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Lyrical Ladies, Writing Women, and the Legend of Lauryn Hill

Paul Warner / AP

 Michael Gonzales | Longreads | August 2018 | 21 minutes (5,551 words)

Back in the early 1980s, rap was primarily a boys club, but a few girls still managed to sneak in and do their thing. Although uptown girls Sha-Rock from the Funky Four + 1 and the Mercedes Ladies were pioneers of the genre, it was a teenager from Queens named Roxanne Shante who gets credit for laying down a verbal foundation for other fem rhyme slayers to follow for decades. As seen in the gritty Netflix biopic Roxanne Roxanne, which details the rapper’s humble beginnings and hard knock life, Shante was just another around-the-way girl with an attitude living in Queensbridge Projects when she was discovered by record producer Marley Marl, who lived and worked in the same public housing sprawl. Marley’s rap posse the Juice Crew featuring Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie and MC Shan were some of the best rappers in the city and being down with them meant something special.

Going by her government name Lolita Shanté Gooden, she began rapping at ten years old and was known within those brick buildings to be the best at freestyling and battling alongside the boys. Unlike a decade later when the scantily clad Foxy Brown and Lil’ Kim became the most popular female rappers, in the ‘80s it wasn’t about sex appeal (often “lady rappers,” with the exception of The Sequence, dressed like the boys), but simply skills. “Shante was a gem,” Marley told me in 2008. “All her songs were made up on the the spot. All you had to do was give her a subject and she would run with it.”

Recruited to bring her dis-heavy rhymes to a record designed to answer back to U.T.F.O.’s popular 1984 jam “Roxanne Roxanne,” a somewhat sexist song featuring Brooklyn rappers Kangol Kid, Educated Rapper and Doctor Ice (Mix Master Ice was their DJ) that steadily insults a “stuck up” young woman who was new to their block, Shante adopted a new first name and brought the pain. “Roxanne Roxanne” might’ve been a sensation and a best-seller for U.T.F.O., but when Shante’s squeaky yet powerful response “Roxanne’s Revenge” was released a few months later, U.T.F.O., as well as the rest of the world, were caught off-guard. Rox called them out individually, verbally taking down the entire crew as she delivered the goods and changed hip-hop history.

The rap sisterhood soon included Sparky D, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, LA Star, Monie Love, Lauryn Hill, Lil Kim, Foxy Brown, Nicki Minaj and countless others. For many of the women rappers who’ve succeeded throughout the years, as former Def Jam artist Nikki D says in the 2010 documentary My Mic Sounds Nice: The Truth About Women And Hip Hop directed by Ava DuVernay, “They were doing double of what a dude could do.”

While Roxanne was an obvious inspiration to her fellow female MCs for decades to come, her voice and lyrics also inspired many young women who never touched a mic to pursue their path regardless of any barriers the boys might put in their way.

‘She Begat This’ is a celebration of the Bad Boy boom bap Wu Tang neo-soul Missy Elliott roaring 1990s, an end-of-the-century era that was an important period in black popular culture.

Like hip-hop itself, writing about rap music was mostly the beat of male (the main quartet being Nelson George, Greg Tate, Barry Michael Cooper and Harry Allen) music journalists in the the early years, but by the mid-’80s, that too would change. There were the Village Voice scribes Carol Cooper and Lisa Jones, though neither wrote that much about the genre. Additionally, there were also the often overlooked women from the glossy teen zines: Cynthia Horner (Right On!), Gerrie Summers (Word Up), Kate Ferguson, Yvette Noel-Schure (who today is Beyonce’s publicist), Marcia Cole and Belinda Trotter. However, progressing into the ‘90s, the textual landscape began to change as women who came of age within the culture — whether hanging at park jams, clubbing with the b-boys or simply enthralled by the booming beat underground sounds that were slowly becoming mainstream — decided that they too had something to say about the scene. The shortlist of then young scribes includes future powerhouse writers/editors Kierna Mayo, dream hampton, Mimi Valdes, who produced the movie Roxanne Roxanne, and Danyel Smith, but it was the writings of Joan Morgan, author of the recently released She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, that I remember reading first.

For me, Joan was the hip-hop writer version of Roxanne Shante. Certainly, she wasn’t the first woman hip-hop writer on the scene, but from jump she was one of the best. While She Begat This, which includes a forward by Mayo, is a tribute to Hill’s masterful album that was released 20 years ago this past weekend, on August 25th, 1998, it’s also a celebration of the Bad Boy boom bap Wu Tang neo-soul Missy Elliott roaring 1990s, an end-of-the-century era that was an important period in black popular culture as well as in the professional and personal lives of those who were there as participants and witnesses, writing from the frontlines with Afro abandon. Back then, besides our personal stereos and radios, The Miseducation could be heard blaring from house parties, spoken word readings, cool clothing stores, restaurants, cars parked on the street and bubbling brown sugar bars everywhere.

These days Joan Morgan, between raising her son as a single mother, teaching at various universities and working on her Ph.D. dissertation, hardly ever writes about hip-hop culture, but when the publisher 37 INK offered her the project to riff on Hill’s landmark disc she felt it was her responsibility to do the right thing. Still, anyone anticipating a 33 1/3-type book filled with nerdy details describing recording sessions, Hill’s writing process, a close reading analysis of the lyrics or an interview with the featured artist, or at least with some of the musicians and collaborators, will be sorely disappointed. Morgan, whose book When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down (1999) is as influential a text amongst a certain sector of the literary hip-hop audience as Hill’s music, chose instead to write “a cultural history of the album.”

In addition to her personal observations and opinions of Lauryn as seen (heard) through a womanist lens, Morgan also interviews her girlfriends, fellow writers and thinkers who were also a part of the New York City (and Brooklyn) scene when Miseducation was first released. Serving as an intellectual Greek chorus throughout the book, they share their thoughts on Hill in relation to colorism, mental health, style, relationships and black genius.

However, considering all the interviews Hill did when the album was released, it’s striking that not one was quoted in She Begat This. Morgan talks about the beauty of the Harper’s Bazaar cover Lauryn appeared on, as well as the “lily-whiteness” of that magazine, which usually kept black faces regulated to the interior pages, but never once mentions what Hill said inside that issue . The only person Morgan spoke with who was actually connected to The Miseducation was Lauryn’s former personal manager Jayson Jackson, who gave the writer some juicy tidbits, including the fact that the record company was unhappy with the project when it was first presented to them.

“Truthfully, when I thought about it I knew that no one would be able to write the book the way I would,” says Morgan via cellphone from an Amtrak train leaving Martha’s Vineyard back to New York City. “But, I only had four months to complete the book and I didn’t have time to chase Lauryn down for an interview, so I interviewed other people (including dream hampton, Michaela Angela Davis, Dr. Yaba Blay, Karen Goode Marable, Akiba Solomon and former Honey magazine editor Joicelyn Dingle) to get their take on what made the project iconic.”

*

Twenty years later The Miseducation is still relevant and winning honors; most recently it was voted #2 on NPR’s list of The 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women, sandwiched between #1 Joni Mitchell (Blue) and Lauryn’s spiritual godmother Nina Simone (I Put a Spell On You) at #3. As writer Paula Mejia stated in her essay on The Miseducation, “The album, rife with Hill’s biting rhymes and sharp turns of phrase, is a wonder from start to finish.” With lyrics that were as piercing and probing as an Alice Walker novel (“…blessed with a broad literary arsenal that… reflected her dexterity as a wordsmith,” Morgan writes) and as musically lush as a seventies Ann Peebles song produced by Willie Mitchell, the album was obviously brilliant, but for Lauryn Hill it would be both a gift and a curse.

The curse came later that year when the production team New-Ark, who helped Hill with producing and songwriting but never signed any contracts, sued for more money (they were originally paid $100,000) and for writing credits. Hill eventually settled with the musicians, and it’s hard for observers not to speculate that the suit embarrassed Lauryn or even scarred her emotionally — a narrative passively reinforced not least by her inability to create a follow-up studio album.

Morgan’s writings helped many rap-loving women navigate through the gray areas of the music that they might’ve loved dearly, but didn’t always love them back.

Hill’s strange behavior both onstage and off has been documented heavily, including in a recent interview with respected jazz pianist Robert Glasper detailing his bad experiences working with her in 2008. Appearing on Houston, Texas, radio station 97.9 The Box, Glasper told tales: from being instructed to address her as Ms. Hill (something that everyone is supposed to do) to never looking her in the eye to her habit of firing her touring bands no matter how good they might be. Addressing Hill directly on the show, Glasper said, “You haven’t done enough to be the way you are…the one thing you did that was great, you didn’t do…” In a recent Medium essay, “Addressing Robert Glasper and other common misconceptions about me (in no particular order)” Ms. Hill responded to the criticism.

Film producer/director Lisa Cortes (Precious), who is currently directing the documentary The Remix: Hip Hop x. Fashion, says, “I don’t think that [sharing credits with New-Ark] should’ve made people look at her negatively.” As a former record executive, Cortes worked closely with R&B and hip-hop producers in the late ’80s/early ’90s. “Plenty of music men have used ghostwriters or other producers to help them finish tracks, but they’ve never been dragged the way Lauryn was. The writing and producing she has done with others (Aretha Franklin, Carlos Santana, Whitney Houston) speaks for her talents and The Miseducation remains a remarkable achievement.”

The controversy of creation never deterred me from listening to The Miseducation and continually embracing its brilliance, but I’ve always been upset that Hill never released another full-length project. With the exception of the much maligned MTV Unplugged project (Village Voice critic Miles Marshall Lewis was the only writer I know who liked that album, calling the 2002 project “the most powerful artistic document to emerge from hip-hop America post-9/11”) and a single with the Fugees (“Take It Easy”), there has been nothing. “From what I understand, Lauryn never stopped recording,” says Morgan, “she just hasn’t put anything out. Who knows, maybe she’ll put out some new music in time for the anniversary.”

Though Lauryn still tours, often showing up hours late and performing her songs in a variety of different arrangements that sometimes angers the audience, The Miseducation remains Hill’s only solo album. After announcing an anniversary tour in April, by July most of the dates were postponed or canceled. “This album chronicled an intimate piece of my young existence,” Hill said in a statement released when the tour was announced. “It was the summation of most, if not all, of my most hopeful and positive emotions experienced to that date.”

*

Interviewing Morgan on her book’s publication date, we reminisce about those early days when she was a young writer at the Village Voice, hanging out in the lounge where she befriended writers and editors including Joe Levy, who suggested she cover the Mike Tyson rap trial in 1992. “I was completely untrained,” she says. “People were telling me that they liked my voice (in print), but I really didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t breaking the rules, I just didn’t know what they were.” My introduction to Morgan’s work was her 1990 review of former N.W.A. member Ice Cube’s solo debut AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (Priority), which was also published in the Village Voice.

Living in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn with my buddy Havelock Nelson while we worked on our book Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture, I sat in the CD-cluttered kitchen and read the piece twice, loving every word of it. Morgan’s writing was powerful, poetic and bold, with the review itself written in the style of a short story involving her girlfriends in Martha’s Vineyard and the Cube cassette. Balancing Cube’s angry Black man stance (his post-Panther arguments with the government and the police) and his sexism, Morgan was split between loving the album and throwing the record into a bonfire. “I think of that review as the first in hip-hop feminism,” she says.

Filmmaker Syreeta Gates, who is currently working on Write On! The Legend of Hip-Hop’s Ink Slingers, a documentary about hip-hop writers from the ‘90s, says, “Straight out the gate her Ice Cube piece had us reimagine our relationships not only with the culture but with the artists in relation to their lyrics…For me, she gave space to play in the grays that I never thought was possible in the realm of hip-hop culture. Her ideology around hip-hop feminism gave a generation of young women a [language for] something that I think for the most part we made a distinct choice to participate in.”

