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An Inquiry Into Abuse

Corbis Historical / Getty

Elon Green | Longreads | August 2018 | 16 minutes (4,019 words)

Roger Morris was standing on the South Lawn of the White House. It was early 1969, and Richard Nixon had only been in office for three or four weeks. Morris was a holdover on the National Security Council from Lyndon Johnson’s administration, staying on at the behest of Henry Kissinger. Morris and his colleagues had been invited to fill empty spots on the lawn during a ceremony involving a visiting head of state. “I was suddenly aware of this figure, very close to me on my right,” Morris said. “I looked over and it was Pat Nixon.” Morris decided that, though he’d never met the first lady, as a courtesy he ought to say hello.

When the event concluded, Morris turned to Nixon. “I just want you to know how much I am enjoying my work. It’s a pleasure to work for a president who is so well-informed in foreign affairs,” he said. Morris wasn’t just blowing smoke. He found Nixon quite knowledgeable about his own portfolio — Africa, South Asia, and the United Nations. As Morris told me, “[Nixon] knew a lot of heads of state in Black Africa, personally and well, for years.” And it wasn’t uncommon, he said, for Nixon to point out mistakes made by Richard Helms, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, during briefings.

Nixon looked at Morris rather quizzically. “Oh dear,” she said. “You haven’t seen through him yet.” Morris, stunned, could only nod.

Pat Nixon was formidable. That year, during a visit to Vietnam, she became the first first lady to enter an active combat zone since World War II. But her relationship with the president could be a challenge. “No question it was a tough marriage,” Bob Woodward would tell Nixon biographer Fawn Brodie in 1980. “Even the people we talked to, who were very defensive about him, just felt that he didn’t treat her very well.”

Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who revealed the president’s secret taping apparatus, told Woodward not long ago that the first lady was “borderline abused.” Nixon would ignore her when they were together. “I wanted to shake him. ‘Answer her, goddamn it; she’s your wife!’”

There have also been darker reports, many of which were rounded up in Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan’s 2000 Nixon biography, The Arrogance of Power. For instance: Allegations that Nixon “kicked the hell” out of Pat in 1962. That, after telling America that the country would not have him to “kick around anymore,” the former vice president “beat the hell” out of her. That, in fact, she had been so injured “she could not go out the next day.” That, on an unspecified occasion, one aide or perhaps more “had to run in and pull [Nixon] off Pat,” who sustained bruises on her face.

That Nixon struck his wife while he was president.

‘Oh dear,’ Pat said. ‘You haven’t seen through him yet.’

The allegations have, for the most part, been in the public record for decades. (The Nixons’ daughter, Tricia Nixon Cox, unequivocally denied the allegations made in The Arrogance of Power in 2000.) But they remain relatively unexamined, particularly considering the severity. The scrutiny is not commensurate with the accusations.

For years, journalists and historians have mostly danced around the reports, gently poking and prodding. Nixon chroniclers tend either to acknowledge that the reports exist without assessing their reliability, or they ignore them altogether. A conspicuous absence of specifics in the public record — dates, locations, and documentation — may be to blame for this, and, especially when writing about allegations of abuse, one must write with care and caution.

What can be said with confidence is the truth of the matter has not been been satisfactorily resolved. With the benefit of distance and perspective, it’s worth giving the alleged incidents a second look and considering their sources more closely, because allegations of abuse are taken more seriously today than they were a half-century ago — or even more recently, when this history was being written.

***

In 1962, Nixon was running for governor of California against Edmund “Pat” Brown. He’d spent the previous eight years as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president. Nixon was suited to the position. “Eisenhower radically altered the role of his running mate by presenting him with critical assignments in both foreign and domestic affairs once he assumed his office,” wrote Irwin Gellman, one of the great Nixon chroniclers. “Because of the collaboration between these two leaders, Nixon deserves the title, ‘the first modern vice president.’”

The gubernatorial campaign was contentious. “Nixon had charged that Brown was soft on communism and crime, while the governor claimed that the former vice president was interested in the governorship only as a stepping stone to the White House,” the Los Angeles Times recalled years later.

Brown told Fawn Brodie, in her Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, that during the campaign he heard that Nixon “kicked the hell out of her, hit her.” The book was published in 1981, which makes this, I suspect, the earliest on-record accusation of its kind.

In a recording of the interview from July 1980, which is held with Brodie’s files at the University of Utah, Brodie and the loose-talking former governor wonder if the alleged abuse — they had both heard the rumors — was physical or purely emotional; they’re uncertain. This is what follows:

BRODIE: Were you aware of Pat as a campaigner, in the campaign, at all? Was she —

BROWN: I don’t think she campaigned. She may have gone to a few women’s parties. But we got word, at one stage of the campaign, that he kicked the hell out of her. He hit her or some damn thing. Did you ever hear that?

BRODIE: That story keeps surfacing.

BROWN: Some of the guys that were on the plane with the campaign came to me confidentially and said, “Nixon really slugged his wife. He treated her terribly. He hauled her out in the presence of people.”

BRODIE: He slugged his wife in front of people?

BROWN: Well, in front of one of the press that was supposed to be friendly to him. He got so angry.

BRODIE: He hit her.

BROWN: But I can’t prove that. I never used it.

Brodie disliked Nixon. As Newell Bringhurst recounted in Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life, Brodie called her subject a “shabby, pathetic felon,” “a rattlesnake,” and a “plain damn liar.” When, in November 1977, Brodie’s husband, Bernard, was diagnosed with cancer, she paused her research, quoting her husband saying: “That son of a bitch can wait.” (Brodie herself would die of lung cancer in January 1981, never entirely finishing the manuscript.)

In a recent conversation, Bringhurst called Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character Brodie’s weakest book. “It’s not a balanced biography at all,” he said. “She went into that — into the research and the writing — with a biased perspective.” It’s true, and understandably so: After Nixon was elected president in 1968, after promising to end the war in Vietnam, Brodie’s son was nearly drafted. When Nixon, several years later, attempted to smear the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND Corporation colleague of Bernard Brodie’s, it was salt in the wounds.

