orwell’s landlord had lived. I was not on a literary pilgrimage. Barnhill is not open to the public, and no one among the island’s 235 residents remembers Orwell. Read more…
I signed up for Gmail in 2005, a month after graduating college and outgrowing my .edu address. Technically the service was still in beta testing. It was early enough that I could claim my entire name, beginning to end, no numbers or crazy characters. The simplicity of my “OG handle”speaks to its vintage. I have to admit I’m rather proud of it. It also means I get a lot of correspondence not actually meant for me. Since I joined Gmail, it has grown to more than 1.5 billion active users: 20% of the world’s population. Since I joined Gmail, the world’s population itself has increased by 1+ billion! There are only so many words in the English language. There are only so many variations. Social media handles are stolen and sold like Uranium on the black market. IP addresses are finite.
I am included on the timesheet of a Melbourne store, Boost Juice — scheduled to work the closing shift on March 24 — and on the agenda for the 64th annual general meeting of the Citizens Advice Bureau in a small town outside of London. World Vision UK writes to thank me for my “donation of 10” (ten what, I don’t know). Kid to Kid Utah thanks me, too, for a donation of $9.32 worth of used children’s items. I am notified that my job application to teach at primary school in Leeds, UK, has been received. The school is rated 2.6 out of 5. One review reads: “Want your child to be bullied then send them there.”
One November I receive a note from Matt, who thinks he knows me from East High. “You Freshman Scum! A belated happy birthday this week. Hope all is going well.” (My birthday is in April, and no one would have called me “scum” when I was a high school freshman. I would have blushed. I might have cried.) December, I get a photo from Zoe — subject line: “SNOW,” body copy: “Happy Winter!” — of a courtyard, stone walls, and iron grate, blanketed in white. Adam sends me a photo, accompanied by no text at all, of three men in a lush, walled garden, one holding a Smart Water, the second holding a Starbucks cup, the third showing off three tickets to a Colts game. An American flag is stuck in a flowerpot.
Sophie writes to say how proud she is of my daughter, who “was such a sweet leader in the classroom today.” Marci tells me she signed up her son Cameron for the Abundant Life Garden Project, an after-school program at St. Philips Episcopal Church in Durham, NC, and she thinks my son Jack would have “a fabulous time” there, too. An automated message arrives from a public school in Cherryvale, KS, notifying me that my son Gary is failing English 11. His grade is 39%. What can you do with a kid like Gary? His future is looking bleak. I write to the school to let them know that the email address they’ve got on file for his mother, a different Rachel Lyon, is actually mine. They apologize and I don’t hear from them again — until the following year, when Marla writes to say she’s collecting pictures for a senior slideshow on graduation night, and will need photos of Gary no later than April 19. So Gary’s graduating after all! I’m glad he turned himself around.
One reason for all this misdirected correspondence is there are at least a few hundred people around the world who share my name. According to the dizzying website howmanyofme.com, there are 186 Rachel Lyons, Rachael Lyons, Rachel Lyonses, and Rachael Lyonses in the United States. The consonant-rich website uknames.gbgplc.com approximates 45 people in the UK, including spelling variations. (Canada — not known for its big egos, really — doesn’t seem to have an equivalent site; a search for an equivalent Australian site yielded suggestions for the following “related searches”: how many Daniels are in the world? how many people are named Mitchell? how many people in the world are named Humphrey? Apparently Daniels, Mitchells, and Humphreys are peculiarly given to egosurfing.) We Rachel Lyons are a not insignificant population.
Another reason I get so very much email, I suspect, is that when people are prompted to enter their email addresses to get something they want — free samples; access to 30 days of unlimited whatever — but don’t want to get all the spam that comes with doing so, they enter something else. What’s an easier address to think up than one’s-own-name@gmail? Given the number of digital receipts I get for things I didn’t buy, I know many Rachel Lyons have put my address down to misdirect their spam. If you’re a Rachel Lyon and you’re reading this, please know: I am here, I am real, I am receiving your correspondence, and I don’t want your spam any more than you do.
I do, however, very much enjoy the non-spam correspondence. An email is a glimpse into another life, a fragment of a story. Maybe I love getting other people’s mail because I am a fiction writer. Maybe I’m a fiction writer because I love getting other people’s mail. Chicken or egg, I do not know. All I know is it gives me a little rush. I read my misdirected correspondence carefully. I read it nosily. I read it with a little voyeuristic thrill and odd surprising pangs of envy. Rationally I know that to share a name with someone is a simple, random thing. Irrationally I can’t help but feel connected to the other Rachel Lyons of the world.
