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Author photo courtesy Simon & Schuster, Scribner / Simon & Schuster

Kiese Laymon | Excerpt adapted from Heavy: An American Memoir | Scribner | October 2018 | 20 minutes (4,158 words)

You were in Grandmama’s living room delicately placing a blinking black angel with a fluorescent mink coat on top of her Christmas tree while Uncle Jimmy and I were examining each other’s bodies in a one-bedroom apartment in Bloomington, Indiana. I was in my final year of graduate school. Uncle Jimmy and I were having a contest to see who could make their forearms veinier. “Shit, sport,” Uncle Jimmy said as he hugged me. “You eating a lot of spinach in grad school or what? You look like you training for the league.”

I was twenty-six years old, 183 pounds. My body fat was 8 percent.

Uncle Jimmy was six-three and so skinny that his eyes, which were nearly always yolk yellow, looked like they wanted to pop out of his head. He wore the same Chicago Bears sweatshirt, same gray church slacks, same church shoes he wore when he was forty pounds heavier.

When I asked him if anything was wrong, Uncle Jimmy said, “This blood pressure medicine the doctor got me on, it make it hard for a nigga to keep weight on. That’s all. Is it okay for me to say ‘nigga’ around you now? I know you’re a professor like your mama and shit now.”

I told Uncle Jimmy I was a graduate instructor and a graduate student. “That’s a long way from a professor. I think I wanna teach high school. But regardless, you can always say ‘nigga’ and any other word you want around me. I’m not my mama.”

On the way to Mississippi, we stopped at gas station after gas station. Uncle Jimmy went to the bathroom for ten minutes each time. I cranked up Aquemini and did push-ups and jumping jacks outside the van while he did whatever he needed to do. He eventually came back with pints of butter pecan ice cream and big bags of Lay’s Salt & Vinegar.

“Want some, nephew?” he asked.

“Naw,” I said over and over again. “I’m good.”

“You good?”

“I’m good,” I told him. I didn’t tell him I was running eleven miles, playing two hours of ball, and eating eight hundred calories a day. I didn’t tell him I gleefully passed out the previous week in the checkout line at Kroger. I didn’t tell him a cashier named Laurie asked if I was “diabetic or a dope fiend” when I woke up. I didn’t tell him the skinnier my body got, the more it knew what was going to happen, just as much as it remembered where it had been.

Uncle Jimmy looked at me, with Lay’s Salt & Vinegar grease all over his mouth, like my nose was a fitted hat. “Let me find out you went from fucking a white girl to eating like a white girl.”

“I just love losing weight,” I told him. “That’s really all it is. I just love losing weight.”

“You just love losing weight?” Uncle Jimmy was dying laughing. “My nephew went to grad school and now he turning into a white girl. You just love losing weight? That’s damn near the craziest shit I heard in thirty years, Kie. Who say shit like that? You just love losing weight?”

Somewhere around Little Rock, Arkansas, we stopped at a truck stop. Uncle Jimmy started telling me a story about one of his friends he worked with at the Caterpillar plant. He said he and this friend served the same tour in Vietnam and had been to Alcoholics Anonymous three times each.

“So yeah, he always talking big about all the Martell he drank over the weekend and all the pussy he be getting,” Uncle Jimmy said. “Always talking about how the white man’ll do anything to keep a nigga down. And he start talking about spoiled-ass Bush. I told him we been known there ain’t nothing the white man won’t do. He said he agreed. But soon as the white boss man come around, this nigga tuck his head into his shoulders like a gotdamn turtle. Steady grinning and jiving them white folk to death.”

I asked Uncle Jimmy why his friend acted one way around him and another way around the white boss man. “Shit,” he said, nervously tapping his foot under the table, “you know how some niggas are, addicted to giving the white man whatever he want whenever he want it. Not me, though. You know that.”

Uncle Jimmy was right. I’d spent the last four years of my life reading and creating art invested in who we were, what we knew, how we remembered, and what we imagined when white folk weren’t around. For me, that vision had everything to do with Grandmama’s porch. Every time I sat down to write, I imagined sitting on that porch with layers of black Mississippi in front of and behind me.

While Uncle Jimmy was in the bathroom, I called Grandmama on the pay phone to let her know we were going to be home later than we expected.

You picked up.

“Hey,” I said. “What y’all doing?”

“Hey, Kie, we’re on our way to the hospital. Tell Jimmy to meet us there. Is he drunk?”

“Naw,” I said. “He’s not drunk. He’s in the bathroom right now. Is Grandmama okay?”

You told me Grandmama had fallen asleep in her chair after complaining of dizziness. When you went to take her wig off, you saw blood on the inside of the wig. You told me you looked at the back of Grandmama’s head and saw this infected hole oozing with puss.

“Please don’t tell Jimmy,” you said. “If he gets even a little stressed, he’ll start drinking like a dolphin.”