Brodie had for many years taught college classes on how to write a biography. And yet, said Bringhurst, “she violated, in many ways, the very canons that she tried to teach her students: You have to have some empathy and perspective for the person you’re writing the biography on.

The allegations have, for the most part, been in the public record for decades. But they remain relatively unexamined, particularly considering the severity.

Brown wasn’t the only source for accusations leveled against Nixon during that period. There’s a quote from Frank Cullen in The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, who, to their great credit, explore the allegations in greater detail than any biographers before or since. Cullen, a Brown senior aide, said he had heard that Nixon “beat the hell [out of]” Pat in the wake of the gubernatorial loss.

By the 1962 campaign, Cullen was an old hand at politics. He’d volunteered on John F. Kennedy’s congressional campaigns in 1948, and stayed on for the Senate run in 1952. In 1960, during Kennedy’s campaign for president, Robert Kennedy introduced Cullen to Brown, who would appoint Cullen assistant legislative secretary. (In 1972, Cullen helped coordinate the visit to the United States by China’s table tennis team that was later famously called “ping-pong diplomacy.”)

***

Other people have made accusations about Nixon. In March 1998, in a talk he believed to be off-the-record, Seymour Hersh told an audience of Harvard’s Nieman fellows about “a serious empirical basis for believing [Nixon] was a wife beater. … I’m talking about trauma, and three distinct cases.” Hersh would reprise the charge three months later during appearances on CNBC and NBC.

More recently, Hersh wrote about it in his memoir, Reporter. A couple hundred pages in, he writes that a few weeks after the resignation:

I was called by someone connected to a nearby hospital … and told that Nixon’s wife, Pat, had been treated in the emergency room there a few days after she and Nixon had returned from Washington. She told her doctors that her husband had hit her. I can say that the person who talked to me had very precise information on the extent of her injuries and the anger of the emergency room physician who treated her.

After receiving the tip, Hersh called John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s White House counsel. Ehrlichman not only declined to wave Hersh away from the story, but said he knew of two other instances of abuse: one from 1962 — presumably the instance referenced by Cullen — but also one that occurred during Nixon’s presidency. (Hersh, in an interview with me for the Columbia Journalism Reviewsaid his hospital source was a doctor.)

The biographers Summers and Swan, who interviewed Hersh, also talked to John Sears, who worked for Nixon in 1968. With Sears, who was suspected of being Deep Throat, it’s essentially a high-level game of telephone: Sears heard from Waller Taylor, a senior partner at Nixon’s law firm, that in 1962 Pat Nixon was hit so hard “he blackened her eye” and “she threatened to leave him over it.”

Sears, now 78, told me he was surprised by Taylor’s story because he himself had neither seen nor, until that point, heard of such abuse. Still, he said, “I saw no reason [Taylor] would make up such a thing. He was a friend of theirs.” This seems to be true. Summers and Swan note that Taylor’s father had been an early supporter of Nixon’s, and Taylor himself introduced Nixon to trickster Donald Segretti. Segretti, however, disputes the latter point. “I’ve had a lot of things over the years made up about me that are just complete fantasy. This sounds like one of those stories,” Segretti said. “I do not know who this Waller Taylor was, [and] I never met President Nixon.” (For good measure, without prompting, Segretti also denied authorship of the “Canuck letter.”)

Sears recalled telling the story to Patrick Hillings, who succeeded Nixon in Congress: “He said it was quite possible; the whole business of the loss in California had made them both upset, and that Nixon had finally agreed to move to New York and get out of politics. But there was a lot of problems in and around that.” Hillings, said Sears, didn’t attest to the truth of the allegations, “but he thought it believable.” (I asked John Dean, who succeeded Ehrlichman as White House Counsel, if he knew about the abuse allegations. Dean’s name doesn’t come up in any of these stories, but historically he’s been quite critical of his old boss — he cooperated with the Senate Watergate investigators — so I assumed he would be candid. “I have zero knowledge of RN striking his wife,” he emailed.)

Seymour Hersh told an audience about ‘a serious empirical basis for believing [Nixon] was a wife beater. … I’m talking about trauma, and three distinct cases.’

The game of telephone continues with a quote from William Van Petten, a reporter who covered the ’62 campaign. Van Petten told a writer named Jon Ewing that he found Nixon to be “a terrible, belligerent drunk” who “beat Pat badly … so badly that she could not go out the next day.” Van Petten, Summers and Swan write, was informed this had happened before, and that Nixon aides, including Ehrlichman, “would on occasion have to go in and intervene.”

What to make of it all? For his part, John Farrell, author of last year’s Pulitzer finalist, Richard Nixon: The Life, dismisses much of this, asserting that the sources are not to be trusted. “Richard Nixon fired John Ehrlichman. Nixon fired John Sears, too,” he said. (Sears said he left under a “mutual understanding.”) However, he allows, “Pat Hillings would have known. Pat Hillings was incredibly close to the Nixons. But he’s not with us anymore.”

Summers, who conducted the interviews with Ehrlichman for The Arrogance of Power, doesn’t believe that Nixon having fired Ehrlichman tainted the source. “In the sense that one assesses the credibility and character of someone who’s talking to you, I found Ehrlichman a credible interviewee, and not a vindictive interviewee.”

***

On August 8, 1974, 61-year-old Nixon resigned the office of the presidency. He was in poor health, exhibiting persistent phlebitis and shortness of breath. In September, he would be admitted to Long Beach Memorial Hospital, where he was given a blood thinner. Scans revealed evidence of a blood clot that had moved from his left thigh to his right lung.

Then, in October, after what one of his doctors later described as “groin pain and the persistent enlargement of the left leg,” Nixon went back to the hospital. He would remain there for three weeks and lose 15 pounds.

Sometime during this period, again according to Hersh, Pat Nixon was taken to a local emergency room. Evidently, her husband had attacked her at their home in San Clemente, California.

I called Hersh to see if he could shed more light on this. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, “I’m not interested. Bye bye.” Mentioning that he had a guest in his office, he hung up.