“I write this while experiencing a strain of psychosis known as Cotard’s delusion, in which the patient believes that they are dead,” the novelist Esmé Weijun Wang writes at the beginning of “Perdition Days,” an essay from her new book, The Collected Schizophrenias. (Read an excerpt on Longreads.) “What the writer’s confused state means is not beside the point, because it is the point,” she continues. “I am in here, somewhere: cogito ergo sum.” The passage moves swiftly, from first person agency (“I am writing”) to distanced third person (“the patient,” “the writer”) to the famous Descartes assertion, in Latin, “I think, therefore I am.” As a reader, it’s astonishing and a little unnerving to consider the immediacy of the prose, your intimacy with a speaker searching to find the correct vantage from which to narrate the strangely drawn, difficult-to-map districts of her mind.
That same authorial compulsion to navigate and survey pervades the book, which is notable for its subject matter alone: a first-person investigation of “the schizophrenias,” as Wang describes the four overlapping classifications of the mental disorder listed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition, often shortened to DSM-5. (Wang was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, in 2013.) Wang approaches the work of writing about her mental illness as if she were reporting from a foreign place, returning to it diligently, pursuing dark corners as if to case the joint. She publishes email correspondences between herself and her physician, written in a period of psychosis. She considers her desire for motherhood through the lens of her time as a counselor at Camp Wish, a bipolar youth camp. She recalls scenes from her three involuntary hospitalizations, describing the trauma of those stays, as well as the slippery interviews on which those hospitalizations were based. Read more…
Anne Thériault | Longreads | April 2019 | 23 minutes (5,836 words)
From the notorious to the half-forgotten,Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on badass world-historical women of centuries past.
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Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.
When we left the future Empress, she was 32 and had just completed her third transformation — and name change — in as many decades. First she had been Yeyette, the coarse, uneducated girl from the colonies struggling to find her place in Paris society; then she had been Marie-Josèphe, the beautiful and popular estranged wife of a Revolutionary hero with a whiff of the courtesan about her; now she was a survivor of the Reign of Terror, a Merveilleuse famous for her revealing clothing, and a semi-professional mistress to the rich and powerful. It was in this latest incarnation that she was christened Josephine by her newest bedmate, a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte.
The young lovers had met through Paul Barras, who was both Napoleon’s boss and Josephine’s sugar daddy. After being aggressively pursued by the famously uncouth Corsican for months, Josephine had, for her own inscrutable reasons, decided to give in to his advances.
If she’d hoped that sleeping with him would somehow slake his obsession with her, she was wrong. Very wrong.
Napoleon’s fixation on Josephine only deepened once they became lovers, and often it tipped over into vicious fits of jealousy. In a letter to a friend, Josephine wrote, “I am afraid, I admit, of the empire he seems to want over all those who surround him.” She also wrote that the “force of [his] passion” made her uncomfortable, although she couldn’t quite articulate why; she knew that she should find his devotion to her attractive, but it creeped her out. Still, after weighing the pros and cons, she eventually gave in to his marriage proposal. She was getting older, and she wanted the security of a husband. Plus, he did seem to genuinely love her, even if his particular brand of love sometimes had a frightening edge.
The wedding was set for March 9, 1796. Since Catholicism was still banned in France, it was a civil service held at a small town hall. Napoleon arrived two hours late, a total asshole power move. The rest of the event was as messy as its beginning: the ages on the marriage certificate were wrong, one of the witnesses was too young to legally be a witness, and everyone was in a bad mood. It almost certainly wasn’t the wedding Josephine had expected, but she grimaced her way through it. When they got home, Josephine refused to move her beloved dog Fortuné off the bed to make room for Napoleon. When his mistress’ new husband tried to push him aside, the pug bit him. Sometimes dogs just know.
If Josephine found one bright spot on her second wedding day, it might have been the inscription on the wedding band Napoleon placed on her finger: “au destin,” to destiny. Both husband and wife believed that they were marked by fate, and nothing could have been a more fitting motto for them. Their shared faith that their marriage — and, indeed, their entire lives — had been predestined would shape many of their choices in the coming years.
* * *
Two days after the wedding, Napoleon left for a military campaign in Italy. His letters from this time are textbook examples of the cycle of abuse, heady declarations of love alternating with vicious scolding for not writing back often enough or with the right emotion. That being said, Josephine’s reasons for not replying in a timely fashion were less than virtuous: she’d begun an affair with a beautiful young soldier named Hippolyte Charles and, through him, had become involved with some shady backroom arms dealing. In Josephine’s defense, taking a lover or two on the side was a normal part of the world she lived in; after all, it hadn’t been that long since she’d been a fixture at Thérésa Tallien’s orgies. Still, she must have known that Napoleon expected monogamy. She must have known that she was playing a dangerous game.