A self-proclaimed “cultural chameleon,” Morgan was a Bronx-bred homegirl who was part prep school (she’d attended the prestigious Fieldston School), part Phillies blunt; an Ivy League graduate who was reared by strict Jamaican parents, but still managed to get her party on. “I can still remember lying to my mother about what block I was on, so I could go with my friends to the park jams,” Morgan laughs. “I listened to what my peers listened to with curiosity and fascination, but I never thought of it as a career.” Still, just because she could recite the raunchiest rap stanzas didn’t mean she wasn’t going to challenge sexism, classism and stereotypes. Her writings helped many rap-loving women navigate through the gray areas of the music that they might’ve loved dearly, but didn’t always love them back.

Regina R. Robertson, west coast editor of Essence and editor of the essay collection He Never Come Home says, “I recently pulled When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost from my bookshelf and started flipping through it again. That book had such an impact on me. I was struck by Joan’s honesty. That book also made me take a step back and reexamine the roles that we all play. Although it’s almost twenty years since it came out, it has stood the test of time.”

Joan Morgan never planned on becoming a music critic, let alone a “hip-hop writer.” In 2006 she explained to interviewer Faedra Chatard Carpenter, “When I started writing, there was no such thing as ‘hip-hop journalism.’ I am part of that generation of writers that, for better or worse, created that as a genre and it really was a term that other people applied to our writings.” Within months of the Cube review, I began seeing her name regularly in the Voice and Spin, and began looking forward to her take on a culture that she obviously cherished.

This was another golden era of black writing, and Morgan’s work at ‘Vibe’ was at the forefront of a literary movement that would inspire a generation.

During that early ‘90s period, Joan was a teacher at the Fieldston School, but that was simply a stopover until the universe expanded and so-called “urban” magazines (most noticeably The Source, Vibe and RapPages) exploded on the scene. “Funny enough, I had very little respect for music journalism,” Morgan tells me, “because I didn’t really understand it. My thinking was, ‘Who needs a review to figure out what they wanted to hear.’ My real dream was to become an actor.”

In 1993, although The Source was already a heavy newsstand presence in the hip-hop mag department, the Time Inc./Quincy Jones-owned Vibe was promoted as bigger and deffer, as though it was the Esquire of urban magazines. With its larger size, better graphics, more experienced editorial direction and a writing staff that included Kevin Powell, Scott Poulson-Bryant and Joan Morgan, the magazine was an instant success. Coming at a time when most mainstream music/lifestyle publications, namely Rolling Stone, had no “writers of color” composing funky fresh features or reviews, The Source and Vibe was where more than a few African-American writers honed their craft, sharpened their skills and were allowed to have their words read by thousands of readers across the world.

This was, as writer Dean Van Nguyen recently documented in the Pitchfork piece “How a Group of Journalists Turned Hip-Hop Into a Literary Movement,” another golden era of black (Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts Movement) writing, and Morgan’s work at Vibe was at the forefront of a literary movement that would inspire a generation. Teenagers read the rap mags on the subway and buses, college students studied them in their dorms, with some hanging favorite articles pin-up style on the wall, and the mostly white world of New York City magazine journalism was forced to pay attention to the new kids in town. Morgan would go on to write several wonderful stories for Vibe including a controversial one on alleged homophobic Jamaican singer Buju Banton and, in 1994, a memorable cover story on TLC (The Fire This Time) that centered on the group’s rebellious rapper Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, who had, several months before, accidentally burned down her professional football player boyfriend’s Atlanta mansion after setting his sneakers on fire.

West coast entertainment journalist Ronke Reeves was an editorial assistant at Vibe during those formative years, and remembers well Morgan’s contributions. “In that male dominated world, Joan had a bold, prominent voice that broke new ground and inspired a generation of young writers. Even after she left Vibe and went to work at Essence and ultimately finish her book, I still followed her work, because, from a female perspective, there was nobody writing like that.”


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A few months before the house burning in Atlanta, writers from the hip-hop magazines were introduced to a new rap trio calling themselves the Fugees. The music on their debut Blunted on Reality was a fusion of streetwise rap and soul mixed with swaggering dancehall riddims. Assigned by RapPages editor-in-chief Sheena Lester, the first woman editor of a national hip-hop publication, I went to the midtown Manhattan offices of their label Sony Music and was introduced to the group, which consisted of Wyclef Jean, a rapper and multi-instrumentalist, his cousin and group founder Pras Michel, and Lauryn Hill, a singer and rapper who was as beautiful as she was talented.

With the exception of a rapper/singer named Smooth, whose album You’ve Been Played was released the year before, no other artists were displaying those dual talents on disc. Lauryn, then all of 19 years old, was an English major at Columbia University who, the year before, had appeared alongside Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act 2. It wasn’t uncommon for Hill to be seen doing homework in the conference room between interviews or in the dressing room when the group did shows. Tonya Pendleton, a former editor at the BET-owned YSB magazine, remembers being impressed. “Lauryn was so incredibly talented as an equally dope singer and rapper,” she says. “Although she had an incredible singing voice, Lauryn is, in my view, the greatest female rap artist of our time, if only because she’s a beast lyrically. The only thing making that arguable is that there are less albums to debate with.”

Hailing from Northern New Jersey, the guys lived in the Newark area while Hill came from South Orange. In author Brian Coleman’s essential text Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies (2007), Pras explained, “Our strength was in being three individuals who blended together perfectly. Clef brought the musicality, Lauryn brought the soulfulness and I brought the roughness and flash.” From the first time I’d listened to an advance cassette, hearing Hill’s dope lyrics on “Some Seek Stardom,” a track she recorded alone, I remember I could tell there was something special about her. Lauryn was a teenager who could hold her own as a rapper, but she also threw in a little jazzy soul singing to keep us on our toes. In a New York Times piece penned by Amy Linden, Hill described the Fugees’ sound as “a little rice and peas mixed with a little collard greens, a little mango with watermelon.”

While Blunted on Reality had followers, the sales were low and The Fugees were almost dropped from the label because of it. According to Jayson Jackson, a former Sony Music Group product manager who later became Hill’s manager, it would have happened if it wasn’t for him conning the publicity department for a few grand to get Caribbean-American producer Salaam Remi to do a remix of their singles “Nappy Heads” and “Vocabs.” In She Begat This, the producer tells Morgan, “They sent me the Fugees because they were Haitian, and they needed that bridge to get them to the mainstream. They had talent. They just haven’t figured out how to channel it.”

The Fugees’ careers were up in the air for awhile until they were given another chance by Sony that led to their critically acclaimed sophomore album The Score in 1996. “It (Blunted on Reality) wasn’t successful,” Pras told writer Brian Coleman, “but it was part of us feeling our way, figuring ourselves out as artists. It had to be what it was in order for us to evolve into The Score.” With their advance money, the group bought equipment and instruments, and constructed their own studio which they dubbed the Booga Basement. Alongside bassist Jerry “Wonda” Duplessis, another of Clef’s cousins, the Fugees recorded their follow-up in a mere six months.

With Clef and Lauryn also contributing to the production, the trio tightened up their style and raised the bar for themselves and rap records in general. The Score’s first single “Fu-Gee-La” was cool, but it was their second joint, a hip-hop remake of Roberta Flack’s classic “Killing Me Softly” sung by Lauryn, that became an unexpected hit and helped them cross over. The third single “Ready or Not” became known as the first time Hill revealed her love for singer Nina Simone and, by merely mentioning the legend’s name, introduced a generation of rap listeners to the activist blues singer. “As far as I know, no one in hip-hop had ever tossed out a Nina Simone reference before, so that was a big deal,” poet LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs says. “Nina represented so much to Lauryn, but later she seemed to also adapt Simone’s radicalness, rage and unpredictability.”

Years later, in light of the shift that Lauryn’s life took, I’d think back to that afternoon we spent together and Lauryn’s pre-release giddiness. Truthfully, after the release of ‘The Miseducation’ and shame of the lawsuit, her public persona would never be so joyful again.

At the 2018 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, when Simone was posthumously inducted, Hill performed “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” “Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair,” and “Feeling Good” as part of a tribute to the late artist. In her lifetime, Nina with her smooth dark skin represented blackness, as in Black is beautiful, which was also a message that Lauryn was communicating. Indeed, in She Begat This there is much conversation (with Yaba Blay and Tarana Burke) about Lauryn’s “deep chocolate brown skin” inspiring other dark girls who felt rejected by both hip-hop culture and their own communities.

“Witnessing Lauryn and her dark skin and natural hair shine brightly on magazine covers was affirming for Black girls to see,” says Newark-based arts writer fayemi shakur. “But, there was something deeper underneath her beauty to celebrate. She embodied a unique blend of style, Black cultural and political consciousness, with serious divine feminine energy. Any Black girl beginning to loc their hair back then could smile with pride in the mirror because Lauryn’s beauty reflected our own. It wasn’t always a popular thing to have natural hair.”

By the end of ‘96, The Score had sold six million units and won two Grammys including one (Best R&B Performance) for “Killing Him Softly.” Writer/filmmaker (Fresh Dressed) Sacha Jenkins, who in 1996 wrote a cover story on the group for Vibe, says, “As someone with Haitian blood dancing through his veins, that Fugees record meant a lot. They made Haitians cool — or rather, they helped a broad range of folks to better appreciate our talents, and recognize the uniqueness of our identity… That record also helped to expand what was acceptable in hip hop, as in, you don’t always have to spit the bars that you ripped out of your Rikers Island prison cell. You can sing, play guitar — scat even. Hip-hop had a lot of rules and the Fugees pissed on all of them. Hip-hop finally had a leading lady. Lauryn isn’t Haitian but, on that album, she’s honorary for sure.”

Of course, Hill too was a cultural chameleon, adopting a bit of Haitian music, jazzy vibes, southern soul and Jamaican yardie in her music. In 1996, the new and improved Lauryn was full of confidence and moxy, but, unknown to the general public, she and Wyclef had become lovers although he was already married. Their relationship became quite messy a year later when Lauryn had a baby, her pop-song-celebrated son Zion, with Rohan Marley, himself the son of reggae legend Bob Marley. Wyclef, whose own solo album The Carnival was a critical and sales success , kept telling the press that he would be producing and writing Lauryn’s album. “You would think after co-producing an album that sold millions that I’d be able to produce and write my own project, but it was a battle,” Lauryn told me the day I spent with her in June of 1998, two months before the albums release. And then she laughed.

On that afternoon I had set out to South Orange, New Jersey to interview Hill for a Source magazine cover story. Forty-five minutes away from Manhattan, the Lincoln Town Car pulled in front of the house where Hill was raised. Having moved a few years before to a different dwelling a few miles away, the old home had since been transformed into a recording studio, one of the many where The Miseducation was made. Earlier in the day, I’d met her mom and young son Zion and learned that she was also pregnant with her second child Selah Louise Marley, who would be born in November. Even at her then young age, motherhood was important to Lauryn.

“What bugs me is the fact that men never have to defend having children,” she’d tell me later. “Women are the ones who are asked, ‘How is this going to affect your career?’ If anything, having a growing family will make me even more motivated to create good music. My grandmother had 13 children and 32 grandchildren. Looking at her life has made me realize what a blessing it is to have family around.” Today Lauryn has six children.

We’d hung out together most of the day and I had gone with her into New York to meet with director Joel Schumacher about starring in the film version of Dreamgirls that he was supposed to make. After lunch at the Tribeca Grill, we returned to Jersey so Lauryn could play the complete album for me. An hour later, I made no secret to her that I was blown away, but also surprised by how much soul music, including wondrous collaborations with D’Angelo (“Nothing Even Matters”) and Mary J. Blige (“I Used to Love Him”), was the bedrock of the project. “What does it say about hip-hop when one of the better hip-hop records of the year contains little actual rapping?” Amy Linden wrote in a review.

Of course there were brilliant rap tracks including the opening song “Lost Ones” and the awesome “Doo Wop (That Thing),” whose split screen/time travel video was one of the most innovative of 1998, but the majority of the album had more in common with the then new neo-soul (D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Maxwell) than it did with hardrock hip-hop. “When I was six-years-old, I found boxes of old school 45s in the basement,” Lauryn told me, explaining the origins of her soul music love. “The first record I discovered was ‘If I Should Lose You’ by the Dream Ups. Next, I found a bunch of boxes and there were about 500 to 600 records from ‘I Wish It Would Rain’ to Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Super Fly.’ The boxes were overflowing with Motown, Stax, Philadelphia International and a bunch of others. While other kids in the neighborhood were rapping about New Edition, I was trying to school them on Roberta Flack and Marvin Gaye. Those old records had become a significant part of my life.”