So I asked Anthony Summers for more information, anything really, about that hospital visit. Did he and Swan attempt to verify Hersh’s source? “I have a very vague memory that we looked for a doctor at the San Clemente hospital.” Did he find the doctor? “I don’t recall.” He suspects the answer is buried in his notes, which aren’t retrievable.

***

Something to consider, when assessing the plausibility of the abuse allegations, is there’s little doubt that Nixon struck others. According to Farrell’s biography, during Nixon’s 1960 campaign for president, on a swing through Iowa, the strained candidate

vented by violently kicking the car seat in front of him. Its enraged inhabitant, the loyal [Don] Hughes, left the broken seat, and the car, and stalked off down the road. At an otherwise successful telethon in Detroit on election eve, Nixon once again lost his temper, and struck aide Everett Hart. Furious, Hart quit the campaign. “I was really mad,” Hart recalled. “I had had a rib removed where I had had open heart surgery, and that is where he hit me.”

Hart, said Farrell, spoke to Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, over the phone about the incident, and said he could not forgive the man. Woods summarized the phone conversation in a memo currently in Nixon’s archives.

More than a decade later, in the summer of 1973, Nixon, mired in the Watergate scandal, visited New Orleans to give a speech to a veterans group. It was expected to be a friendly audience. As Nixon walked toward the convention hall, reported the Washington Post’s magazine, “he wanted nothing in his way, in front or in back, before he got at the crowd inside.” However, “breathing on him from behind was [Ronald] Ziegler and the clump of TV cameras, mics, and newsmen that inevitably followed.”

An angered Nixon, as Michael Rosenwald wrote last year, “stuck his finger in Ziegler’s chest, turned him around, and then shoved him in the back hard with both hands, saying ‘I don’t want any press with me and you take care of it.’” It was even caught on tape, which was fortuitous because a Nixon aide later denied the incident had occurred at all.

***

The earliest chronological firsthand accusation is also the most shocking. In 1946, Nixon ran against Jerry Voorhis, a five-termer in California’s old 12th congressional district. Despite his incumbency, or perhaps because of it, Voorhis ran a terrible campaign. To boot, there were reportedly phone calls to prospective voters from an anonymous caller inquiring, “Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a communist?”

Nixon destroyed him. In his account of the defeat, Farrell includes a quote from Zita Remley, a Democratic campaign worker of whom a Long Beach paper enthused in 1960 that, were she to ever faint, “it’s certain that she could be immediately revived by fanning her with a political brochure.” Remley found Voorhis “very white and sort of quiet. … He just sort of put his head in his hands.”

Something to consider, when assessing the plausibility of the abuse allegations, is there’s little doubt that Nixon struck others.

Farrell mentions Remley once more in the book, in the endnotes, where he accurately describes her as a “Democratic partisan” who claimed to have “firsthand knowledge of the anonymous phone calls.” However, he writes:

Remley, at least, is a troublesome source: a Nixon hater who fed at least one demonstrably false story about Nixon’s taxes to the press and claimed (more than 20 years later) that Nixon slapped her outside a public function — an assault that, if verified, would have ended his career but that she didn’t report to the police at the time.

Remley talked about the slap in question with Fawn Brodie, who wrote about the knotty tax business:

[Remley] had become a deputy assessor of Los Angeles County with the job of checking veterans’ exemptions. In 1952, just after the election, Nixon sent a notarized letter to her Los Angeles office requesting a veteran’s tax exemption, which was granted only to veterans who, if single, had less than $5,000 worth of property in California or elsewhere, and if married, $10,000.

As Brodie (who misspelled Remley’s first name as Vita) tells it, Remley knew that Nixon bought a pricey home in Washington, D.C., and denied the request. The powerful political columnist Drew Pearson found out and published a damning story.

Nixon was upset about it. In RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, he wrote that Pearson’s column was “teeming with innuendo and loose facts” and claimed that Pearson retracted the column three weeks after the 1952 election.

That sets the scene for what followed later that year. Brodie writes:

When Nixon was speaking in the Long Beach auditorium, Mrs. Remley went to hear him. Arriving late, she listened from near the open door. As he emerged he recognized her. In a sudden fit of rage, he walked over and slapped her. His friends, horrified, hustled him away in the dark. There were no cameras or newsmen to catch the happening, and Mrs. Remley, fearful of losing her job, told only a few friends.

Farrell doesn’t buy it. “She really detests Nixon,” he said. “She could have ended his political career right there by filing a complaint. And yet she never did. There’s no hospital report. There’s no police report from that incident. It’s just her talking, years later, to Fawn Brodie.”

Those doubts are among the reasons Farrell chose to exclude the Remley incident from the book’s text, “to signal to the reader that I didn’t believe it.”

Of the allegations more generally, Farrell continued: “In the period after Watergate, Nixon was accused of everything — some of it quite fanciful — and it’s significant, I think, that you had three of the greatest investigative reporters, Woodward and Bernstein and Hersh, and not one of them put it in print in their long investigations on Nixon.” Neither Woodward nor Bernstein responded to repeated interview requests.


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***

Farrell is right that, given the opportunity to thwack Nixon about this, the otherwise fearless trio declined. Maybe that means something. After all, if “Woodstein” and Hersh couldn’t nail him, who could? But maybe it just says something about the nature of investigative journalism; chasing dozens of consequential stories at any given time, and they don’t all pan out. Which doesn’t, of course, make them false. It just means the threshold for publication — a hospital report or a doctor’s testimony, perhaps — wasn’t met by deadline.

Decades later, we’re left having to deal with a handful of hazy stories, and wondering about the motives of the men and women telling them.

Of all the allegations, it’s Zita Remley’s that really gnaws at me. I am willing to concede, as Farrell contends, that Remley lied about Nixon’s taxes, even if there’s evidence she just made a dumb mistake. What I keep returning to is this: What did this obscure campaign worker stand to gain from accusing the still-living Nixon of slapping her? It certainly wasn’t fame. From what I can tell, Remley’s death in 1985 didn’t even merit an obituary in the local papers.