“I don’t think dolphins drink, though.”

“Just bring your ass directly to the hospital, Kie.”

When Uncle Jimmy finally made it back to the car, he was flying on something more than Hennessy or weed. He handed me a Black Ice air freshener he bought and told me to make the world smell this good. When I asked him what he meant, he said, “Drive this van, nephew. Drive this shit. Make the world smell this good.” Uncle Jimmy could barely open his eyes or close his mouth. “Don’t use the brakes like you did last time, nephew. Drive this shit all the way home.”

‘Please don’t tell Jimmy,’ you said. ‘If he gets even a little stressed, he’ll start drinking like a dolphin.’

* * *

I’d heard Grandmama whimper over the loss of her best friend and her sisters. I’d heard Grandmama yell at Uncle Jimmy for daring to disrespect her in her house. I’d never heard Grandmama scream while begging the Lord to have mercy on her until that night in the hospital.

Uncle Jimmy wasn’t as high anymore. He and HaLester Myers, Grandmama’s new husband, were sitting in the waiting room, avoiding each other’s eyes, watching news about Bush and the Supreme Court. You, Aunt Linda, and Aunt Sue were down the hall talking shit about Uncle Jimmy. You blamed whatever he was going through on what he saw and did in Vietnam. Aunt Linda blamed alcohol. Aunt Sue blamed all of us for not praying for him more.

I walked away from y’all and went to Grandmama’s room.

With one hand in the pockets of my mesh shorts, and one hand holding hers, I told Grandmama it was going to be okay. Grandmama said she had faith in the white doctor who was taking care of her. She kept calling him “the white-man doctor,” though he was really a short, light-complexioned black man with a dry, red Afro.

“The white-man doctor got my best interest at heart,” she said. “Grandmama will be fine directly.”

The black doctor with the dry red Afro asked me to leave the room because they had to do a small procedure. He said the infection was deeper than he thought. It started in the middle of her head and went down the back of her neck. “We’re gonna help her with this pain,” he told me. “The infection is seeping into her bloodstream.”

I walked out of the room but he didn’t close the door behind me. “Lord Jesus,” Grandmama kept saying before she screamed. “Please have mercy. Please have mercy.” I knew, but didn’t want to admit, why Grandmama was screaming, why the black doctor with the dry red Afro didn’t give her enough anesthetic, why he thought cutting a full inch and a half deep into the back of her scalp was for her own good.

Folk always assumed black women would recover but never really cared if black women recovered. I knew Grandmama would act like she recovered before thanking Jesus for keeping her alive. She would never publicly reckon with damage done to her insides and outsides at the hands of people who claimed to have her best interest at heart. She would just thank Jesus for getting through the other side of suffering. Thanking Jesus for getting us through situations we should have never been in was one of our family’s superpowers.

I spent the night in the room sitting in a chair next to Grandmama’s bed and holding her hand. Grandmama didn’t say a word. She just looked out the window of the room, with her cheek pressed into the thin mattress until the sun came up.

The next morning, after I went for an early morning jog, Uncle Jimmy walked into Grandmama’s room. “These folk got me looking like a mummy, Jimmy Earl,” Grandmama said, before hugging Uncle Jimmy’s neck and talking about how skinny we’d both gotten since the last time she’d seen us. I told her she needed to do a better job of taking care of herself.

“You need to mind your business, Kie,” she said, “and don’t lose no more weight or your head liable to bop on down the road.”

“How can a head bop down a road, Grandmama?”

“You know what I mean, Kie,” she said, laughing at herself before directing her attention to Uncle Jimmy. “Why you ain’t eating, Jimmy Earl? You hear me?”

Grandmama looked at Uncle Jimmy and me standing side by side. She kept blinking her eyes in slow motion. The slow blinking was even worse than the eye twitching. Everyone in the family knew the slow blinking meant Grandmama was double disgusted with whatever she was looking at.

“I’m eating, Mama,” Uncle Jimmy said all of a sudden.

“What you eating, Jimmy Earl?”

Uncle Jimmy looked at me. “Gizzards,” he said. “Lots of spinach, too. All the spinach and gizzards I can eat.”

“Boy, you ain’t seen a leaf of no spinach. Why you ain’t eating, Jimmy Earl? Don’t get to lying off in this hospital.”

“I ate spinach the whole trip down,” Uncle Jimmy told Grandmama, while looking at me. “The whole trip down. Didn’t I eat spinach, Kie?”

Grandmama’s slow-blinking eyes dared me to lie so I kept my mouth shut and nodded up and down until I said, “Grandmama, what you think of Bush and them stealing that election?”

“Ain’t nothing the white man is too shamed to do, except do right by us. And it’s always some ol’ big-head black man who should know better trying to help the white man harm us.”

“Talking about Clarence Thomas?”