In She Begat This writer/filmmaker dream hampton argues that The Miseducation, which she hated, sounded under-produced, but for me the music took me back to coming of age in the days of Soul Train on television, slow grindin’ at basement parties and live bands with real instruments jamming in smoke-filled venues. As Lester Bangs once said of Patti Smith, “her sound is (was) new-old.” Songs like “Ex-Factor” and “When It Hurts So Bad” were reminiscent of Willie Mitchell’s golden touch on Ann Pebble’s tracks, especially “Trouble Heartaches & Sadness,” or channeling Etta James at her most heartbroken. “I feel like the blueprint of this record has been in my head for years,” Hill said. “Although I rarely discussed my ideas with anyone before I started working, it was all in my mind.”

At the time I didn’t know that the label had originally rejected her masterwork, but perhaps I should’ve picked up on that when she said, “When Marvin Gaye created What’s Going On, even Berry Gordy thought he was crazy and trying to ruin his own career. It’s that kind of risk-taking that is sorely missing in music, be it rap or rhythm & blues.” Of course, the label turned out to be wrong; The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill sold millions, topped year-end best-of charts and propelled the then 23-year-old to superstar status. No one could’ve predicted that the album would’ve been as successful as it was.

Years later, in light of the shift that Lauryn’s life took, I’d think back to that afternoon we spent together and Lauryn’s pre-release giddiness. Truthfully, after the release of The Miseducation and shame of the lawsuit, her public persona would never be so joyful again.

“That album is a tour de force from a Black woman’s specific view with lyrics that speak to personal heartbreak as well as public, cultural issues,” Tonya Pendleton explains. “Whether she’s wondering why a lover can’t give more or why an artist can’t say more, she’s using her distinct voice and point of view to serve the music. There is so much richness to this album that’s it’s hard to believe it’s as old as it is. It seems as though she presciently covered all of the hot-button issues to come, from fuckbois to cold corporate rap to both the fear and anticipatory joy of becoming a working mother captured so beautifully on ‘Zion.’ It would difficult for me to chose a favorite song, but the opening track ‘Lost Ones’ may be one of the most lyrically potent fuck-you songs ever created.”

Within months of its release, Lauryn had become an even bigger star than she was during the Fugees reign, appearing on numerous magazine covers, including the beautiful Jonty Davis pic that graced the September, 1998 issue of The Source where my interview appeared. “That same year, a few months after The Miseducation came out, I saw her perform at my school at the University of Virginia,” journalist Tomika Anderson remembers. “Afterward, a few of us met her and shook her hand. She was so accessible and classy and beautiful, we were just blown away by her. She was just such a wonderful role model.”

Twenty years later, we’re still talking and writing about The Miseducation, but, as Hill would discover, with great genius often comes great consequences. Her post-millennium breakdown (or crack-up, in the Fitzgeraldian sense of the word) hasn’t always been easy to watch, especially for those who believed that she was a goddess hovering over us mere mortals. “[Hill] became a figurehead and touchstone and it was easy to forget how young she was,” Amy Linden says. “Being the Voice of a Generation has to be difficult, especially when you are dealing with personal drama that her fans and label might not have been privy to.”

Although She Begat This isn’t the music geek examination of that classic album that I was expecting, Joan Morgan succeeds at revealing other layers of our Lauryn love, while also humanizing a woman who many tried to transform into a deity two decades ago. As Roxanne Shante, never one to dish out compliments, said in 2010, “Lauryn Hill is in a category of her own.”

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Harlem native Michael A. Gonzales writes The Blacklist book column for Catapult. He has written for The Paris Review, The Village Voice, Pitchfork, New York magazine and the upcoming Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop edited by Vikki Tobak. A former hip-hop journalist, his articles, essays and reviews have appeared in The Source, RapPages, Vibe, Ego Trip, XXL, Complex and Mass Appeal. In addition, he is the co-author of Bring The Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture (1991). Currently he is working on a hip-hop novel.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors

Heritage Images / Getty

Laura Esther Wolfson | An essay from the collection For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors | University of Iowa Press |  June 2018 | 10 minutes (2,516 words)

 

When I was a very young woman, I spent many months working and traveling in the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War would soon take many people by surprise. I was far from my mother and from everyone else who mattered. In the Soviet hinterlands, I met a woman I’ll call Nadezhda. She treated me like a daughter. She had none of her own. She clearly wished she did.

Reader, I married her son.

—————

There was more to it than that, of course. I met the son first, and, in the usual way, he brought me home to meet his parents. And the son was actually delightful. When he spoke, he grew irresistible. Small children (there were many in his extended family) were especially susceptible to his charms. They would wrap themselves around his legs when he stood up from a chair to keep him from leaving.

Those months spent in another language, an experience both freeing and confining, the tectonic historical shifts I witnessed at close range — these things changed me. That the changes might fade with time was unthinkable. I needed a way to bring it all back home.

I was too big to wrap myself around his legs the way the children did.

—————

I hopped over to the States to take care of some personal business, then circled back to Nadezhda, her son, and the rest of the family in those hinterlands I mentioned, which were in Soviet Georgia. Nadezhda had just become a grandmother by her other son, who was the younger by four years. The household now consisted of Nadezhda and her husband, the baby and its parents, the older son (my intended) and me.

Julia, the baby’s mother, complained to me about what I could see for myself: the family did not welcome her. The pregnancy had been an accident, their second. I say their second, but both mistakes were of course seen as entirely hers.

Read more…

Shooting For Truth

The phrase "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work sets you free) appears at the entrance to Dachau and other Nazi concentration camps. Automatik, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Sven Hoppe / AP. Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Adam Skolnick | Longreads | August 2018 | 9 minutes (2,415 words)

“Every feature film is, in some ways, a lie,” said director Chris Weitz as he sipped his fourth double espresso. We were on set of Operation Finale, huddled under a tent next to acclaimed Spanish cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, and the specific lie up for debate was whether to turn a sunset scene into sunrise. That switch triggered some hand-wringing because moviemaking is an attempt to capture a scramble of moments, and if the look of one is altered, because, say, Oscar Isaac is still being primped in wardrobe as precious light fades from the sky, there are ripple effects, which can torpedo narrative flow and make even a true story feel false.

Whether or not the man Isaac was playing, Peter Malkin, actually landed at Ezeiza International Airport at dawn or dusk when he arrived in Buenos Aires in 1960 to help hunt down fugitive Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann, is beside the point. What matters is that Malkin’s arrival and all the moments thereafter feel real because this is a true story, one with urgent modern relevance. Plus, for Weitz this project is personal.

Chris Weitz, director of Operation Finale (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

If he missed an opportunity to shoot the scene as planned, the production schedule would be shredded, money wasted from an already stretched budget, and that matters because this is not the kind of movie studios like to make anymore. The 48-year-old director credits MGM for investing in an entertaining movie about a serious topic (read: there are no flying robots), but he’d declined to shoot in Budapest, which would have saved cash, preferring the authenticity of Buenos Aires — and now this.

¿Qué estamos esperando?” Aguirresarobe asked nobody in particular. Weitz was wondering the same thing. It was 6:42 p.m. and the sky was darkening, but despite the pressure and his caffeine load, Weitz projected an aura of calm on his bustling bilingual set.


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“Every day you’re making a movie it sort of gravitates toward a clusterfuck,” Weitz reasoned as he rolled up the sleeves of his pin-striped button down. “You just have to surf it.” Scattered all around us were a range of cherry vintage vehicles (a Citroën, two DeSotos, and a few Di Tellas, Argentina’s endemic automotive brand) and more than 50 extras dressed in mid-century period attire. All of it — the dusky light, the location, the costumes, the stakes — produced a magical quality as if we were in the eye of a Fellini or Kurosawa dream sequence.

We’d met up earlier that morning at Weitz’s rented house in Buenos Aires’ hip Palermo district, with its trendy restaurants, corner cafés, and cobbled streets, hopped in his chauffeured Camry, and drove an hour out of town to set, during which time I peppered him with questions about his 20-year career. Weitz has imagined almost every movie genre starting with the iconic coming-of-age sex comedy, American Pie, which he produced and directed with his brother Paul. Their follow-up, About A Boy (they cowrote and codirected), placed them among the best screenwriters of their generation and garnered an Oscar nomination. Since then he’s directed fantasy popcorn (New Moon) and channeled his inner Star Wars geek to cowrite a smash hit franchise spin-off in Rogue One. In between he published three young-adult novels in a post-apocalyptic trilogy, and contemplated ditching Hollywood “to do something a bit more useful,” he said. Makes sense for a man who sits on the board of Homeboy Industries and is a sucker for the radical inclusiveness of Burning Man, where he met his wife, Mercedes Martinez. This was his first turn at the helm of a major studio movie in six years.

As soon as we arrived on the Argentine air force base doubling as Ezeiza, he was whisked away by production designer David Brisbin (Drugstore Cowboy, New Moon) and prop master Ellen Freund (Mad Men) to approve the throwback terminal and control tower. A bit later he was greeted by the base’s real-life commandant, distinguished in his flight suit, who invited him to a pig roast the following evening. His invitation sounded more like an order, but in each instance Weitz was gracious and unflappable, because, when it comes to making movies, he has seen it all.

‘Every feature film is, in some ways, a lie,’ said director Chris Weitz as he sipped his fourth double espresso.

Weitz was raised around the business. His grandfather Paul Kohner was a prominent agent and producer who married Mexican-born actress Lupita Tovar. Their daughter, Susan, Weitz’s mother, also became an actress, who won two Golden Globes and was nominated for an Oscar for the 1959 film Imitation of Life. The brothers Weitz grew up in New York City, but visited their grandparents in L.A. often. That meant attending sprawling Bel Air dinners with scions of Old Hollywood, John Huston and Ingmar Bergman among them, but the reason MGM’s Jonathan Glickman hired Weitz for Operation Finale was because of his father’s history.

John Weitz was 10 when Adolf Hitler was declared Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Part of a wealthy Jewish family, he was sent from Berlin to St. Paul’s School in London, where he would stay until 1938 when the rest of his family finally fled Nazi Germany. Together they made their way to the United States. Weitz joined the army in 1943, and as a well-educated native German speaker, matriculated into the Office for Strategic Services (OSS), a predecessor to the CIA. In late April 1945, John Weitz was part of the team that liberated Dachau, the notorious death camp, and became one of the first Allied soldiers to see the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand. He shared what he witnessed with a few close friends in a series of letters, but he never told his grisly war stories to his sons.

“When I think about it now,” Weitz said of his father, “it’s quite likely that he had some kind of PTSD. He never slept very well. He was tightly wrapped.”

After retiring from a successful career in New York fashion, John Weitz began writing biographies of Nazis, including one of the Minister of Economics under Hitler, Hjalmar Schacht, as if Nazism was a riddle he was still trying to solve. When Chris returned home for the summers while earning his degree at Cambridge, he was dispatched to the main branch of the New York Public Library to help with research. That meant poring over giant leather-bound catalogs in search of obscure German diplomatic histories. He’d frequently return to his father’s study with photocopies of entire books in hand.

In late April 1945, John Weitz was part of the team that liberated Dachau, the notorious death camp, and became one of the first Allied soldiers to see the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand.

“He was fascinated with how the upper classes in Germany made accommodations and kind of allowed or justified Nazis to themselves,” Weitz said, “having first mocked everything about it.” Still, his father never showed his scars from Dachau. It wasn’t until 2014, 12 years after his death, that Weitz received a copy of a letter signed by his father, dated May 5, 1945. It details a descent into an unfathomable waking nightmare.