As we’re seeing now, the women who accuse powerful men — Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes — do not reap windfalls. Their lives do not seem measurably improved by sticking their necks out. (Quite the contrary. Stormy Daniels, for instance, was recently arrested for touching undercover detectives in a strip club — charges that were later dismissed.)

Now, imagine doing this 40 years ago — which is to say, 20 years before Monica Lewinsky was dragged through the mud and Bill Clinton left office with an approval rating of 66 percent.

What’s the upside?

***

“This is an agonizing subject for me, because I heard some of the same stories, from a much earlier period,” said Roger Morris. A source suggested I talk to Morris, who resigned from the National Security Council in 1970 when Nixon ordered the bloody Cambodian “incursion.”

Morris wrote 1991’s Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, which charts Nixon’s life and career through the election of 1952. He heard stories in Whittier, California, where Nixon moved at the age of 9, and Washington. The tales, always off-the-record, were passed along by friends and acquaintances, often elderly Quakers. (I asked if there was anyone I could talk to; Morris said they were all dead.)

As we’re seeing now, the women who accuse powerful men — Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes — do not reap windfalls.

“I had heard stories about the physical abuse of Pat Nixon as early as the Congressional years, which would have been ’47, ’48, ’49, and much of 1950,” Morris continued. “They had these terrible, raging fights, at high decibel.” Per the descriptions he heard of altercations at the Spring Valley home, Nixon had “manhandled” his wife, “not necessarily beaten. It was a violent relationship, in that respect.”

Morris didn’t hear the stories when he was in government, but only much later, starting in around 1983, when he began work on the book. He could never nail down the details, so, while his book includes accounts of the marriage becoming increasingly strained, there’s no reference to physical abuse. “I didn’t have any real, solid verification. I did not have any eyewitnesses.” Which is not to say his sources were bad, or distant; among them, Morris said, were in-laws of the Nixons. “They were plausible people, serious people.” He believed the stories, but lacked what he felt would be necessary for inclusion — eyewitnesses, testimony from doctors, or hospital records. (That’s to be expected, and it’s one of the inherent difficulties in writing about abuse.)

“If you ask me if this is probable — could it have happened? Absolutely. It is consistent with too much testimony of what we know about their relationship. It was stormy. It was given to outbursts of anger, profanity. It was not based on abiding, mutual respect,” Morris said. There had once been a great deal of love between them, “but as in many marriages, it was depleted and exhausted.”

Just before we hung up, Morris added: “We’re living in a very different era now, and I do think historical figures ought to be judged whole, as it were, against the setting of their times, but also against the setting of posterity.”

Elon Green is a writer in Port Washington, New York.

***

Editor: Kelly Stout
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

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…

Twelve Longreads for Aretha Franklin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more:

Listening for a Way Out

Kathy Kmonicek / AP

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

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

“Why do you talk about her so much?”

“What’re you, gay?”

And then:

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

The fire crackling in my chest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

How could these two women get away with this?

Did they know black women who did this?

Are they happy?


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

*John 14:6, KJV

*From Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.

* * *

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

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

 

A British Seaweed Scientist Is Revered in Japan as ‘The Mother of the Sea’

Pahala Basuki / Unsplash, Algonquin Books

Susan Hand Shetterly | Excerpt adapted from Seaweed Chronicles: A World at the Water’s Edge | Algonquin Books | August 2017 | 16 minutes (4,260 words)

Occasionally you can still find them out on islands, crumbling near the water’s edge, the old eighteenth- and nineteenth-century kilns built out of stones gathered from the shore. People on the Irish and Scottish coasts and in Brittany cut and burned seaweeds in the pits of those kilns to make potash and pearl ash, valuable potassium salts. The wet seaweeds — AscophyllumFucus, and the kelps — had to be lugged up from the shore, carefully turned and dried, and then burned at a temperature that would render them into products that were sold to make glass and soap, to bleach linens, to encourage bread to rise, and to use as fertilizer to sweeten fields. In the boom time, around 1809, Ireland was exporting about 5,410 tons of potash a year. It was backbreaking work that whole neighborhoods engaged in, and at its height, the many kiln fires created smoke so thick it endangered the lives of nearby pasturing cows. It wasn’t long before the seaweeds in some places were overcut, the shores laid bare.

Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the market vanished when potassium salt deposits were discovered underground in Germany and in Chile, and mines were opened.

The burning of seaweed resurfaced with the discovery that the ash residue could be used to extract iodine. But that, too, disappeared when deposits of iodine were found belowground. Left alone, seaweeds regrew, with farmers coming to the shore to harvest them for their gardens, and gatherers cutting favorite species to eat and to feed to their domestic animals. Over time, the old kilns were disassembled by wind and rain and snow. Read more…

A Thereness Beneath the Thereness: A Jonathan Gold Reading List

Jonathan Gold poses for a portrait during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images)

For the past four decades, Jonathan Gold tirelessly catalogued the ebb and flow of cuisine in Los Angeles, and in the process, became known as the “food writing poet” of the city. That poet, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this past month, died last week at the age of 57. In his New York Times obituary Ruth Reichl, who published Gold in Gourmet magazine, said of the writer-critic,

Before Tony Bourdain, before reality TV and ‘Parts Unknown’ and people really being into ethnic food in a serious way, it was Jonathan who got it, completely. He really got that food was a gateway into the people, and that food could really define a community. He was really writing about the people more than the food.

According to David Chang, no one knew more about Korean cuisine than Gold, and the critic, whose career began as a music journalist, became the foremost expert on the various regions of the world. Some opine his speciality was Mexican and Central American cooking, having eaten at every pupuseria, taco stand, and restaurant along the 15.5 mile stretch of Pico Boulevard. But really, Gold’s expertise wasn’t limited by borders. Read more…

The Toxic Legacy of Building 606

AP Photo/Eric Risberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Seeing Private Everyman

Life Magazine March 16, 1942, courtesy the author / Nevin Ruttanaboonta, Unsplash

Steve Edwards | Longreads | July 2018 | 16 minutes (4,482 words)

When my wife was first pregnant with our son, it startled me to think that the life we were living before his arrival would be a mystery to him, part of some dim and distant past. All he would have were our stories. And because we lived far from our respective families, stories would be almost all he would have of them, too. It may have been first-time father jitters, but it felt important that he know something of his people and what we were all about. Or maybe I just imagined him a captive audience to whom I could tell stories my wife had already heard a thousand times.