While Josephine was ignoring her husband’s letters and living the high life in Paris, Napoleon was growing more and more anguished, and when he told Barras that he hated all women and was consumed with despair, the older man decided that he needed to step in. Napoleon had been racking up astonishing victories in Italy, and Barras couldn’t afford to have him distracted from his work. So one night, after a dinner given in her honor, he muscled Josephine into a carriage bound for Milan. She cried and begged him to let her stay, but Barras was adamant. He was going to give Napoleon whatever he wanted, including, once again, Josephine.
When they got home, Josephine refused to move her beloved dog Fortuné off the bed to make room for Napoleon. When his mistress’ new husband tried to push him aside, the pug bit him. Sometimes dogs just know.
Napoleon was overjoyed by his wife’s arrival. Their time apart had only heightened his obsession and when they met in Italy, he couldn’t stop fondling her, even in front of his staff. Josephine found his attentions overwhelming. “My husband doesn’t love me, he worships me,” she wrote to an acquaintance. Even though her life in Milan was lavish — she was staying in a literal palace — Josephine was miserable. She missed her life in Paris, she missed her children, she missed her freedom.
Napoleon had to return to the front lines soon after Josephine’s arrival, from whence he sent her letters about her vagina, calling it “the little black forest” and writing that “[t]o live within Josephine is to live in the Elysian fields.” Truly, this man missed his calling as a romance writer.
JOSEPHINE: on the whole, Italy was kind of a wash
JOSEPHINE: I mean, the plundering part was pretty fun
JOSEPHINE: the Italians make great art, I’ll give them that
JOSEPHINE: but then Napoleon’s family arrived from Marseilles
JOSEPHINE: I mean, they basically moved in with us!
JOSEPHINE: and there are not enough Correggio paintings in the world to make it worth putting up with them
Napoleon’s family had been less than enthused to learn about his marriage. Josephine was infamous by this point, and her scandals well-known. Napoleon’s mother opposed the match from a moral standpoint as well as a financial one — her son had been supporting the family ever since his father’s death several years earlier, and she didn’t relish seeing that support drained away by a depraved slattern from the colonies. In spite of Josephine’s attempts to charm her new husband’s family, they would openly loathe her for the rest of her life. His 16-year-old sister Pauline was especially heinous to Josephine: she referred to her as “la vielle” (the old woman), stuck her tongue out at her behind her back, and did her best to outdress her sister-in-law on every occasion.
Josephine left Italy in November, ostensibly bound for Paris. Napoleon left at the same time, but headed to peace talks in Austria first. He was shocked when he returned to Paris in December and his wife still wasn’t there. Instead of going straight back, Josephine had met up with Hippolyte in Nevers, and the two were leisurely fucking their way across France. A ball dedicated to her was organized by Napoleon’s ally Talleyrand in Paris for December 25th, but when she still hadn’t arrived it was postponed until the 28th. Josephine didn’t show up until January 3rd, by which point organizers had been forced to throw out two rounds of food and flowers. The event went grimly ahead but Napoleon was furious, as Josephine must have known he’d be. Josephine and Napoleon reconciled with a Big Dramatic Scene, a completely healthy relationship dynamic they both seemed to relish. This was something that played out over and over again throughout their time together: Napoleon would stomp around and yell, while Josephine wept and begged for his forgiveness. Eventually he would play the part of Big Merciful Daddy and take her into his arms and comfort her; nothing made Napoleon feel more secure in his masculinity than reducing his wife to tears and then comforting her. Josephine, for her part, seemed to feel like she could get away with almost anything as long as she cried hard enough about it later.
In 1797, Napoleon began planning his next big military campaign.
NAPOLEON: babe, I’m going to conquer Egypt
JOSEPHINE: can I ask why?
NAPOLEON: for the empire
JOSEPHINE: sure, but, why Egypt specifically?
JOSEPHINE: I mean, isn’t it kind of … out of the way?
NAPOLEON: Alexander the Great conquered Egypt
JOSEPHINE: I don’t know if that’s really a reason
NAPOLEON: it’s an empire-building thing, you wouldn’t understand
If Josephine had been reluctant to join Napoleon in Italy, she was now desperate to accompany him to Egypt: her involvement in Hippolyte’s shady business had been revealed and the resulting scandal had been deeply unpleasant; she wanted to have Napoleon’s baby and solidify her position as his wife; she owed a lot of people a lot of money. But Napoleon refused to take her, so instead she headed to the spa town of Plombières, where she hoped to recover her fertility. Both she and Napoleon were desperate for a baby, but lingering physical trauma from her time in prison coupled with years of using what then passed for the morning-after pill (highly toxic douches, mostly) had left her unable to conceive. She hoped that “taking the waters” would improve her reproductive system. Instead, her time at Plombières made her chances of getting pregnant even more remote when a balcony she was standing on collapsed, leaving her with a broken pelvis and a severe spinal injury. Although she would go on to make an incredible recovery, the incident almost guaranteed that she would never have another child.