Prisoners are milling around everywhere, the way they looked cannot be described … starved, beaten, scarred … They showed me the horrors… The gas chamber… the label over the door says in bitter irony “Brausebad”… cement walls and floors, little barred windows knee high… and eighteen nozzles in the ceiling… and next door the “control room” … where the SS men used to turn on the hot water then turn off the hot water and turn on the gas… and then the hundred or so… would choke to death, scraping their hands bloody on the cruel cement walls… tens of thousands died here… it can be smelled from hundreds of yards away… the stink of death …

Pull a thread from any of the tragic stories discovered at Dachau and it leads to Adolf Eichmann. He planned the logistics first for the mass deportation of Jews, then their herding into urban ghettos across Europe, and finally transporting them like abused livestock by train to concentration camps. Because of his meticulous design, at least 11 million people were murdered with brutal efficiency while he lived out the war like a gilded robber baron in stolen luxury.

Pull a thread from any of the tragic stories discovered at Dachau and it leads to Adolf Eichmann…Because of his meticulous design, at least 11 million people were murdered with brutal efficiency while he lived out the war like a gilded robber baron in stolen luxury.

Within weeks of reading his father’s letters for the first time, Weitz received the Operation Finale script from Glickman, who calls the movie “a riveting thriller” about Israel’s daring operation to capture Eichmann in 1960. Weitz knew the history. In the chaos that followed allied victory, some of the worst war criminals slipped free, including Eichmann, who escaped from a POW camp before he could be identified. Penniless and on the run, he worked as a lumberjack then a chicken farmer before connecting to an underground railroad for war criminals run by Nazi sympathizers within the Catholic Church. It was a cabal of priests that wrangled him a Red Cross passport — the same document Holocaust survivors depended upon — and, with the help of former SS-affiliated Argentinians, facilitated his escape from Italy to Argentina, where he built a life as Ricardo Klement and eventually sent for his family. It wasn’t until the daughter of a Holocaust survivor started dating his son, who still carried the Eichmann name, that his presence would register on the radar of Israel’s national intelligence agency, Mossad.

The original script, a debut written by 28-year-old Brit Matthew Orton, was terrific, and Weitz guided rewrites that would make it even better. Eichmann could have had an inner Hannibal Lecter quality, but Orton and Weitz resisted this interpretation. “That’s very juicy stuff, but I wanted him to be less of a villain so that he could end up more of a threat,” Weitz said. “Humanize him, and he becomes even worse.” That tracks historically, too. By the time Mossad agents found him, Eichmann was living the ordinary life of a factory foreman on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, hidden in plain sight.

In a fascinating bit of casting, Weitz tapped Sir Ben Kingsley to play Eichmann, which offers the Oscar winner, who brought Itzhak Stern to life in Schindler’s List, a chance to explore the Holocaust from the wrong side of history. Soon after, Oscar Isaac came on board as a Mossad agent who is haunted by his family’s death at the hands of Nazis. One week into shooting, Weitz shared the Dachau letter with his cast.

Originally slated for production in 2016, the schedule shifted to 2017 to accommodate Isaac, and an old story found modern relevance thanks to Brexit, Trump’s election, and a widening acceptance of racist, authoritarian thought. There was Charlottesville, of course, and Trump’s reaction to the tiki torch bearers who managed to be shocking, yet easy to dismiss in their buffoonery, making them even more dangerous. After all, how many steps is it from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Warsaw, Poland, where 60,000 angry people, including thousands of skinheads and Nazis took over the streets last November. And how different is the Trump administration — which championed a horrifying and brutal family separation policy for illegal immigrants that was widely condemned as child abuse (at least 528 children remain separated from their deported parents, and one toddler who was taken into ICE custody on the border has died) — from the coalition government in Austria, which includes leaders of their radical right Freedom Party, or Viktor Orban’s government in Hungary, which has consolidated power by demonizing Muslim immigrants and refugees. Are we just as bad? Are we worse? How much worse might we soon become?

I like to think part of the reason “alt-right,” nationalist ideas are thriving today is that somehow the idea of Nazism has been sanitized of its horrors, and that too many have forgotten — or were miseducated in the first place — about what the Nazi flag represents. A similar Nazi resurgence swept Europe, particularly Germany, in 1960, when Israel sent Mossad agents to Buenos Aires to kidnap Eichmann to put him on trial in the promised land. Back then, Germany hadn’t yet tuned their education system toward truth and reconciliation. Cleansed of blood, denial was comforting. The thrill of nationalism, nourishing. If Eichmann was offered a fair trial, the theory went, with the opportunity to defend himself, hard evidence could be displayed, witnesses would testify, and the entire truth about the Holocaust could be laid bare before a worldwide televised audience.

I like to think part of the reason “alt-right,” nationalist ideas are thriving today is that somehow the idea of Nazism has been sanitized of its horrors, and that too many have forgotten — or were miseducated in the first place — about what the Nazi flag represents.

“There is a line in the movie when Eichmann says, ‘Your lawyers and your lying press will frame me,’” Weitz said. “That very phrase is propped up in ‘alt-right’ circles today because if you attack the sources of information you attack the notion of truth itself, and if you destroy those sources you have the right to impose your will.”

Weitz has no illusions that his film, which includes a depiction of that trial, will influence policy or stem the tide of nationalism, as if it’s 1960 all over again. His focus has always been to tell an entertaining and suspenseful tale. “What’s cool about this story,” Weitz said, “is the [good guys] don’t have guns. Their job was to get him out alive.”

Of course, first they had to find him, and that meant a sunset — or perhaps sunrise — arrival at an exotic airport for Peter Malkin. Just before 7 p.m., Isaac appeared on set looking every bit the movie star, and the cameras rolled. By 7:10 p.m., after a couple of hiccups there was just enough light for one more take, and Isaac delivered. Though the scene was utilitarian — he’s getting picked up curbside — and is more an orchestration of extras and camera movements, he found the tension in his rival agent in the driver’s seat. “Avi sent you?” Isaac asked, annoyed. The camera held for a long beat, and the entire set exhaled.

“OK, OK, OK,” Weitz said, “We live.”

***

Adam Skolnick is an author and journalist living in Los Angeles.

Operation Finale stars Oscar Isaac, Ben Kingsley, and Mélanie Laurent, and is in theaters on August 29, 2018.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler

A History of American Protest Music: Which Side Are You On?

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Tom Maxwell | Longreads | August 2018 | 8 minutes (1,536 words)

 

It’s axiomatic: In hard times, the vulnerable suffer most. Although the Great Depression left no American untouched, those who lived in the penury of Kentucky coal country bore a greater burden.

“In the early thirties I had one of my babies starve to death,” recalled Kentucky singer Sarah Ogan Gunning in Voices From the Mountains.

It literally happened — people starved to death. Not only my own baby, but the neighbors’ babies. You seed them starve to death too. And all you could do was go over and help wash and dress ‘em and lay ‘em out and sit with the mothers until they could put ‘em away.

On February 16, 1931, the Harlan County Coal Operators’ Association reduced their employees’ wages — already at subsistence level — by 10 percent. The miners responded by organizing a union. Union members were either fired and evicted from their company-owned homes, or beaten and killed. Soon there was a general strike. Thus began a period of harassment and violence known as the Harlan County War, or more simply, Bloody Harlan. The sheriff’s department acted as enforcers for the mine operators.

Sam Reece worked as an organizer for the National Miners Union. “Sheriff J.H. Blair and his men came to our house in search of Sam — that’s my husband — he was one of the union leaders,” remembered musician and activist Florence Reece. “I was home alone with our seven children. They ransacked the whole house and then kept watch outside, waiting to shoot Sam down when he came back. But he didn’t come home that night.”

The next morning, Florence, in her words, “tore a sheet from a calendar on the wall,” and wrote a new lyric to an old melody.

Come all of you poor workers, good news to you I’ll tell

Of how that good old union has come in here to dwell

Which side are you on?

 

If you go to Harlan County, there is no neutral there

You’ll either be a union man or a thug for JH Blair

Which side are you on?

Reece couldn’t have known that what she created would become the most durable anthem of the labor movement, and a template for protest songs for decades to come. “Which Side Are You On?,” written from acute personal trauma, has been universalized, both in lyric and musical modality. After making its way out of Harlan County and into a New York recording studio, it got modified to fit the message of countless underdog protagonists.

“Which Side Are You On?” quickly became an anthem in the union halls and picket lines. Jim Garland, another organizer and songwriter, immediately used it as a tool for protest. “In the course of such fights, songs expressed people’s feelings in a manner that allowed them to stand together,” he said. “Rather than walking up to a gun thug and saying, ‘You’re a bastard,’ which might have resulted in a shooting, we could express our anger much more easily in unison with song lyrics.”

In December, 1931, Garland and his cousin Aunt Molly Jackson travelled to New York to give concerts to raise money for the striking miners. They performed “Which Side Are You On?”, where it ultimately caught the ear of Pete Seeger.

By the early 1940s, Seeger was changing the face of American popular culture. He formed a band called the Almanac Singers with folk hero Woody Guthrie and singers Lee Hays and Millard Lampell. They sang folk songs — some they wrote and some learned from others — that were pro-union and anti-war. “They did not perform in costume, either of the concert stage or of the radio barn dance,” wrote Robert S. Cantwell in When We Were Good: The Folk Revival, “and yet their street clothes, in which they ordinarily appeared, ranged from pieces of business suits in various permutations and combinations to dungarees, workshirts, and construction boots….”

“Back where I come from, a family had two books,” remembered Arkansas-born Lee Hays. “The Bible to help ’em to the next world. The Almanac, to help ’em through the present world…We became the Almanac Singers.”

The first Almanac Singers album, Songs for John Doe, sold well enough in Communist bookstores to merit a new record. Talking Union was recorded in the same Central Park studio in May, 1941, and released on Keynote records in July. “Which Side Are You On?” was the last of its six songs. Even though they didn’t change Reece’s original melody or lyric, the Almanac Singers took “Which Side Are You On?” from the personal to the universal. It’s instructive to hear both versions. First, Reece, singing her composition in later years.

The melody for this song originated centuries ago in England, and is known as modal music. Modal music doesn’t have a key or chords in the way we would understand from, say, a Beatles song. Traditional Irish and Scottish folk music, which became the basis for Appalachian folk music, is modal, and predates 1650.

Reece’s performance is declarative and singular. She sings as an individual, without accompaniment or harmony. She sings to us as a group of individuals, each with a decision to make. “You have to be on one side or the other,” she once said. “In Harlan County there wasn’t no neutral. If you wasn’t a gun thug, you was a union man. You had to be.” She is asking us to decide, because even if the idea of community, in the form of a union, was comforting, the reality is that people were being picked off one by one.

The Almanac Singers’ version of “Which Side Are You On?” is an example of tonal music. (Again, think of a Beatles song, with chord changes and harmonies.) Pete Seeger begins with a stark, descending banjo riff — a foil for the upcoming single-string guitar melody — and then sings the first verse. The chorus is a haunting response to his call, sung by a group of voices. A community has formed, and what they sing is as much indictment as encouragement. Florence Reece’s modal melody, an artifact of Appalachian fiddle music, has been incorporated and expanded. We hear harmonies now, as sympathetic as a friend, as organized as a union.

Jim Garland, who brought “Which Side Are You On?” to New York, stayed and became part of the Greenwich Village folk scene, one largely founded by people like Seeger and Guthrie. It was an alternative world, one informed by a mix of races and cultures and classes. These folk artists collected and composed songs of the people, performed them in small clubs, union halls, and regional festivals, and made them available through recordings, virtually none of which were available to Florence Reece back in Kentucky.

Seeger had a knack for popularization. Remember, it was he who changed “I Will Overcome” to “We Shall Overcome.” Seeger also identified “Which Side Are You On?” as being pliable to other applications. He penned some new lyrics in support of the National Maritime Union in 1947:

The men who hate our union, they say we dodged the draft

Not one of those damn liars knows his forward from his aft

From there the song gained immortality. The Freedom Singers, a group formed by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1962, rewrote the lyric to reflect their Civil Rights struggle.

Come all you Negro people, lift up your voices and sing

Will you join the Ku Klux Klan or Martin Luther King?

They certainly employed, to great effect, the Almanac Singers’ call and response arrangement, bringing altogether more church into the proceedings.