My family’s big story was my grandfather’s brush with fame in Life magazine. During World War II and beyond, he was Life’s Private Everyman — Charles E. Teed of Effingham, Illinois, a figure meant to typify selectees in the war effort. On March 16, 1942, he graced the cover and was profiled in a long feature article. In 1961, he appeared alongside the 20th century’s most notable celebrities in Life’s 25th-anniversary issue. There’s Marilyn Monroe on one page. There’s Granddad on another. By Life’s estimation, “victory over the common enemy” depended upon Granddad and men like him, and whether, when the time came — in a line paraphrased from War and Peace — they shouted “‘Hurrah!’ or “‘We are lost!’” I was 10 when he died. Nearly everything I know about his life, I learned from the magazine.

I remember the night a copy of that magazine was brought to the dinner table. The dishes had all been swept away and it was placed before me. I was instructed in the careful turning of its pages so as not to rip them.

At first, I didn’t understand. The Granddad I knew, then in his late 50s and early 60s, wasn’t anybody famous. He shot pool, taught us pinochle, and took us fishing. He worked in a factory and often came home exhausted at night. “I’m sorry, honey,” he’d sometimes say to my brother and me when requests to shoot pool came down in the after-dinner hours, “I’m too tired.” But there he was on the cover, a skinny John Wayne.

He’d been photographed from below, solitary, outlined only in sky, his eyes set on something in the middle distance. He wore a field jacket and gloves. The bayonet on his rifle stabbed into a corner of the frame. In the photographs inside the magazine, he looked like one of my miniature plastic Army men come to life. He sprinted through the woods out on maneuvers; scrubbed canvas puttees and cartridge belts; swept up on KP. And there were other pictures, earlier ones, which my great-grandmother had supplied from home: Granddad at 6 in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, and later, in the backyard, playing Cowboys and Indians. In a picture of his sixth grade class, he stood in the back row, smiling and self-possessed, described by Life as the “tallest and best-looking boy” of the bunch. And how proud he seemed at 16 and already 6-foot-2, dressed in his Sunday finest — a white collar shirt, a pair of high-waisted slacks cinched tight by a belt — on a front-porch step beside his grinning and equally handsome 6-foot-6 father.

It was a revelation to see him so young. It was a revelation, too, to imagine that people all around the country — millions of them — had looked upon these same images. When his issue first hit newsstands, Pearl Harbor had happened but we were still several months away from any major land battle. It was a time of deep uncertainty. The lives of those willing to sacrifice themselves for the country were stories yet to be written.

It was a time of deep uncertainty. The lives of those willing to sacrifice themselves for the country were stories yet to be written.

For reasons even he never knew, Life chose Granddad to represent those possibilities. Maybe it was his good looks. Maybe he was just in the right place at the right time. Regardless, there he was, an icon of the everyman.

Hope writ large.

After that night at the dinner table, I don’t think I ever looked at him the same. Though my understanding of the war was incomplete, only a child’s understanding, I felt great pride that he had been someone our country turned to for hope. And I knew that appearing on the cover of Life meant he was anything but ordinary. And if the magazine changed the way I saw him, it also changed the way I saw myself. Maybe there was something brave in me. Maybe I could give people hope. The feeling was that Granddad mattered, and that I could matter, too. And if I could pass along anything to my son, it would be that.

* * *

So much of what we think we know about each other — even the people we love — is predicated on what we don’t know. Or can’t know. Or what is kept from us as children for our own good. On nights Granddad wasn’t too tired for a game of pool, I remember watching him hover silent as a shark around the table in his basement, chalking his cue and lining up shot after shot and slamming them home. Other nights he’d pull out his projector and show clips of 8 mm film he’d taken at the go-kart races at the fairgrounds, or some scene from a fishing trip out at Lake Sara. In my earliest memories, it’s the 4th of July and I’m sitting atop an old-fashioned oak-barrel ice cream maker while he turns the crank. Around us are friends and family with sweating cans of Coors, talking and laughing and telling stories, their enormous Oldsmobiles and Buicks parked at odd angles down the street. I remember his gentleness in those moments, the care he took teaching me how to hold a pool cue, how to aim and think about angles when making a bank shot. The only time I ever heard an edge creep into his voice was a night the news showed images of the famine in Ethiopia. Granny saw the children’s bloated stomachs and got a pained looked on her face and told him to turn it off. “This is what’s happening,” he hissed. “You have to look.”

From my vantage as a 43-year-old looking back, I’m tempted to say that the news footage triggered the PTSD from which he must surely have suffered. Something in how he scowled at the television so intently — his laser-like focus on it — betrayed a nervous system that had trained itself to be ever-vigilant for signs of trauma.


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Against the innocence of my childhood memories, it takes an act of imagination to consider the scope and severity of the suffering Granddad endured. The picture of his father and him so proud on that porch step was taken around 1936, in the heart of the Great Depression. A little over three years later, his father — a workman for the Illinois Central Railroad — was hit and killed by a freight train, his lanky 6-foot-6 frame severed at the waist. Granddad had just graduated high school, his whole future ahead of him.

In their profile, Life rendered his father’s death as part of Granddad’s backstory, a detail that testified to the humanity of ordinary selectees and that celebrated the American ethos of overcoming adversity by reinventing yourself. His father’s death wasn’t a tragedy but an opportunity. With an insurance payout and a settlement from the railroad, Granddad and my great-grandmother started a restaurant in downtown Effingham called the Heart Café. He put in grueling 17-hour days, bussing tables, manning the cash register, sweeping up. And it was at the Heart Café, in the depths of his loss, that he met Violet Kincaid — Granny — a dark-haired young woman from a nearby farm who took a waitress job. In a story my mother says isn’t true, or maybe only half true, Life wrote that Granny dropped a tray of dirty dishes on her first day: “Teed helped her pick up the pieces, they looked into each other’s eyes and it was all over for Teed.” Six weeks later they got engaged, and not long after, in July 1941, he was drafted into the army.