Meanwhile, things in Egypt weren’t going so great. The British were sinking Napoleon’s ships, and his friend Junot was sinking his hopes by telling him what everyone in Paris already knew — that Josephine was fucking Hippolyte. You would think Napoleon might have figured this fact out on his own, but denial is a powerful drug. Admitting that Josephine had betrayed him shook not only his relationship with her, but also his relationship with himself: maybe he wasn’t actually the most virile and powerful man in the world, but a cuckold and a laughingstock. He swore to divorce Josephine, and for once she wasn’t there to weep and rend her garments and beg forgiveness.
And then the unthinkable happened: the British seized a French mail ship containing a letter from Napoleon to his brother about Josephine’s unfaithfulness. Then, like an 18th-century WikiLeaks, the London Morning Chronicle published selections from the letter. If the French had been tittering behind their hands about the military genius and his cheating wife, the English were outright guffawing.
* * *
Now the entire world knew about Napoleon’s humiliation.
Josephine, ever practical, decided that this would be a great time to buy a house. Actually, not just a house — a proper country estate called Malmaison (a name that roughly translates to “bad house,” which is … a choice). Josephine’s reasons were twofold: she wanted somewhere to live if Napoleon divorced her, but she also hoped that a beautiful property like Malmaison might lure him back. Barras, who obviously had a vested interest in her marriage, loaned Josephine the money she needed. She moved in almost as soon as the sale was completed, and quickly realized Malmaison was a great place to carry on her relationship with Hippolyte away from prying Parisian eyes.
Napoleon didn’t return to France immediately after finding out about his wife’s relationship with Hippolyte, partly because he preferred to bury himself in his work, partly because the situation he’d started in Egypt was still unstable, and partly because he wanted to have his own revenge affair. Josephine spent the better part of a year on tenterhooks, waiting for her husband and praying that she could pull off the most audacious weep ‘n’ beg of her life. Finally, in October of 1799, while dining at a friend’s house, she received word that Napoleon was back in the country. She dashed from Paris to Lyon, hoping to get to him before anyone else could, but arrived to find that he had already left by a different road. When Napoleon arrived in Paris and found his house empty, he assumed Josephine was off with her lover. Furious, he ordered his staff to begin packing up her clothes.
When Josephine finally got back to Paris she went straight to Napoleon, but he had locked himself in his room and refused to see her. She sat on the floor outside of his door and cried all night, but her old tricks failed to move him. At 5 o’clock in the blessed morning, Josephine sensed she would need stronger ammunition, so she roused Eugène and Hortense. The two sleepy teenagers, still in their nightwear, joined their mother and begged their stepfather not to abandon them. Napoleon was genuinely fond of Josephine’s children, and it was their pleading that finally softened his heart. He allowed Josephine to come into the room and then, not long after, into his bed. Plus ça change!
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Napoleon did not live to regret this decision. Josephine’s ability to wield soft power — flattery, distraction, general diplomacy — soon came in very handy. While Napoleon was in Egypt, several of his sources informed him that the current government was deeply unpopular and France was in dire straits. The rumors were not an exaggeration. He plotted with Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, one of the five leaders of the Directory — the committee that had governed France since the end of the Revolution — to overthrow the other four. As soon as that was done, Napoleon immediately double-crossed Sieyès and declared himself First Consul of France, an authoritarian title that basically put him in complete control of the country. Like many two-bit despots, Napoleon claimed to be acting in the interests of liberty and democracy; like many two-bit despots, he felt that this was a personal victory that he had earned because he was destined to rule. But the truth was that Josephine had done much of the backroom work for him: hosting dinners, inflating egos, and diverting attention. Without her, it’s unlikely that the rough-mannered general would have succeeded.
Shortly after his coup, Napoleon decided that he needed a residence more befitting a ruler. First he and Josephine moved into the Luxembourg Palace, and a few months later into the Tuileries. The latter was a symbol of the ostentatious excesses of the French monarchy; built by Catherine de’ Medici in the 16th century, the Tuileries was where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were kept after their removal from Versailles. Napoleon’s choice to align himself with the kings of the Ancien Régime was obviously intentional, and he immediately installed his wife in Marie Antoinette’s old chambers. Josephine, though, was ill at ease. She hated the stiffness and formality of her new role, and complained to Hortense that she felt haunted by the dead queen’s ghost. Still, she did her best to fulfill her new role as consuless, even though her heart longed to return to Malmaison.
She soon had her chance, as Napoleon gave her permission to renovate Malmaison to use as a country estate for entertaining guests. Once that was completed, Josephine began working on the estate’s grounds. She discovered that she had a natural aptitude for horticulture, and began cultivating as many species of plants as she could. Tired of the formal gardens of Paris, Josephine hired an English gardener to achieve the jardin à l’anglaise look, much to Napoleon’s horror; she also used her husband’s connections to solicit seeds and plants from around the world, delighting especially in the rare and difficult to grow. Although she was entirely self-taught, Josephine’s botanical knowledge and ability impressed even the experts, and gardening was a passion she would keep up for the rest of her life. She even convinced Napoleon to let her import plants from England during the trade blockades that would mark the wars between Britain and the Napoleonic Empire.