Len Chandler, a topical singer from Greenwich Village who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery, wrote his own version:

Come all you Northern liberals, take a Klansman out to lunch

But when you dine, instead of wine, you should serve nonviolent punch

Through the rolling years, “Which Side Are You On?” has been adapted and covered by myriad artists, including Dropkick Murphys and Ani DiFranco. The question renews itself as each generation struggles against inequality.

The melody proved as durable as the lyrics proved malleable. Although Reece claimed to have borrowed the melody from an old Baptist hymn, the truth is much less sanctified. A listen to an a capella version of “Ho Lily Ho” by Appalachian singer Sarah Hawkes reveals the song’s origin. This is an ancient tune, also known as “Jack Monroe.” In most of its iterations, the song tells the story of a young woman who dresses like a man to find her lost lover in battle. In every version, fearlessness defines her:

‘Your waist is slim and slender, your fingers they are small

Your cheeks too red and rosy to face a cannon ball’

 

‘My waist, I know, is slender – my fingers they are small

But it would not make me tremble to see ten thousand fall’

Even if Florence Reece, the young and beleaguered Kentucky housewife, did not know the original song’s themes of transformation and bravery when she wrote her lyric, she carried them forward nonetheless.

Now it’s our turn. The new lyric has yet to be written, but the circumstances that will inspire it are with us daily. There may indeed be one humanity; there may indeed be “no such thing as other people’s children,” but right now this world is binary, and we are called to choose. Which side are you on?

***

Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

Boo: A Reading List About Ghosts

red, green, blue, and orange pac-man ghosts painted on a gray wall, with bright green grass on the ground
Photo by Jason Whitaker via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories (and some of her friends’ favorites, too). 

Tonight the subject is…ghosts. (Cue “WoooOOOOOOOOOOOooooo” sound effect.) Ghost stories seem to point to a reality beyond our own — or, at the very least, to an expanded understanding of what exactly this plane of existence encompasses. And from a philosophical perspective, I’m half Mulder and half Scully, which means I can find deep spiritual fulfillment from things that I’m 100% sure are total bullshit.

I was raised in rural western New Jersey, right across the Delaware River from the beautiful farmlands and forests of eastern Pennsylvania. Both sides of the river are dotted with 17th and 18th century homes and outbuildings, and many people speak of ghosts as matter of factly as my old neighbors in New Mexico speak of aliens: Maybe they hadn’t personally seen one, but their cousin sure did, and he wasn’t nuts. I’ve never seen a ghost, but I, too, have met many reasonably rational people who report ghost stories. I had a friend whose mother, a salt-of-the-earth woman with common sense and a practical nature, told me with no tongue in cheek about the ghost that lived in their farmhouse.

“I think it’s a little boy,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I get that sense. He’ll leave cabinet doors open. I can feel when he’s in the room and when he isn’t. When we first bought the house, I sensed him here. I could hear him rattling around in the basement. After the cabinet doors thing kept happening, I said out loud, ‘Hey, we don’t mean you any harm. We are going to fix some things in the house but we aren’t going to mess anything up or tear anything down.’”

She said she felt things were very nice after that, and that he still did the cabinet thing sometimes and she would say “Hello!” out loud when he did. “Maybe he’s lonely,” she said. “He’s mischievous but not mean.”

Like my friend’s mother, I was raised Roman Catholic. My relationship with the religion today is tenuous at best — I dislike corruption and mass sexual assault in any internationally franchised corporate entity, whether or not they get nonprofit status due to centuries of political influence — but I give credit to my loving Irish-Catholic father for teaching me an important lesson about belief. (My father, it must be stated, is also not a fan of homophobia, financial misappropriation, abuse, or incense.) Along with giant curly hair, he passed on to me a nearly prayerful awe for science. But his approach to spiritual belief — and belief in spirits — is deeply respectful, more so than my own. He said, “I think it would be arrogant to assume we know everything about this world and if other worlds exist. We don’t know what happens after we die. Maybe elements of energy or what we call a soul do stick around. And I do believe people who say they’ve seen things. Whether or not they were real ghosts, I can’t say.”

My religious background and the relatively open-minded attitude of my parents also influenced my curiosity about telekinesis, astral projection, astrology, clairvoyance, and the bestselling Time-Life “Mysteries of the Unknown” books. It certainly vaulted me in the general direction of witchcraft. Though I am a member of no religion and have a healthy skepticism about many things, I retain the desire for spiritual fulfillment and a connection with the divine. I also like ritual; I recently paid someone a couple hundred bucks to do a healing ceremony with me in a beautiful old house in Los Angeles. (It involved tarot, prayer, and creating a spell bag. I got to write down a list of things and then set that list on fire. It was great! Ten out of ten, would recommend.)

There are many genres of paranormal tale, and I believe the greatest of these is the ghost story. Do we see the people who’ve died before us? Is this simply wishful thinking? And if it is wishful thinking, why do some people report terrifying apparitions none of us would ever wish to see? Is this a collective human tendency to hallucination, or mental illness, or are ghosts really real? I don’t know, but I do know I’ve gotten to read some very good stuff on the subject.

1.  “Why Do People Believe in Ghosts?” (Tiffanie Wen, The Atlantic, September 2014)

Wen leads with three anecdotes about women who believe they may have captured images of ghosts via iPhone camera. Wen herself is one of these examples, and she does a medium-deep dive into why folks in our modern world still believe in specters and ghouls.

Recent surveys have shown that a significant portion of the population believes in ghosts, leading some scholars to conclude that we are witnessing a revival of paranormal beliefs in Western society. A Harris poll from last year found that 42 percent of Americans say they believe in ghosts. The percentage is similar in the U.K., where 52 percent of respondents indicated that they believed in ghosts in a recent poll.

Wen cites examples from Asia and mainland Europe, and consults scholars and scientists to figure it all out. By the end of the article, I came to the conclusion that there’s simply something wrong with the iPhone camera and the way it captures images, and that it was probably something notorious asshole Steve Jobs knew about and couldn’t fix.

2. “Ghosts Definitely Don’t Exist Because Otherwise The Large Hadron Collider Would Have Found Them, Claims Brian Cox.” (Andrew Griffin, The Independent, February 2017, suggested by Kara Hansen)

The headline alone is hilarious. Before reading this article I had no idea who Brian Cox was, but his photo told me this dude was wild, because he is giving us “deeply-moisturized Mads Mikkelsen on a casual science journey” realness. I’d also heard of the Large Hadron Collider, probably on an episode of Big Bang Theory or in an article I skimmed, but I didn’t know what the hell it was either. Now I do!

The LHC is the biggest particle accelerator ever built. It is includes a huge ring of superconducting magnets and accelerators that fling particles around, sending them into each other at such speed that they can be used to understand some of the most fundamental properties of the universe. In doing so, scientists can find out how elementary particles interact and behave, and understand how they work to compose the world that we see around us.

Sounds dope. What does all this have to do with ghosts? Well, Brian Cox, who is a TV-friendly professor at the University of Manchester, thinks the LHC would’ve seen a ghost if ghosts were real. It hasn’t, so ghosts are not real. Also important: Cox has a Beatles haircut, very on-brand for Manchester. And he was in a band, much like my friend Brian, who is a physicist but also half of the hilarious band Ninja Sex Party. Maybe they hang out.

Oh, Cox also has a podcast called the Infinite Monkey Cage, with which I plan to become obsessed. So he said some smart-sounding thing about all this on his show, and fellow TV-friendly scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson was all, “Friggin’ excuse me?” Except what he actually said was, “If I understand what you just declared, you just asserted that CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, disproved the existence of ghosts.” And Cox was like, “Yes.” Anyway, I’m going to become a Brian Cox fan, probably.

3. “The 10 Best Ghost Stories” (Lauren Oliver, Publishers Weekly, October 2014)

Lauren Oliver seems like a really neat person. She’s also a talented author. And while my columns here are reading lists and I don’t usually link to other lists, I’ll make an exception here. Oliver collects her favorite ghost stories, and I’m terribly embarrassed to say I’ve read none of them. I’ve certainly seen Kubrick’s screen adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, and I know it has key differences from the book. And I’ve seen any number of film, stage, and TV versions of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Anyway, I’ve got to get my shit together and check out all of her recommendations before I myself am dust and ashes, at which point I’ll pass on to my next life, or stick around this plane as a lingering ghost, or simply be dead and gone. Regardless of what happens, I doubt I’ll have much time to read.

4. “The Truth About The Paranormal” (David Robson, BBC, October 2014, suggested by Kara Hansen)

Robson opens with an anecdote about a naked Winston Churchill encountering the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. I am here for any and all naked Churchill stories, and to put it in the lede is a bold and brave move, so probably this article should get whatever the British Pulitzer is called. (It should be called the Bareass Churchill.)

His supposed contact with the supernatural puts Churchill in illustrious company. Arthur Conan Doyle spoke to ghosts through mediums, while Alan Turing believed in telepathy. Three men who were all known for their razor-sharp thinking, yet couldn’t stop themselves from believing in the impossible. You may well join them. According to recent surveys, as many as three quarters of Americans believe in the paranormal, in some form, while nearly one in five claim to have actually seen a ghost.

Read on for information on damage to visual processing centers in the right hemisphere of the brain, symptoms of epilepsy, and other reasons you might think you’ve seen a ghost when you haven’t. Turns out sometimes your brain tries to fill in missing information when, for example, you catch a glimpse of something unidentifiable in low light. Also turns out there are no more Churchill naked tales in this article, but you should still read it.

5. “The Spookiest Ghost Stories From All 50 States” (Mental Floss, October 2017)

There are so many delightful stories here. I’m highlighting one from Connecticut, our nation’s dullest state, as a reward for being a nice place to stop for a pee at the many Dunkin’ Donuts shops between Boston and New York.

In 1970, famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren were called to combat the spirit of “Annabelle,” a demonic presence attached to a giant Raggedy Ann doll. For weeks the doll had thoroughly freaked out its owner, Donna, moving from room to room, leaving handwritten notes, and even attacking a friend who suggested Donna get rid of the doll, choking him in his sleep. Finally, a priest exorcised the doll and the Warrens locked it away in a special case designed to check its malevolent influence. But even that wasn’t enough to save one brash visitor to the Warrens’ museum, who reportedly taunted the doll and died in a motorcycle crash on his way home.

* * *

In high school, my mom and her sister threw a party when their mom was away. My football-playing, pot-smoking, drag-racing (not in the RuPaul way, sadly), respectful-of-ghost-believers dad (remember him?) showed up with his giant cloud of curly red hair and found her Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy dolls, and proceeded to arrange them into a coital tableau to make his dumbass football bro friends laugh. My mom was enraged and embarrassed because she was trying to impress some guy and my dad was stealing focus. The point is, adolescent boys are gross and my mom wouldn’t go out with my dad for another year.

I’d tie it back into spectral ghosts but I keep picturing Raggedy Ann humping Raggedy Andy at a hormonal teen house party in Bound Brook, New Jersey in 1973 and now I’m snort-laughing on a flight to Dallas. Because for me, the most compelling part of ghost stories will always be the tales of who we used to be. Pantomime doll sex is just a bonus.

* * *

Sara Benincasa is a stand-up comedian, actress, college speaker on mental health awareness, and the author of Real Artists Have Day JobsDC TripGreat, and Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom. She also wrote a very silly joke book called Tim Kaine Is Your Nice Dad. Recent roles include “Corporate” on Comedy Central, “Bill Nye Saves The World” on Netflix, “The Jim Gaffigan Show” on TVLand and critically-acclaimed short film “The Focus Group,” which she also wrote.

Editor: Michelle Weber

Working Through the Apocalypse: An Interview with Ling Ma

CSA-Printstock / Getty

Ryan Chapman | Longreads | August 2018 | 12 minutes (3,139 words)

The end of the world in Ling Ma’s novel Severance comes not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but a stream of misinformation, social media hysteria, and plenty of willful denial. If this sounds familiar, it’s far from dreary. Ma injects comic levity into a world ravaged by “Shen Fever,” whose victims perform habitual tasks in a mute, somnambulant state until they waste away. Candace Chen, a New York-based, Chinese-American millennial, is immune to the disease, and joins a small group of survivors led by a former I.T. specialist.