There is an almost irresistible romance to his story — from its tragic beginnings, to his sudden fame on the cover of Life, to the fear of death in battle that must have hovered in his mind like an ungraspable wisp of steam.

And those starkly beautiful black-and-white Life photographs only served to amplify the drama and spectacle.

But the reality of war was that in the course of his 27 months as a combat soldier in the infantry, Granddad had seen “a lot of things die.” That’s how he described it to Life editors in an interview for the 25th-anniversary issue in 1961. In Morocco, he’d stormed the docks at Safi under sniper fire, and later marched 250 miles across the desert to Port Lyautey. In Sicily, he led pack mules up mountains so steep the mules sometimes fell off. Outside St. Lô, France — a city Allied bombs reduced to rubble — he was shot in the chest and crawled under an apple tree to die. Luckily for him (and me) a field guide found him.

He told Life he remembered thinking that “the orchard and the clouds were the last things [he] was going to see.”

Instead he spent the next two years in a hospital. In his absence from Effingham, The Heart went under and so his first job upon arriving home was racking billiards at a bar. He and Granny saved up and started a ma-and-pop grocery, only to see it run out of business when national chains swooped in. He taught himself TV repair, started a shop out of his home. When that was no longer profitable he took a line job at a factory.

All his life he worked and scraped by and found a way to provide. He answered his country’s call for sacrifice and never quit on his family and embodied every bit of the rugged selflessness of a John Wayne war flick. His private life, however, would have been more morally complicated. No matter how selflessly he gave himself after the war, he still had to live with the things he’d done to survive it. And as such, despite millions of people having come to know him from his photographs in Life, he may have felt invisible.

And as such, despite millions of people having come to know him from his photographs in Life, he may have felt invisible.

In a 1943 column about how war changed soldiers like Granddad, who’d spent years on the front lines, the famous World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote that: “The most vivid change is the casual and workshop manner in which they now talk about killing. They have made the psychological transition from the normal belief that taking human life is sinful, over to a new professional outlook where killing is a craft. To them now there is nothing morally wrong about killing. In fact it is an admirable thing.” I don’t believe — can’t believe — becoming a professional at killing is something any veteran walks away from easily or without harm. I think Granddad would have wanted to protect us, his family, from the trauma he knew. He would have wanted to protect himself from the pain of our knowing. But how often the dead, friend and enemy alike, must have sat in the room with us, their ghosts crowding the card table while we bid for trump in games of pinochle. While 8 mm films flickered on a screen in the basement. While I sat atop an ice cream maker and Granddad turned the crank some long-lost 4th of July.

I remember one night — it must have been a year or two before he died — he came into my bedroom with a gift. It was a small framed black-and-white picture of him at 16. In the photograph his hair was slick and black, his cheeks tinted a rosy pink. He held out the picture and said he thought I might like to have it for my desk.

Something about the moment overwhelmed me. I didn’t know what to make of such a gift. And I refused to accept it.

He nodded and quietly left, taking the picture with him. The next morning I had a change of heart and tried to tell him I wanted it after all but the words failed me. He packed the picture into his suitcase. I never saw it again.

In the hard light of morning, maybe giving me a picture of himself felt too much like vanity. Maybe he realized that his memories from 16 — before his father was killed, before the war came along and changed everything — would be lost on an ’80s kid like me. There is no salvaging the past, no storing it up in someone else for safe keeping. Maybe a man who killed in war in order to live should have known better than to be sentimental. But I think about what it says about his heart, and maybe all hearts, that he wanted me to know him. That after years of hard knocks, some part of him remained tender enough to be hurt by a child.

One thing I’ve learned as a writer is that the stories inside us — especially the ones that hurt — have to come out. Whatever the cost of telling them, the cost of holding onto them is greater. As such, I think the courage it took Granddad to go to war had a twin in the courage it took him to examine his life afterward, and to offer its fractures for the world to see. When Life contacted him in 1960, wanting to catch up with “Private Everyman” for the magazine’s 25th-anniversary special double issue, he could have said no. Instead, he agreed to be photographed over the course of a whirlwind two-week trip that took him from Effingham to Fort Bragg, Normandy, Casablanca, Palermo, New York City, and back — the places the war had taken him 15 years before. Life billed the story “an adventure in time as well as a journey through space.”

On each leg of the trip, elaborate “re-creation” photos — pictures meant to invoke Granddad’s experiences in the war — were staged. In one shot, taken in France, he and some soldiers from a nearby Army post flank a crack-filled farmhouse, rifles drawn. In another, in the mountains of Sicily, he squats beside a pack mule, the white slash of a cigarette in his mouth. Alongside the “re-creation” shots are shots of the man he’d become — the 40-year-old husband and father hammering a sign for his TV repair shop in the front yard; the laconic veteran reading names on the white stone crosses in the cemetery at Omaha Beach.

In one man lived the other.

Of all the images of Granddad to have appeared in Life, the shots from November 1960 are the most personally affecting to me. For one, he looks more like the man I remember from when I was kid. For another, there’s something in his countenance — a flintiness and melancholy — that suggests an incalculable depth of hurt.

It’s there, too, in the quotes Life editors lifted from their interview with him to serve as captions for the pictures. Under the shot of the crack-filled farmhouse in France, Granddad says: You never could tell about those broken-up farmyard buildings in Normandy. You could be running into a sniper there or a booby trap or, on the other hand, you might get real lucky and find a keg of Calvados. I guess there’s only one thing you can say about war after you get to know something about it, and that is it’s rough. The circumspection and carefulness of his talk — and the euphemism of war as “rough” — speaks to the unspeakable.

And to that I would only add that photographs like Granddad’s, in simultaneously concealing as much as they reveal, testify to a fundamental truth of being human: We live by illusions. We curate our lives like stories in a magazine.