JOSEPHINE: I also built a giant greenhouse and started importing exotic animals
JOSEPHINE: I had llamas and an orangutan that could eat with a knife and fork
JOSEPHINE: I know this all sounds ridiculously expensive
JOSEPHINE: but if life has taught me anything, it’s that you should spend money while you can
JOSEPHINE: because tomorrow you could go to jail
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: seriously, that’s your takeaway from the Revolution?
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: not that monarchy is oppressive, or that we should strive for freedom and equality
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: you’re as bad as any of those Bourbon kings
JOSEPHINE: stay away from my fucking llamas, Robespierre
* * *
Josephine succeeded in building an estate that both she and the First Consul could love. Napoleon began to use Malmaison to meet with all kinds of dignitaries and officials; in the early years of his rule, much of his government business was conducted at the country estate. They hosted days-long events that involved outdoor dinners and games, and even theatrical interludes starring Bonaparte family and friends. Josephine had transformed herself once again, from sexually adventurous good-times Merveilleuse into a consuless at the height of sophistication and good taste. Unfortunately for her, this state of affairs couldn’t and wouldn’t last long.
As Napoleon’s authority grew, so did his royal ambitions. He began to consider Malmaison beneath his station, preferring life at the Tuileries. Josephine was forced to spend more and more time in the city (and more and more time with her miserable in-laws). Napoleon, meanwhile, was sleeping with as many women as possible. These affairs — if you can call them that — took an odd form. The consul would have the women he chose wait for him, naked, in bed; he would be in and out (so to speak) in a matter of minutes. More than sex, he seemed to enjoy his ability to order his mistresses around, to control how they interacted with him. These liaisons also gave him another type of power, over Josephine: the ability to reduce her to tears, push her to the brink of despair, then soothe her like a fretful child.
Napoleon’s attitudes toward women oscillated between furious resentment and paternal infantilization. Both of these were reflected in his Napoleonic Code, which severely restricted the rights women had gained during the Revolution and even the few they’d held under the Ancien Régime. He also made chattel slavery legal again, in spite of his promises to uphold abolition, a decision many blamed on Josephine’s influence. Whether or not she advocated for the reinstatement of slavery, Josephine certainly didn’t seem to oppose it, writing to her mother that Napoleon was “very attached to Martinique and is counting on the support of the planters of that colony.” Josephine was uniquely positioned to understand both the brutality of chattel slavery — she had witnessed it firsthand, after all — as well as the Revolutionary arguments that had led to its abolition. Her entire personal brand was built on the indignities of losing her freedom during the Reign of Terror. She either knew on every level that slavery was a violation of basic human rights and didn’t care, or she found some way to rationalize it to herself, which is functionally the same as not caring.
To justify his regressive laws, Napoleon reinstated Catholicism as the state religion. He explained his rationale to the senator Pierre Louis Roederer succinctly: “Society cannot exist without inequality of wealth and inequality of wealth cannot exist without religion.” With the Catholic Church back in business, nearly every change wrought by the Revolution was undone.
* * *
As time went on, Napoleon became increasingly preoccupied with having a child. It was becoming clearer and clearer that Josephine was not going conceive, although she suggested that the problem lay with him — after all, hadn’t she already had two healthy pregnancies? Her fertility was, according to her, demonstrably fine. But still Josephine was terrified that her husband would leave her for a younger woman who might provide him with a baby. Eventually, she came up with an idea straight out of Aunt Edmée’s playbook: Hortense, now 18, could marry Napoleon’s brother Louis. The children of that union would bear both Napoleon and Josephine’s blood, and would make the perfect Bonaparte heir.
HORTENSE: but Louis is awful!
JOSEPHINE: well, we all have to do our duty
JOSEPHINE: to the empire, you know
HORTENSE: this feels more like me taking one for the team so that you can get what you want
JOSEPHINE: aren’t we all on the same team?
JOSEPHINE: really, you’re helping me to help yourself
Louis, like the rest of Napoleon’s extended family, hated Josephine and spent his wedding night reciting all the reasons why his new bride’s mother was a slut. In spite of this, Hortense gave birth to a son almost exactly nine months later, who she christened Napoleon Louis Charles. Her mother and stepfather were exultant.