Although this post-apocalyptic remnant waves a typical number of red flags — micro-authoritarianism, liberal use of euthanasia — Candace makes do as they scavenge for food and mercy kill the “fevered.” Ma depicts the end times with alternating chapters on Candace’s pre-apocalyptic life: dating in Brooklyn, navigating adulthood, and working at a book production company. She specializes in Bibles and takes occasional business trips to printing facilities in Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

Ma has fun with the end of the world: Severance reads like The Walking Dead infected with the anarchic spirit of Office Space. Candace’s coworkers sport designer flu masks, idly wonder about the colleague who didn’t return on Monday, and debate whether to take the spot bonus for staying on when everyone else has the good sense to get the hell out of NYC.

Candace doesn’t have good sense. She maintains her routines and eventually moves into her office. She updates a photo blog called NY Ghost with images of the empty city. And we learn Candace is guarding a secret which may imperil her chances with her newfound “friends.” Read more…

To Be Clean

Illustration by Xenia Latii

Natassja Schiel | Longreads | August 2018 | 24 minutes (6,673 words)

I closed the sheer maroon curtain of the private dance nook and needled my eight-inch stilettos through the G-string I’d kicked off minutes earlier to Prince’s “Darling Nikki.” On the single chair, where I usually hovered nude over men, I sat and counted the money I’d made. Only $9. It wasn’t a money-making night. I couldn’t stop thinking about what my younger sister, Melissa, had told me earlier. I was sad, and no one wants to give money to a sad stripper. Even if she fakes happiness, the customers seem able to sniff out insincerity, and it repels them. In six weeks, I’d be moving 3,000 miles away. From Portland to New York. How could I leave my sister behind? What about Melissa?

After wiggling back into my minidress, I stood, forced a smile, and strutted back into the club. I was there to make money, so I had to find a way to become genuinely cheerful. But my motivation deflated after only a few steps. I’ll just go to the bar — watch the girl on stage — and find my bearings. Nelly Furtado’s “Maneater” was playing, and only one girl danced to that song. Mya.

Mya swung upside down, topless, on the monkey bars that lined the top of the stage. Her breasts, not even A cups, were perfect. I admired her dark amber nipples as she swayed in the air. Her wavy black hair hung like a lion’s mane. Sparkling red lip gloss framed her smile. Every seat was filled and a few stragglers even stood off to the side, delighted by her.

Mya appeared carefree. I needed to be like that.

When I had been on stage, there were only two men. A few others had come up and given me pity tips.

“You want a drink?” a man with a deep voice asked me. The question jolted me out of my head. I looked at the speaker peripherally. He was in his early 30s, young — unlikely to spend real money. Occasionally younger men came into the clubs in Portland to hit on the strippers. As if the dancers were not trying to make a living, but trying to find someone to date.

We loathed these customers.

“Sure,” I said and smirked.

“Let’s do a shot. Do you like that whipped cream vodka stuff?”

I shrugged. I didn’t, but it was Mya’s favorite, and that alone made it appealing. The times Mya and I had taken shots, we’d leaned into one another, our cool skin touching. She always smelled like peaches and wore shimmering outfits with glittery jewelry. “Bling it and they will come” was her stripper motto. I’d had a crush on her for two years.

Many nights, while it was slow — common in 2010, deep into the recession — we’d sit together at the bar. We’d both loved dancing at first, and we were both ready to move on with no other job to move on to.

“If you could do anything,” I’d asked her, “what would you do?”

“I wanted to be a vet when I was growing up, but it feels so far out of my reach.” She looked down at the bar instead of at me.

“I bet you could start small. Maybe a vet’s assistant?”

She thought it over. “I know I would still need education of some kind. I feel like I’m too old for that now.”

I laughed. “You’re one year older than me, right? Twenty-six?”

She nodded.

“I’m taking community college classes — my sister, too,” I said. “You aren’t too old. I’ll help you. I’m good at this kind of thing.”

She grinned, the corners of her eyes crinkling. She grabbed my arm and leaned in to kiss my cheek, then pressed her face to mine, staying there for several seconds before moving away.

I learned we both had orange cats that had male names but were girls (hers: Bobby; mine: Raja). That she loved David Bowie and Prince. That like me, she was first-generation American. However, she was proud to be Mexican American. That was not like me — I rejected my Russian and German lineage. I adored Mya so much that despite how badly I needed money, I’d hoped for these nights, huddled up with her at the bar. My feelings for her intimidated me. And even though we’d sometimes make out after hours, I couldn’t bring myself to do more.  

The customer handed me my shot. “I’m Rob, by the way,” he said. This will do it, I thought, this will drown out my sister. We clinked glasses before downing the syrupy-sweet liquor in one swallow. My stomach warmed and I became light-headed. The rush of the first drink on an empty stomach. My shoulders relaxed. My chest loosened. Everything was going to be alright.

“You don’t seem like the other girls that work here. You’re better than this,” Rob said.

I rolled my eyes. “So many men say that, thinking they are being clever or complimentary, but I’m going to let you in on a secret.” I motioned for him to get closer, then whispered into his ear, “The girls I work with are my friends. We hate when customers say that kind of shit.”

“Yeah, but I mean — ”

I placed my pointer finger to his lips. “Shh,” I said.

Rob, like I thought, wasn’t interested in getting a private dance. Or spending money on anything other than drinks. There was no way to make money off him. I surveyed the room from my place at the bar on several occasions, considered introducing myself to someone else — tonight was uncommonly busy. But, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was too raw. Opening myself up for any form of rejection, even the faux rejection of the club, might break me.

That was most of dancing. Approaching man after man who delighted in saying no to women who would probably never even speak to them outside the club. Rob bought another round, and I eased into the fact that tonight was going to be another dud. At closing, I had little more than $100. In the beginning of my stripper career, almost four years earlier, a friend had told me: “As long as you make a bill.” Then and still, $100 a night didn’t seem like enough for this job. I’d wanted to make $500 that night, what I used to average. But I hadn’t even made $200 in months.

After the bouncer yelled for everyone to “get the fuck out,” the dancers shuffled into the dressing room. We kicked off our heels, standing flat-footed as we disrobed. Mya wasn’t even five feet tall and once we were both naked, she embraced me, our hot and sweaty bodies stuck together. I loved it — the feeling of being glued to her even for a moment. I breathed her in, peaches and tangy body odor.

“You’re so sexy,” she said and laughed.

Me? No, you are!” It was the first time all night I’d been happy.

She gave me a peck on the lips and then we dressed quickly in jeans and T-shirts.

Mya and I walked out to the parking lot with the bouncer at our side. October was usually wet and cold in the Northwest, but this year it was still dry and warm so it felt like a summer night. My attention was on Mya, so at first I didn’t notice that Rob was standing to our right, in an empty parking space. He tried to convince me to go with him right then “because we had a real connection.” The bouncer stepped between us and told Rob to go, but Rob persisted. I started crying. It was the third time in three consecutive shifts that a customer had waited outside for me.

I adored Mya so much that despite how badly I needed money, I’d hoped for these nights, huddled up with her at the bar. My feelings for her intimidated me.


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“Why does this keep happening?” I asked Mya. The other times I hadn’t cried. I’d made it clear they were crossing boundaries. This time, though, I felt helpless. As helpless as I’d felt earlier that day with my sister. I thought of all the men that had hurt me, and all the men that had hurt my sister. I wanted to take it all away from her, or at least I thought I did.

“It happens to all of us,” Mya said, shrugging. “But you’re too upset.” She took my hand and interlaced her fingers with mine. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

She guided me to her beat-up black Honda Accord. It wasn’t the first time Mya had tried to get me to go home with her. Many times, she’d purred into my ear, “Please come to my place.” And each time I had wanted to, but fear took over. What did it mean that I wanted it? I suspected I was bisexual, but had been told repeatedly that bisexuality wasn’t real. Well-meaning friends and less well-meaning customers told me I was simply bi-curious. I’d heard this so often that I was confused. Was what I felt for Mya only curiosity? It seemed like more. And that scared me. So I’d refuse. And she’d say, “I don’t understand. Don’t you want to be with me?”

I really do, I’d think, but shake my head and leave.

Now, Mya opened her passenger-side door and shut me inside as Rob yelled over the bouncer’s shoulder, “I wasn’t trying to make you upset. I just like you for real.”

I cried harder. The idea that he thought he liked the real me was too much to bear. He didn’t know the real me. No one there did.

“Ignore him,” Mya said as we sped off in her car.

At her place, Mya guided me to her bathroom. She kneeled down, turned on the bathtub faucet, and let the stream of water run over her fingers. “I’m going to give you a bath,” she said. “It’ll make you feel better.”

She stood up and ran her fingertips along the side of my face, then tugged at my clothes, removing each item slowly, and told me to get in. As I settled into the warm water, she poured rose bath gel onto a loofah and massaged it until it was foamy.

“I get the feeling that wasn’t really about the customer. What’s going on?” she asked as she rubbed the loofah over my back in soft, circular motions.

I took a steamy floral breath. I wanted to lie. It seemed like too much to tell Mya the truth, but the truth was too close to the surface.

“Eight years ago, two of my sister’s friends went missing,” I said. This was something I never intended to tell her, or anyone that didn’t already know.

I pretended it hadn’t happened. I pretended it hadn’t had any effect on me. I needed to be the stronger, older sister because so many people — including our mother — made the disappearance of the girls about themselves. Melissa needed me to let her have space to grieve without another person co-opting it. But what happened had also been so painful for me that I couldn’t face it.

“I can’t even imagine,” Mya said, shaking her head. She dropped the loofah, then cupped water into her hands, releasing it over my shoulders. The water cascaded down my back.

“Right after the second girl went missing, my sister—” I stopped, unsure if I should go on.  

Mya looked into my eyes. “You can tell me.”

“Why are you being so nice to me?” I asked, perplexed. It seemed like I might infect her with my pain. I never wanted anyone to see me like this. The suffering was off-limits and only allowed in private.

“Oh, Natassja,” she said, as if that was enough of an explanation. She touched my face and pulled me in for a kiss. “Let’s go to bed and cuddle. I won’t try anything, I promise.”

She took my hand, and I stood. Opening a towel, she patted me dry. She rubbed thick shea butter that smelled like peaches all over my body. The cream warmed quickly, melting as she applied it to my bare skin.

“Do you feel better?” she asked.

I nodded, though it wasn’t quite true. But I wasn’t crying — and that was close enough.

She led me to her bed and untangled my hair with a brush, one of my favorite sensations. It was one of the only tender things my mother had done for me as a child. I begged her to brush my hair until I was a teenager. Mya had no idea, but she was soothing me exactly in the way I needed.

***

“I started making amends,” my sister had said earlier that day as I pulled out of the Portland Community College campus parking lot where we were both taking classes. “And I need to tell you something.” Melissa took a deep and loud breath. I glanced in her direction, the crook in her nose visible from the many times she’d broken it when we were growing up, and then I looked back to the road.

My sister was 21, four years younger than me, and a year and a half clean. Snippets from the first time she received a jail sentence flashed before me. The court officer hauling her away. That I’d tried to tell her that I love her, but a different officer blocked me. She’s my sister, I’d said dumbly, pushing forward against him. I could feel the stiff bullet proof vest under his uniform. He grabbed my upper arm and threatened to arrest me, too. I went limp, and he dragged me to the exit of the courtroom, then flung me out into the hall. Stunned, I rubbed my arm. Red fingerprints would change to a ringed bruise that I continued to rub until it disappeared. It took two years: my sister in and out of jail. But once faced with time in prison, she finally stayed clean.

“Go for it.” I smiled.

I thought my sister might apologize for the time she stole my last $20. I’d called my mother that day and told her what Melissa had done. My mother didn’t believe me. It’s all the money I had in the world, I said, then sat in my car and wept. It was during one of several failed attempts to stop stripping.