Some part of me has always been drawn to hidden truths. Like a kid turning over a rock, I’m curious about what’s underneath the tidy and convenient narratives we create to smooth over the chaos of life. Staged to suggest Granddad’s memories of war, those “re-creation” shots fascinate me. They are conspicuously absent of blood and suffering and death. The stink of human misery doesn’t rise off the page like black smoke. At the same time, however, could even the most graphic of photographs capture that? And confronted with the true horrors of war, who could stand to look at them? Not the readers of Life, I don’t suppose. For them — and for me — the suggestion of war is as far as we can go. The rest is a journey of the imagination. “To take a photograph,” writes Susan Sontag in On Photography, “is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” And to that I would only add that photographs like Granddad’s, in simultaneously concealing as much as they reveal, testify to a fundamental truth of being human: We live by illusions. We curate our lives like stories in a magazine.

* * *

The photographer who accompanied Granddad on that 1960 “adventure in time” was a man named Leonard McCombe. Other Life photographers of the era — Frank Capra, Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith — enjoy more name recognition, but McCombe’s photographs are every bit as incisive and iconic. He was born on the Isle of Mann, and at 19 had been embedded as a photographer with British troops in Normandy not far from where Granddad was shot. The trip was something of a return for him, too.

Several years ago, I had a brief email exchange with McCombe. He had retired from photography and now owned an apple orchard on Long Island. Having heard from an online connection that I was looking for information about his trip with Granddad, he wrote to me out of the blue:

Dear Mr. Edwards,

I am now in my late eighties, and I don’t do any interviews. My memory is not perfect, but I could answer a few questions by email. I was sent by the editors of Life about fifty years ago to do a story on your grandfather. My job was to get a picture story and I did not make any notes. Remembrance of the past was the theme of the story.

Sincerely,
Leonard McCombe

I wrote back immediately, saying I was simply curious what he might remember and whether he had any stories to share. Two weeks later, a page of McCombe’s remembrances arrived via email. He remembered Granddad’s backstory of growing up poor during the Depression, and losing his dad; starting a restaurant with my great-grandmother; and meeting a “pretty waitress” (Granny) and getting married quick. He remembered that “one thing [Granddad] liked in the army was marching with the band,” because “he felt for the first time like one of the boys.” He told me about shots he’d made in Effingham, and how from there they traveled to Fort Bragg and Normandy, where Granddad had landed at Utah Beach on D-Day Plus 4. “Chuck remembered fighting in the hedgerows,” McCombe wrote, “and securing abandoned farmhouses with landmines going off, booby-traps, and snipers in the orchards.” After Normandy it was on to Morocco and to Sicily, where McCombe said he made his best shots — photographs of Granddad in “the high mountains with mules carrying munitions and food supplies to the troops.”

I read and reread the email, savoring even the smallest fragments of story. Like the day they had lunch with an innkeeper at the Lyon D’Or, a small hotel in Bayeux, and listened as she told about being awoken in the night during the initial D-Day bombardment. Or how, during one of the “re-creation” photo sessions, the local soldiers they brought in had set off so many smoke bombs McCombe feared a visit from the police.

The stories McCombe shared brought the trip to life in a way the photographs alone couldn’t. Beneath the images’ glossy surfaces were the sacrifices he and Granddad had made to get them. The conscious choice to look.

In one sliver of a story, McCombe mentioned that their flight from Paris to Casablanca had been full of German tourists. The irony wasn’t lost on me. In the days prior, Granddad had been photographed wandering Utah Beach looking at remnants of the big German guns that fired upon him. He stood in an orchard like the one where a sniper put a bullet in his chest. Only 15 years had passed since he’d crawled under that apple tree to die. No time at all. The voices of those German tourists must have chilled his blood.

Life wrote that for Granddad “the slow summoning up of memory was always a poignant experience, sometimes tender, often painful. … Most of those who were there with him are long since vanished into the past.” And now that he has long since vanished, I marvel at his willingness to participate in that summoning.

What compelled him to do it? Did he want to test himself? Did he feel some kind of obligation to Life’s readership?

I can only speculate about his motivations. I know as much about Granddad’s private thoughts and feelings as I do about the circumstances that landed him on the cover of Life in the first place. But against everything I can’t know stands a simple fact: He was there. One of the first “re-creation” photographs of the trip — a shot that never made it into the magazine but that I discovered years later in an online archive — boldly underscores the seriousness of his commitment. In the picture, a group of men at the railroad yards stand over a body that’s been covered by a blanket. One man has his hand on his head as though in shock. The image is composed so that a nearby freighter’s boxcars crowd out the entire right side of the frame. Foregrounded on the left and taking up nearly as much space, his back to the camera, Granddad looks on. He’s dressed in clothes he might have worn at 19 — a denim jacket, a wool cap with earflaps. He and Leonard McCombe, on maybe the first day of their trip around the world and back, had staged the scene of his father’s tragic death. When I look at the picture, I don’t see the picture. I smell pitch oozing from railroad ties. I feel the heat and rumble of the freighter’s big engine. No one else could have known what he felt standing there. Maybe that was reason enough to want to tell the story.

In 1944, after he’d been shot, Granddad thought the last things he was going to see were the clouds and the sky. Forty years later, dying of lung cancer in the Veterans’ Administration hospital in Danville, Illinois, the thought became a kind of wish. After chemo and surgery, talk had turned to him coming home. Granny bought a chair and a beach umbrella so he could sit in the backyard and listen to birds and watch the clouds. I imagined him getting better, stronger, putting on weight, not coughing anymore, his hair growing back, his arm around my shoulders some afternoon at Lake Shelbyville fishing for black crappie. But the night he got the all clear, the relief was too much. Instead of coming home, he died in his sleep.

At 10 years old, nothing had ever scared me as much as walking into his hospital room and seeing him so frail. My brother and I stood by his bed, stunned, just looking at him and trying not to cry. He slowly pulled the oxygen tube from his nostrils and put a thumb over the vents and beckoned my brother to come close.