Shortly before the birth of his heir, Napoleon was made “Consul for Life.” He officially moved his country seat from Malmaison to the Chateau de Saint-Cloud, one of Marie Antoinette’s former residences, where he did his utmost to recreate the court life of the Bourbon dynasty. He dressed his staff in red velvet and gilded everything in sight. He insisted that Josephine order extravagant new gowns for every occasion — including one covered with real rose petals — although he balked when her bills arrived. Few people remembered all the arcane rules and rituals of court, so Napoleon had Josephine consult with Henriette Campan, who had been Marie Antoinette’s First Lady of the Bedchamber, about things like who was supposed to bow when.
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: what was the point of even having a revolution??
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: did 40,000 people die in vain?? So that we could have another KING?
NAPOLEON: well, I didn’t start the Revolution, I just finished it
NAPOLEON: so that sounds like more of a you problem than a me problem
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: I’m dead, I don’t have any problems
NAPOLEON: with all due respect, Max, I would say that even in death you have a lot of unresolved issues
If Josephine had been overwhelmed by the grandeur of the Tuileries, Saint-Cloud was even worse. She missed the casual country vibes of Malmaison, not to mention the public affection her husband had showered her with there. His liaisons were becoming more and more public, and Josephine knew that pushing back against his infidelity would only put her position at risk; in spite of Hortense’s child, Josephine was still terrified that her husband would leave her. Napoleon wielded his new relationships like weapons — he loved to recount graphic details about his conquests to Josephine, demanding that she applaud his sexual prowess. If she got upset, he grew vicious, reminding her that she had been unfaithful first. By Napoleon’s logic, she deserved payback for humiliating him in front of the entire world.
In January of 1804, a plot to assassinate Napoleon was discovered. The Duc of Enghien, a nephew of Louis XVI, was arrested at his home in Baden (even though there was no evidence linking him to the plot), found guilty in a secret military trial, and summarily executed. The rest of Europe was appalled — Baden was a neutral territory, and the legal proceedings had hardly been fair. But in France, Napoleon successfully spun the story; he was the hero his country needed, protecting it from anarchy and the dregs of the Bourbon dynasty. Riding a wave of popularity, Napoleon launched a referendum and was elected Emperor of the French. “I am the man of the State,” he declared. “I am the French Revolution.”
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: I just want to say I totally called it that you would make yourself king
NAPOLEON: technically, an emperor is not a king
NAPOLEON: spiritually, it’s more in the tradition of the Roman Empire? Anyway, it polls well
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: I fail to see how the Roman emperors were less oppressive or corrupt than the French kings
NAPOLEON: Max, you know I always treasure your input
NAPOLEON: but don’t you have anyone else to haunt?
GHOST OF ROBESPIERRE: you know I don’t, I beheaded all of my enemies 10 years ago
Josephine was going to be “greater than a queen,” just as Euphémie had said — she was going to be an Empress. Or was she? Even though her husband was going to be Emperor, she didn’t have an official title. Napoleon himself didn’t seem to be too sure about which direction to jump. On the one hand, crowning Josephine as Empress would make it a lot harder to get rid of her if and when he wanted to take a new wife who would give him an heir. On the other hand, he was deeply superstitious and believed that his wife was his good luck charm; without her, he worried that his winning streak would break. Plus, every time he leaned toward not crowning Josephine his terrible family rejoiced, which infuriated him.
Josephine and Napoleon began playing a dangerous game of chicken. He told her that he was too loyal to leave her, and begged her to do the leaving for the sake of his dynasty. She retaliated by saying that she would separate from him as soon as he gave her a direct order to do so. Every time Napoleon was on the brink of breaking it off, something — his love for his stepchildren, his fear of a life without Josephine, her ability to lure him into the bedroom — stopped him. Finally, less than a month before his coronation, his family made up his mind for him. The Bonapartes, feeling triumphant, had spent weeks alternating between snubbing and teasing Josephine, sure that her downfall was imminent. Piqued by their disrespect, Napoleon publicly announced her coronation, then rubbed salt in the wound by telling his sisters that they’d be carrying Josephine’s train during the ceremony.
The night before the coronation, Josephine made the ultimate move to keep her husband at her side. The Pope was in town to do the coronating — although Napoleon actually ended up crowning himself, because despots will despot — and Josephine sought a private audience with him. She confessed that her wedding to the Emperor had been a civil service, which meant that they weren’t truly married in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Horrified, the Pope refused to participate in the coronation unless Napoleon and Josephine were married in a religious ceremony. Knowing that the Pope’s support was key to legitimizing his reign, Napoleon gave in. Josephine’s gamble had paid off.
* * *
On December 2, 1804, Josephine — heroine of the Reign of Terror, scantily clad Merveilleuse, former mistress of half a dozen men — was crowned Empress of France in front of the Pope himself.