Or I thought Melissa might apologize for one of the many times she’d accused me of being her reason for relapsing. In response I’d yelled, my voice strained, cracking: I’m the only person that’s ever truly loved you. Then calmly told her she could no longer be in my life as she sobbed. Later, I clasped my hands on my neck. I wanted to feel all the discomfort of my sore throat; the self-imposed punishment of my cruelty. The awareness that I was trying to guilt her into sobriety came over me, but we still didn’t speak for months. And the truth was that I did worry it was my fault. If it was my fault, it also meant I could control her — her addiction — but that I was failing. I owed her an apology, too.

‘Eight years ago, two of my sister’s friends went missing,’ I said. This was something I never intended to tell her, or anyone that didn’t already know.

“OK, this is it,” my sister said. “I was thirteen the first time I shot up heroin.” She stared ahead. I was confused. This wasn’t an amends. It seemed more like a confession. Prior to this, she’d insisted that she never shot anything into her veins. I hadn’t believed her, but I never suspected she might have been only thirteen.

“What do you mean? How?”

“It was right after Jessica went missing,” she said evenly, “when everyone realized that Allie hadn’t just run away.” I looked at her and she was looking at me. Her grey eyes stared straight into mine. She pursed her lips, and only moments later, unable to hold my gaze, she looked out the passenger-side window.

The mystery surrounding the disappearance of her friends, and how she suffered as a result, was her reasoning: the catalyst for her use of heroin. Except it wasn’t really. In that moment, I thought maybe if that hadn’t happened, she would’ve tried heroin later, at a more appropriate age. When she was 18, or 21. It was illogical. Is there an appropriate age to shoot up heroin?

I knew she’d tried meth by accident — it had been laced in some weed she’d smoked, when she was 11. She started smoking cigarettes and pot at 10. She’d been drunk at a Girl Scout meeting when she was 9. She posted pictures of herself high on Ecstasy on Myspace when she was 15. Her eyes glazed, dime-size pupils almost swallowing her irises, her jaw clenched. A purple pacifier hung around her neck. I don’t know when she started snorting cocaine, I just know it was her “favorite.” The drug she used compulsively, that she could never turn away. When exactly does an addiction start?

“But who gave it to you?” I asked. My chest burned and became itchy as hives blossomed there. I looked straight ahead so she couldn’t see the pain I knew would be obvious in my eyes. In the last year and a half, she’d transformed. The longer she stayed clean, the softer her face. The more she smiled. She rediscovered that she was nurturing, often playing with our younger cousins: rolling around in the grass, chasing and tickling them. She laughed. Thinking back to the little girl she was, the one that got so lost, was unbearable.

“It was Samantha’s stepdad. Remember her? I practically lived over there at one point.”

I remembered. Neither Melissa nor I knew our respective fathers. She latched onto men as result, but I tried to stay away from them. I learned early the damage men can do — at the hands of a family member — and it was something I wanted to inoculate my sister from. But, though the same man didn’t hurt her, I’d been powerless to stop others. Samantha’s stepdad had been one of the men I believed might hurt my sister. But there were many. There was the friend’s father that took Melissa on camping trips — only Melissa, no one else. Another friend’s stepdad that gave Melissa beer and requested back rubs from her. The paramedic who bought Melissa stuffed animals.

I’d begged my mother to stop letting my sister hang out with grown men. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she’d say. “She just wants a father and these men are willing to be something like that for her.”

She’s in danger, I’d plead.

“What do you mean it was Samantha’s stepdad?” I asked, not sure I wanted the answer.

“He was the one that laced the weed that one time. He said heroin would take my pain away and asked me if I wanted to try it.” She sighed.

I nodded, continuing to look ahead at the road, fuming, but trying not to appear rattled. I was afraid she’d stop entrusting me with this information if I reacted too strongly.

“So he found a vein and did it for me.”

“Did it help?” I asked.

Her growth seemed to have been stunted at the age of 10, and I’d been worried about her lack of development. My mind went back to her skinny arms and legs. She’d weighed less than 60 pounds. I’d been relieved when finally, at the age of 17, she grew and gained weight. She was now 5’7”, three inches taller than me, and a normal weight.

“I mean, the pain went away, but I started vomiting. It was awful.”

“Why’d you do it again if you hated it?”

“Because I’m a drug addict,” she said.

I was living in my first apartment by then. Melissa had been navigating the world without me. It stung — the idea that I had left her right when she needed me.

“It was my choice.” Her dark brown ponytail bobbed as she turned her head away from me before going on. “I have to take responsibility for it.”

In her addiction, she never stuck with anything. But now, she showed up each morning for classes at the community college. She maintained employment. She had become responsible, and yet, it seemed like she’d taken this ethos too far.

“But you were a kid.”

“Still, no one forced me. And it’s OK. I’m OK now.”

My knuckles whitened as I gripped the steering wheel, trying to focus on the bridge we were about to cross. We drove past Lucky Devil Lounge to the right, the club I’d be working at later that night. Melissa didn’t know I was stripping again. Months earlier, I’d quit and sworn I was done for good. She wasn’t the only one who lied.

I’d started stripping for the same reason I was doing it again: I needed money. But I’d long ago recognized the high I got while dancing. Nothing else made me feel the way dancing did. No substance could compare to the rush of getting naked for men — men who couldn’t touch me. Men who paid me to tease them, but couldn’t gain anything real from me. I could be as sexual as I wanted and no one could have me. That made me feel like the most powerful woman in the world. And that was the hardest part of quitting. I didn’t want to let it go. Even though, as time went on, the highs came less often. The façade that I had all the power had started to crumble. But, I longed for it anyway.

Was her addiction that much different?

Neither one of us spoke again for the rest of the 30-minute drive to the halfway house where she was living. In six weeks, I’d be moving to New York to study creative writing at the New School. I’d felt OK about moving because Melissa was clean, in school, doing well. Suddenly, I was unsure. How could I leave her? How could I have ever left her? It was irrational and I knew it, but I wanted to reach back into the past and change everything.

***

Two weeks after I graduated from high school, around midnight in the dining room of the duplex where my mother, sister, and I lived, I was hand-sewing a dress for a porcelain doll that would become Melissa’s birthday present when she turned 14. After finding the doll at a craft store for $3, I decided to make my sister something she’d always wanted. I designed my own pattern, using an old newspaper to trace it before cutting it into pieces. I based it on a Victorian ball gown and used shiny, satin fabrics in Melissa’s favorite color: purple, in several shades. And also designed a hat, purse, and parasol to match.

While Melissa was staying at a friend’s house, I was silently, carefully working on the dress when my mother started screaming from the top of the steps.

“You’re being too loud!”

Her sudden yelling startled me. I pulled the stitch I was working on too tight.

My mother stomped down to the dining room. She wore a baby-blue terry cloth robe, and her hair was a frizzy, wild auburn mess.

“You’re being too loud,” she yelled again, pointing at me. In a movie, it would’ve seemed exaggerated and funny. I held the needle strung with lavender thread perfectly still, as if moving would ruin the entire gown. As if I’d move and provoke more rage from my mother.

“I’m so sick of your shit,” she continued.

“I’m just sewing,” I said meekly, as if it weren’t obvious. “I haven’t been making any noise.”

I knew I was making a mistake. If she believed I was making noise, it was fact. She’d done things like this throughout my childhood. She’d burst into my room in the middle of the night, screaming into the darkness at me to “shut up.” I’d wake, confused. This was embarrassing when I had friends over. They’d whisper after my mother went back to bed, “Why’d she do that?” I’d smile weakly, unsure of what to tell them.

“Get the fuck out of my house,” she shouted.

The required reaction to these outbursts was simple: say I was sorry; say I’d be quiet.

I set the dress down while slyly examining the stitch I’d pulled too tight — I hadn’t ripped the delicate fabric. I looked over to her, but I didn’t say what I knew she wanted to hear.

“OK. I’ll go.”

The next day I found my first apartment. It was behind the mall where I worked, and the complex itself was rumored to be the most crime-addled place in the Portland metropolitan area: mostly drug deals, but also an occasional murder or rape. I didn’t care. Or more accurately: I couldn’t afford to care. I shared a one-bedroom with a friend. Rent was $450 a month; $225 each.

I thought about taking Melissa with me. Our mother wouldn’t object. On random slips of paper, I calculated my budget over and over, trying to figure out if there was a way I could afford to take care of both of us. It was 2002, and the minimum wage in Oregon was $6.50. Even if I managed to get 40 hours between my two part-time jobs, it wouldn’t be enough to adequately support myself, let alone another person. Melissa couldn’t come.

She’d weighed less than 60 pounds. I’d been relieved when finally, at the age of 17, she grew and gained weight. She was now 5’7”, three inches taller than me, and a normal weight.

As I grappled over what to do, I asked my closest friends, “What about Melissa?” They told me that I shouldn’t feel guilty; my sister wasn’t my responsibility.

Soon after I moved out, our mother refused to buy my sister school clothes or supplies, something she’d done several times to me. Extended family members or other adults in my life always picked up the tab, and I was both grateful and humiliated. These same adults called me when they found out I’d moved out. They all asked: What about Melissa? How can you leave her alone with your mother? They externalized my internal dialogue, and it deepened my guilt.

So, I did the one thing I could: I picked up the tab for my sister — I took her school shopping.

“Can I move in with you?” Melissa asked while we wandered through Target.

She wasn’t privy to my obsessing about taking her with me; the many pieces of paper that I’d calculated my budget on — then recalculated and recalculated and recalculated. I thought she was just smoking cigarettes and weed, drinking alcohol. I’d been concerned about those things, but she’d already tried heroin and I’d had no idea. Her request sucked the air out of the store. We stood in the fluorescent-lit aisle of office supplies. I focused on a package of gel pens and shook my head. She never brought it up again.

***

“People kept asking me, what about Melissa?” I said to Mya, her arms wrapped around me, her legs tangled in mine. It was a week after she’d bathed me. After that night, I went home with her every time we worked together. “And they were right. How could I have left her? How can I leave her again?” I stroked Mya’s hair.

“It makes perfect sense why you’d feel that way, but it’s misplaced. You realize that, right?” She traced the side of my body with the back of her hand.

“I thought that was true for so long. Now I’m questioning everything I’ve ever done. I feel like I failed her,” I said. I pushed Mya’s hair behind her ear.

“It wasn’t your job to protect her. It was your mother’s,” Mya said.

“I feel like I should take her with me when I move to New York.”

“You can’t fix what already happened. You know that, right?”

I didn’t know that. I believed, inexplicably, that I could still correct the wrongs of the past. But I didn’t say this. I shrugged, then tilted my face up and Mya kissed me deeply. We pawed at each other. Her skin was warm putty in my hands. I bit her neck lightly, then stopped.

“Oh my gosh. I completely forgot to ask,” I said. “Did you register for classes?” The last time I’d been over, we researched what it would take for Mya to become a vet assistant. Only an associate’s degree. We’d both done a happy dance in her living room that night.

Mya smirked. “I did,” she said. “I start in January.”

“You’re starting veterinary school right when I’ll be starting classes in New York. New beginnings for us both.”

“We should celebrate that,” she said, grinning. She climbed on top of me, and for a while I forgot about everything but her.

When she fell asleep, I listened to the even, slow pattern of her breath. I never wanted this to end, but the fact that it had to almost made it easier to just let myself feel. To be in the moment. To not worry about what could go wrong. Four more weeks and I’d be living in New York. Four more weeks to spend entwined with Mya. I opened my eyes. Orange light shone through her curtains. It was already past dawn.

Mya shifted in her sleep, reached out, pulled me in. And even though she was smaller than me, she made herself the big spoon.

***

I’d been living in New York for a year and a half, studying creative writing, when Melissa moved to live with me. By then she was three years clean. After I’d learned about the extent of my sister’s drug use, I hadn’t let go of the idea that she needed to be close to me.

Her first week in the city, we were walking down 2nd Avenue in the East Village when she remarked, “It’s a junkie’s paradise here.”