When my brother leaned in, Granddad lifted his thumb from the tube and blasted him in the face with the cold air.

Or I should say he tried to blast him with cold air. His movements were too slow and shaky to really make it happen. And my brother only pretended to be surprised. But that was Granddad — he didn’t want us to be afraid.

The better story from his last days was one I learned later, secondhand from my mother. Upon Granddad’s arrival at the VA, word somehow got out that Private Everyman, the soldier featured in those old Life magazines, had been admitted. In their wheelchairs and hospital gowns, people began stopping by to pay their respects. They struck up conversations with him in the day room and on the elevator. They remembered him.

According to my mother, Granddad delighted in being recognized. She said that when they all got to talking he was like a king holding court. These years later it strikes me that in Granddad’s photographs in Life, his fellow vets had seen themselves, their triumphs and struggles. They had felt acknowledged by the witness he bore. And it occurs to me, too, that in chatting him up in the VA and telling him their stories from the war years, they acknowledged him. The tremendous gift of that stops me cold. No one in the world escapes from trauma and tragedy — it’s coming for us all. But in sharing our stories, we can see and be seen.

My son is nearly nine now, around the age I was when I first read about Granddad in Life. He likes legends of knights and castles and dragons. Lately he’s been putting together the story of how his mom and I met, and coming to terms with the puzzling fact that we were once children ourselves. One of these nights, after we’ve finished dinner and cleaned up the dishes, I’ll bring out one of Granddad’s copies of Life and instruct him in the careful turning of its pages. I’ll tell him everything I can about the people in the pictures. I’ll try to answer any question that might spring to mind — about the war, or why people are always fighting. I don’t know what it will mean to him, if anything. Maybe for him the story will be how meaningful it all was to me. Or maybe it will blur and fade, one more dog-eared photograph waiting to be discovered in memory’s dusty attic. Anything is possible. We live in a little town in Massachusetts, surrounded by orchards like the one in France where Granddad nearly died. Someday years from now my son may even realize why, when we’re out driving, I always point out pretty clouds in the sky.

***

Steve Edwards is author of Breaking into the Backcountry, a memoir of his time as the caretaker of a wilderness homestead in southern Oregon. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

Prison: A Death Sentence by Poison

Federal Prison in Florence, Colorado. (AP Photo/Pueblo Chieftain, Chris McLean)

When the U.S. government builds a new prison, it has to generate an environmental impact statement: a report on how the prison facility will affect the surrounding environment. Stunningly, there is nothing to compel a study on how the surrounding environment will affect the prison’s population.

At The Outline, Michael Waters reports on how nearly a third of all federal U.S. prisons are located within three miles of Superfund sites, places where the land and water are so contaminated with industrial waste it’s considered dangerous for humans. Unless of course you’re a felon.

A week after Richard Mosley arrived as an inmate at Pennsylvania’s maximum-security SCI Fayette prison in 2008, he started getting sick. The air outside was so contaminated that his nose kept closing up. Then came the weight loss, followed by the gastrointestinal problems. Pretty soon, Mosley was relying on asthma masks to breathe. “I was going back and forth to medical trying to get some kind of relief or diagnosis,” he told The Outline. “I think I went maybe 35, 40 times.”

Meanwhile, Mosley started writing letters to local officials three days per week. “I was making a big stink,” he said. “If I was going to die there, I wasn’t going to die quietly.” He knew something was wrong. All around him, inmates were suffering. Skin rashes, gastrointestinal problems, and breathing issues were common across the prison. Everyone had a runny nose. The water quality was so abhorrent that guards brought bottled water for their onsite patrol dogs, according to Mosley. But the inmates still had to drink from the tap.

Only after he completed his sentence in 2012 and received a phone call from the Pennsylvania-based advocacy group Abolitionist Law Center did Mosley finally learn what was making him sick.

SCI Fayette was built in 2003 on the edge of a coal-ash dump for a nearby mine. Winds regularly sent that ash, which contained arsenic, lead, and mercury, into the air around the prison, and SCI Fayette inmates who inhaled it for a sustained period of time reported respiratory problems. Longer-term risks included thyroid cancer and lung disease.

According to Paige Williams, a cartographer who mapped out the phenomenon of toxic prisons as a student at Humboldt State University, 589 of the 1,821 federal and state prisons in the U.S. stand within three miles of a Superfund site — an Environmental Protection Agency designation denoting an area of land that is so contaminated it is dangerous to the public health — with 134 being within one mile of such a site.

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Eight Things You Need to Know About Me and the Beach

Matthew Brodeur / Unsplash

May-lee Chai | Longreads | July 2018 | 15 minutes (4,118 words)

When I was a junior in college, my father, mother, and brother took a trip to Hawaii. I didn’t go because I’d been named editor-in-chief of the school newspaper and needed to be at school before the semester started. I needed to get the first issue out for freshmen orientation. I also needed the money. My parents weren’t paying for my college, and I needed every little bit of cash that I could get.

While she was in Hawaii, my mother called me at my dorm to tell me about the trip. Only recently had my mother overcome her severe fear of flying and she still had a kind of ecstatic quality to her voice that I associated with the extreme highs that followed her moments of panic or fear.

“It’s beautiful! This is my place,” she declared. “The flowers, all the flowers, everywhere!”

She then proceeded to tell me how lovely she found Honolulu — the sunlight, the birds of paradise and jasmine and red ginger and hibiscus and bougainvillea, the white sand, the warm ocean. After seven years in the Midwest, seven years of blizzards and tornadoes followed by more blizzards and more tornadoes, she was sick of weather that rotated from one extreme of discomfort to the other.

“And they like me here! I went out into the water, Papa was on the beach, you know he won’t get wet, and Jeff wasn’t feeling well, he was in the room, so I went by myself into the ocean, and I was just splashing the water over my arms, it felt so good, and a white woman came up to me. She said, ‘Aloha! Welcome!’ Then she leaned in close to me and said, ‘We whites have to stick together against the Asian invasion.’” My mother was ecstatic. “She liked me! They like me here!” Read more…