All of this was, of course, set against the backdrop of Napoleon’s military career. He managed to spin even his defeats as successes, and used them to justify further expansion of his empire. In the summer of 1805, he turned his attention once more toward Austria, which was still salty about the whole Marie Antoinette thing and allied with Britain and Russia against France. Napoleon abandoned his plans to invade England in order to head east to quash the Austrian army, and he was hugely successful. The next year, he pressed even farther, into Prussia, and in early 1807, into Poland. He wrote to Josephine often, but even as he proclaimed his love, he was distracted by news out of France: one of his mistresses was pregnant. Josephine, who had traveled with Napoleon as far as Mainz, knew exactly what that pregnancy could mean for her marriage. She begged her husband to let her join him in Warsaw but he ordered her back to Paris, where she spent the winter white-faced and weeping, certain that orders for a divorce would come through any day.
Josephine had little reprieve from her unhappiness. In the spring of 1807, her grandson and heir Napoleon Louis Charles died. Hortense and the Empress were inconsolable; Napoleon, who thought they should be paying attention to his victories in the east, grew impatient with their grief. Less than a month later, Josephine’s mother died in Martinique. Napoleon refused to make the news of his mother-in-law’s death public, claiming that it would cast a shadow over his victories, and refused to name Hortense’s younger son his heir, which Josephine took as a further sign that he was about to leave her. When the Emperor returned to France after sealing an armistice with Tsar Alexander, his manner toward his wife was noticeably chilly.
Now that he was secure in his fertility, Napoleon began to consider a divorce in earnest. The idea of solidifying his new alliances with Austria and Poland with a marriage was deeply appealing and, he reasoned, the death of his heir was a good excuse to find and impregnate a new wife. Josephine, knowing she was about to be discarded, fell into an emotional spiral, dragging Napoleon with her: the more miserable she became, the more he resented her. But he still loved her, too, and couldn’t picture life without her gentling influence. Plus, he was sure that she brought him luck; his greatest victories had come after their wedding, and after all, what about “au destin”? Would his military winning streak continue without her? But in 1809, after learning that a Polish mistress was pregnant with another one of his children, he made up his mind: he had to divorce Josephine.
On November 30th, just two days before the 5th anniversary of their coronation, Napoleon and Josephine dined together. At the end of a nearly silent meal, the Emperor took his wife’s hand and told her that, while he would always adore her, he had to put the interests of France in front of his own wants. Josephine fell into hysterics, and Napoleon began to cry too, becoming even more upset when he realized that losing his wife meant losing his stepchildren. He had thought this through thousands of times, but faced with the reality of divorce, he blanched. In the end it was Eugène who insisted that the separation happen. He knew that a reconciliation would be brief and ultimately unhappy for everyone.
On December 14, 1809, Napoleon and Josephine convened a grand ceremony in the throne room to announce their divorce. The Emperor wept as he described what a wonderful wife the Empress had been. Josephine — whose face was a mess of tears and makeup — swore that Napoleon would always be her dearest love. Together, they signed the record of proceedings. That night they clung to each other in Napoleon’s bed, both sobbing, before Josephine retreated to her own chamber.
Josephine decamped to Malmaison, where Napoleon visited her. The pair continued to cry together over the dissolution of their grand love affair, more united in their separation than they had been over the last year of their marriage. But the Emperor’s grief didn’t stop him from marrying 18-year-old Marie Louise of Austria (who happened to be Marie Antoinette’s great-niece) on March 11th, 1810, just months after his divorce. He told Josephine that she would have to leave Paris before his new wife’s arrival, and at the end of March the deposed Empress set off for a chateau in Navarre.
Josephine did her best to rally her spirits, even though the lovely new home Napoleon had promised was a damp, drafty monstrosity, so hideous that people called it “la marmite” (the cooking pot). She began renovating its gardens, and occupied her evenings doing tarot readings for her ladies; years before, she had developed a close relationship with cartomancer Marie Anne Lenormand, and remained obsessed with Lenormand’s fortune-telling deck of cards for the rest of her life. Between her love of plants, her tarot fixation, and her (still ongoing) debt, Josephine was basically a prototype for the modern millennial lady.
* * *
In March of 1811, Marie Louise gave birth to a son. Napoleon was beyond exultant — he finally had a legitimate child and heir. In a fit of good temper, he allowed Josephine to return permanently to Malmaison (she had been there the year before, but was only allowed to stay briefly before traveling onward to Aix-en-Provence). She began to build a quiet life for herself — collecting art, hosting intimate soirées, and spoiling her grandchildren. She grew sugarcane in her greenhouse and let Hortense’s young sons suck on it just like she had as a child. Napoleon remained close to her, writing to her often and spending two hours visiting her before he left to conquer Russia; he even let her kiss and cuddle his son, although Marie Louise was furious when she found out.
I probably don’t have to tell you that things didn’t go well in Russia. Things never go well for invading armies in Russia. Over 500,000 French soldiers died; fewer than 100,000 came home. Napoleon was ousted from power in the spring of 1814, and Paris was soon overrun with triumphant Cossack forces. By the beginning of May, they would restore the Bourbon dynasty to the French throne. Napoleon, meanwhile, had been exiled.