I froze. I’d worked at a sports bar on 2nd Ave. for most of the time I’d lived in New York. I scanned our surroundings. Everything familiar was still there: the pharmacy, the coffee shop, the bodega on the corner, the bars that lined the street, the indie movie theater, the Eye and Ear Infirmary, bags of trash. Those were the things I’d always noticed. Yet it was like Melissa did a magic trick.

Suddenly, instantaneously, I saw the block the way she did.

A girl in clean, ripped clothing nodded off on the corner: a street kid. She leaned against a building, then slid down to the ground, as if in slow motion. Slumped over, she stayed there — her head hanging, eyes closed, jaw slack. I spotted at least three other street kids nodding off, dotted along the sidewalk, just like she was. My skin prickled with the realization that I’d brought my sister into this world.

Six months later, Melissa and I stood in the bathroom of our apartment. “I need to tell you something,” she said, while pulling her right eye taut and then drawing black liner across her lid. She was getting ready for work. I’d been waiting for this conversation.

“So, I relapsed,” she said, then started lining her other eye.

“I know,” I said. A mix of rage and sadness filled me. Though she’d been able to maintain employment, paid rent on time — was acting as a responsible adult in these ways — her behavior had become more and more erratic. As were her moods. She stopped smiling. She didn’t laugh. Her face hardened. She stayed out many nights. Sometimes it was clear she was hungover, her eyes rimmed red, her face slightly swollen. And she’d lost at least 20 pounds.

“I knew you did. That’s the only reason I’m telling you. But don’t freak out. I have it under control. There is such thing as moderation. And you know that I never even got to drink legally, right?” She looked at me expectantly.

After I’d learned about the extent of my sister’s drug use, I hadn’t let go of the idea that she needed to be close to me.

“I need to think,” I said, then shut myself inside my bedroom. I did not have faith that she could keep it “under control” long-term. Our agreement had been that we would live together as long as she was sober. I’d considered this a formality. Of course she’d be sober. And we’d have a dry home. This changed nothing for me. I didn’t often drink, and never at home.

My hard-drug experimentation was also over. It had been brief, and my primary motivation had been to understand my sister. The one time I tried cocaine ended in uncontrollable sobbing. The one time I smoked heroin resulted in dizziness and nausea. In both cases, all I wanted was for the intoxication to end. And, afterward, a deep sadness settled over me that lasted for days. The only drug I tried and liked was MDMA. It made me feel like I could love, and more importantly, trust freely. I’d had a similar sensation with Mya, except no drugs were necessary. I didn’t feel compelled to actively seek MDMA out again. After experimenting, I felt no closer to understanding my sister or her addiction. My relationship with stripping was still the closest, but stripping was no longer appealing.

When I’d moved to New York I didn’t want to risk not finding steady work, so I’d started dancing at what was considered one of the most upscale clubs (and the first strip club to be traded on the stock market): Rick’s Cabaret. But, of the nine strip clubs I’d worked, this one was the seediest. The first time a customer grabbed my ass, I asked a bouncer for help. He said, “You’re a stripper.”

In New York, touching was against the law, but no one heeded this. I started slapping customers regularly. I’d never experienced anything like it. Even when I’d worked at a club that allowed touching, the girls decided who touched them and how.

One night at Rick’s, a customer whipped his limp dick out in a private room. When I told him to put it back, he asked, “What am I paying for then? Can’t you at least give me a hand job?” He, like the majority of the predominately white and rich clientele, felt entitled to extras. I left the VIP and refused to return until a bouncer helped. A manager eventually lied to the customer, telling him there were cameras in the rooms so that he’d cooperate. This customer claimed he was a famous music producer. The next day I verified this using Google.

Even on nights that I left with $2,000, the high I used to feel was missing. So much about stripping I had loved, but once it was done fulfilling my needs, it had been easy to stop. After six weeks, I quit.

Melissa’s plight wasn’t as simple. She’d experienced so much so young — I never blamed her for wanting to ease her sorrow.

After Melissa admitted she relapsed, I sat on my bed, hands shaking. I needed to tell her to move out. How was I going to do this? We avoided each other for a few days. Then I mustered the courage to approach her. She lounged on our red couch, playing Candy Crush.

I stood, lingering over her awkwardly and said, “If you aren’t clean.” I took a breath. “Then you need to move out.”

She rolled her eyes. “Like I said, it’s under control.”

“I don’t care. That’s the deal.”

It worried me to kick her out, but if I let her stay I’d be enabling her, which was the only thing that would be worse. I gave her 30 days to find another place.

“You’re being dumb,” she said.

I started shaking again. “You have to leave,” I repeated, before going back into my bedroom and burying my face into a pillow so she couldn’t hear me cry.

She must’ve known I was upset, but I tried to hide it from her. I stopped eating because nausea settled in, becoming my new norm. My skin turned sallow and splintered capillaries dotted the puffy skin under my eyes like bright red freckles. I cried often, but never in front of my sister. I thought I was done worrying that she might die or go to prison because of her addiction. Three years, I believed, was enough to know that it was over. Now I understood that “one day at a time” really meant one. day. at. a. time.

***

I fell asleep soon after realizing it was past dawn, entangled with Mya. What could’ve only been hours later, we both rose. We went to brunch. We ate off each other’s plates. Sometimes we got manicures. It was like having a best friend that I also had sex with. This, I realized, was what I had always wanted. I opened up to her in ways that I never had to a man. And in this I felt comforted. I was falling in love, but unlike with a man, I didn’t try to stop it. I let it be. Even with the knowledge the end was sure, it didn’t scare me. I felt like I could love her, but I wasn’t worried about what it meant. I assumed we’d stay friends. I assumed that what was between us would forever be sacred, no matter what else happened. To be with her felt safe. And in a way that I’d never experienced before.

My attachment to my sister wasn’t healthy, I suddenly knew.

And so, after my sister confessed she’d relapsed, absorbed in grief, I’d lie in bed and remember my time with Mya — how she’d soothed me when I’d needed it most. She’d bathe me, and I’d take steamy, floral breaths. She’d nuzzle up to me and I’d feel her warm minty breath on my neck. I’d stroke her hair, tuck it behind her ear. We’d gaze into each others eyes, and neither one of us looked away.

“She’s not your daughter,” she’d said. “And at this point, she’s grown. You need to let go.”

I didn’t listen to her at the time, but I knew that Mya had been right. And that two years after she’d said those words, I needed to listen. I needed to love my sister in a different way. To believe that things could be OK if I wasn’t trying to control where she lived, or what she did. Though our intimacy was so much different, I needed to take the lessons I learned about loving Mya and apply them to loving my sister.

Melissa agreed to move out instead of getting clean, and I tried to accept her choice. I meditated on let go.

Slowly, the color returned to my face; I realized I was starving and shoveled food into my mouth. The responsibility I’d been harboring for my sister started to fade. I stopped asking, What about Melissa? I began to understand that I could love my sister, but not take responsibility for her.

Three weeks after my sister told me she’d relapsed, she told me she was clean.

“And I’m committed to staying that way,” she said while shuffling her feet and wringing her hands. “Can I please keep living here with you?” She picked at the lavender nail polish on her thumb, then raised her head and looked at me.

It seemed like I couldn’t rightfully kick her out if she was sober, but I had no way of knowing if she was telling the truth. As much as I tried to let go of the responsibility I’d felt for her, it wasn’t as simple when she was standing before me. My head started to ache. I rubbed my temples.

“Natassja,” she said. “I swear.”

I clenched my jaw, looked up at the ceiling, and sighed.

“Please give me another chance.” She picked at the last bit of nail polish on her thumb. Sunlight illuminated the fleck of lavender as it floated to the hardwood floor, and I watched it as it fell.

* * *

Natassja Schiel is writing a memoir about her time working as an exotic dancer on the island of Guam titled Tumon Strip. Her work has most recently appeared at The Millions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Opossum Literary Magazine.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

The Horse Was a Lie (The Horse Is Here With Us Now)

Ernst Haas / Getty

Levi Vonk | Longreads | August 2018 | 7 minutes (1,927 words)

In the prelude to Mario Chard’s “Caballero,” we are presented with a car crash. We are told that the crash happened in the desert, that there was no one around. Two accounts of the crash exist. The first is a succinct description by the Associated Press:

Eight of the 14 people in the Chevy Suburban died
after it rolled several times on U.S. 191 a few hours
before dawn Monday. Salas-López, originally from
Guatemala, told investigators he swerved to miss a
horse. He was arrested after fleeing into the desert…

The second is a quote from the sergeant investigating the crash:

The passengers say no, he wasn’t swerving to miss a
horse, that he was fondling a female passenger in the
front seat of the vehicle.

At first it seems an all-too-familiar migration narrative, the harsh coalescence of movement and death, of sexual exploitation and isolation, which has become a defining aesthetic of the U.S.-Mexico border. Of course the coyote lies. Of course the victim dies. We find ourselves in bitter but accustomed topography.

Instead, “Say it was a horse,” writes Chard in the first canto of “Caballero,” and we move into stranger territory. Read more…

Why Do Men Fight?: An Interview with Thomas Page McBee

Corbett Sullivan Wrestling, January 1, 1892 / Associated Press

Cooper Lee Bombardier | Longreads | August 2018 | 15 minutes (4,084 words)

In his new book Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man, journalist and memoirist Thomas Page McBee trains for a charity fight. The book interweaves his immersion in the world of boxing — McBee became the first transgender man to box at Madison Square Garden — with research, interviews and stories that explore how we’ve arrived at a moment of collective reckoning with the toxic masculinity in American culture.

Amateur is an ambitious project, questioning not only what it means to be a man in our current culture, but what it means to be a trans man, interrogating the opportunities and privileges arrived at through a shift in socialization and lived awareness. The change in how others treat him as a man — at times better and worse in equally disturbing measure — as well as reports of masculinity’s demise, like the 2010 Atlantic cover story “The End of Men” which declared America to be in the throes of a “masculinity crisis,” spur McBee to search for a healthier idea of what it means to be a man. Read more…

The Word ‘Hole’

Kydpl Kyodo / AP

Katharine Kilalea | An excerpt from the novel Ok, Mr. Field | Tim Duggan Books | July 2018 | 10 minutes (2,708 words)

The sun was shining brightly off the whiteness of the page before me when I opened the newspaper. It was hot. Watery noises rose from the tide pool where children were swimming. The silence was otherwise disturbed only by occasional shouts from their strident games mistress who, since the narrow windows encircling the courtyard hid the upper and lower reaches of the world from view, I could hear but not see.

My gaze rested on the newspaper in front of me, whose pages I turned without thinking. The headlines (the news was always about the heat wave or the cricket) were immaterial to me. I had only a vague sense of what was going on. The news interested me only insofar as it provided something to look at and I let my eyes engage momentarily with this or that piece of information, not so much reading as giving them something to do to pass the time. Then I placed the paper facedown on the table, stood up, and sat down again.

I’d never liked crosswords or any kind of word games. It was a musician’s sensibility, perhaps, which made me pay more attention to the sounds of words than to their meanings. I couldn’t even read a novel since before long I’d always find myself in the middle of a sentence or a paragraph with no idea of where I was or what had come before. Tracing a plot or following a cast of characters required a mental gymnastics my mind seemed incapable of. Yet that morning, beneath the obituaries and the classifieds, the crossword drew me in. Who invented the telephone? What nationality was the first dog in space? My hand picked up the pen as if of its own accord. It felt pleasurable to be filling in the empty grid. It felt like doing something, a meaningful activity. Like work, even, to be exerting effort and producing results. The answers came easy at first. But one question led to another and sometimes, beneath the crossword questions, I detected other questions, small, half-formulated questions, questions that were almost too vague to warrant my attention. Why do you just sit there? Why don’t you go out? Why don’t you go for a walk or sit in the garden? But it was too hot to be outside and the grass was full of ants from the figs that had fallen from the tree. And what is the point of walking when there is nowhere you have to be? So I returned to the crossword, which wasn’t as inviting as before. The boxes looked somehow sinister and without purpose. Like molds, or the husks left over from something that had been there once and been taken away. Like holes, I thought. Empty holes. I said the word hole. Hole. Said out loud, it led in two directions: Hole. Whole. There was something about it that my ear liked. Read more…