Tsar Alexander, who was in Paris to ensure that Louis XVIII acceded peacefully, began visiting Josephine. He was fascinated by the legendary woman who had held his enemy in thrall for so long, and the former Empress, for her part, received him graciously. She understood that this man held her life — and the lives of her children and grandchildren — in the palm of his hand, and turned on the charm accordingly. Other conquering dignitaries began to visit her as well; she was, after all, one of the spoils of war. She belonged to them now.
Stay away from my fucking llamas, Robespierre.
In the middle of May, Josephine caught a chill while out walking around the grounds of Malmaison with the Tsar. By the end of the month, she was desperately ill with a high fever and a rash. On the morning of May 29th, delirious but still the same old Josephine, she insisted on being dressed in a pink satin gown and rubies in case the Tsar came. She was dead by the time the clock struck noon.
French public opinion had run hot and cold on Napoleon — mostly cold over the last years of his reign — but Josephine had been almost universally beloved. She represented so many things to so many people, from the wild hope of the early days of the Revolution to the desperation of the Reign of Terror to the grandeur of the French Empire. Perhaps above everything else, she represented pragmatism and tenacity; she’d never been ashamed to do what was necessary to survive. Thousands upon thousands attended her funeral, weeping for their Empress. Her legacy was complicated, but it was the legacy of their people.
And Napoleon? In his disgrace, he was abandoned by almost everyone, including Marie Louise; Eugène and Hortense were among the few that remained loyal to him. He died seven years later, exiled to the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic. His last word was “Josephine.”
There is a statue of Josephine in Fort-de-France, Martinique. In 1991, it was beheaded, just as she would have been if not for Robespierre’s timely downfall. It was a fitting tribute to the heroine of the Terror who had watched the restoration of slavery with the same secretive Mona Lisa smile she wears in all of her portraits.
Long live the dissolution of oppressive monarchies. Long live freedom. Liberté, fraternité, égalité forever.
Anne Thériault is a Toronto-based feminist killjoy. She is currently raising one child and three unruly cats. If she has a looming deadline, you can find her procrastinating on Twitter @anne_theriault.
Ornate and imposing, the century-old Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Passenger Terminal in downtown Mobile, Alabama, resembles a cross between a Venetian palace and a Spanish mission. Here, on St. Joseph Street, on July 23, 1927, one of the more fortuitous meetings in American literary history occurred, a chance incident that would seal the friendship of two of its most influential writers. “No sooner had I got off the train” from New Orleans, Langston wrote in The Big Sea, “than I ran into Zora Neale Hurston, walking intently down the main street. I didn’t know she was in the South [actually, he did, having received a letter from her in March, but he had no idea she was in Alabama], and she didn’t know I was either, so we were very glad to see each other.”
Zora was in town to interview Cudjo Lewis, purportedly the only person still living who had been born in Africa and enslaved in the United States. She then planned to drive back to New York, doing folklore research along the way. In late 1926, Franz Boas had recommended her to Carter Woodson, whose Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, together with Elsie Clews Parsons of the American Folklore Society, had decided to bankroll her to the tune of $1,400. With these funds, Zora had been gathering folklore in Florida all spring and summer. As the first Southern black to do this, her project was, even at this early stage, clearly of immense importance. It had, however, been frustrating. “I knew where the material was, all right,” she would later write. “But I went about asking, in carefully accented Barnardese, ‘Pardon me, but do you know any folk-tales or folk-songs?’ The men and women who had whole treasuries of material just seeping through their pores, looked at me and shook their heads. No, they had never heard of anything like that around there. Maybe it was over in the next county. Why didn’t I try over there?”
Langston, meanwhile, had been touring the South for months, penniless as usual, making some public appearances and doing his own research. He read his poems at commencement for Nashville’s Fisk University in June; he visited refugees from the Mississippi flood in Baton Rouge; he strolled the streets alone in New Orleans, ducking into voodoo shops; he took a United Fruit boat to Havana and back; and his next stop was to be the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. It was his very first visit to the South.
When Zora invited him to join her expedition in her little old Nash coupe, nicknamed “Sassy Susie,” Langston happily accepted. (The car looked a lot like a Model T Ford, and could only seat two.) Langston adored the company of entertainers, and Zora was as entertaining as they came. Langston did not know how to drive, but Zora loved driving and didn’t mind a whit. They decided to make a real trip of it, “stopping on the way to pick up folk-songs, conjur [sic], and big old lies,” as Langston wrote. “Blind guitar players, conjur men, and former slaves were her quarry, small town jooks and plantation churches, her haunts. I knew it would be fun traveling with her. It was.” Read more…
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