“Yeah, that ol’ big-head man know good and well these folk been stealing everything from us that ain’t nailed down since before I was born. I knew that man wasn’t right from when he sat on TV talking about a high-tech lynching when he got caught harassing that black woman. What her name is, Kie?”

“Anita Hill.”

“Right. Right. Anita Hill. All the education you got and you surprised they stole that election?” Grandmama asked me. “All that schooling, and you didn’t know what they was planning with all that gerrymandering? Kie, did Jimmy Earl eat spinach when y’all drove up here?”

I got up, stretched my calves, and weighed myself on the scale beside Grandmama’s bed. “I slept most of the way down here, but maybe,” I told her, and walked out of the room so Uncle Jimmy could tell all the lies he wanted to with no shame.

Stepping on the scale in Grandmama’s hospital room was the first time I’d stepped on a scale since leaving Indiana. The scale on the bottom floor of the gym at Indiana was the sleekest, sturdiest, most precise scale I’d ever stepped on. If I weighed myself, then took just a half sip of water or spit a few times, I could see a change in my weight. I weighed myself in the bottom of that gym before and after every workout, before and after every meal. I also got a tape measure to measure my waist every morning when I woke up. I came to Indiana with a thirty-three-inch waist and I managed to get it down to twenty-eight inches in two and a half years. Twenty- eight inches was good, and it was so far from forty- eight inches at my heaviest, but I knew I could get my waist even smaller if I worked harder.

If I weighed myself, then took just a half sip of water or spit a few times, I could see a change in my weight. I weighed myself in the bottom of that gym before and after every workout, before and after every meal. I also got a tape measure to measure my waist every morning when I woke up.

* * *

Grandmama was released from the hospital three days later. When I got to her house late Saturday night, Grandmama, Aunt Sue, Aunt Linda, and you were sitting around the TV watching The Color Purple in silence. Every time y’all watched it, it seemed like the first time. Y’all didn’t cry. Y’all didn’t move. Y’all just breathed deeply and made sure part of your body was touching the body of the woman next to you.

After the movie, while everyone in the living room was talking about how no good Clarence Thomas was for helping George Bush steal the election, you asked Aunt Linda and me if we wanted to go to the casino in Philadelphia. Aunt Linda, who lived in Vegas, swore that the Mississippi casinos were too country to hit, but she loved how reverential folk in those country casinos were to her.

“Vegas, honey,” she loved to say when folk asked about her elaborate wigs and her two-inch fingernails layered in ruby-red nail polish and studded diamonds. “I’m from Vegas, honey.”

I went in the bathroom to weigh myself before getting in the car, but Grandmama’s scale was gone.

Aunt Linda talked from Forest to Philadelphia about this video poker game and what she’d have to hit to get off the machine. When Aunt Linda asked you how much you’d have to hit, you didn’t answer her question.

The Golden Moon Casino in Philadelphia, Mississippi, was a windowless space of smoke, free alcohol, emergency lights, and ding-ding-dings. You didn’t have to play to hear the ding- ding-dings and see the emergency lights. I didn’t understand why anyone would put a dollar in a machine you’d probably lose when you could just watch folk, drink all you wanted, and listen to ding-ding-dings all night for free.

I sat in front of the machine across the casino floor from you, sipping diet pop, watching you spend every dollar you had in your pocket. I watched you rummage through your purse for enough quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies to take to the casino cage and get a few dollar bills. I watched you take those dollar bills and slide the money in the machine you were sitting at a few minutes earlier.

When you saw me watching you, I walked over and gave you the forty dollars Grandmama had given me for Christmas and the sixty dollars I had in my wallet. I watched you slide the five twenties in the same machine. In less than a minute, you walked over to Aunt Linda and sat next to her as she played. Neither one of you said a word. Aunt Linda eventually gave you what looked like another twenty and turned her back to you.

You went back to the same machine. When the money was gone, you looked over both shoulders and watched me watch you again. You walked over to me and asked if I brought my credit card. I told you I hadn’t had a credit card since somebody stole mine at Millsaps a few years ago.

“You need a credit card, Kie,” you said. “That’s how you build up your credit.”

I wanted to say so much, but we’d made it through Christmas without fighting and I didn’t know what I would do or feel if you slapped the taste out of my mouth after I’d given you my last money at a casino.

When we got home, you walked in Grandmama’s room, spread out across the foot of the bed, and told me to close the bedroom door.

“I don’t feel good, Ma,” you said to Grandmama.

“What you reckon it is?” Grandmama asked.

“Kie,” you said, “close the damn door.”

“Okay,” I said. “But why?”

“Because I said so, Kie. Just close the damn door.”

Grandmama looked at Uncle Jimmy and me standing side by side. She kept blinking her eyes in slow motion. The slow blinking was even worse than the eye twitching.


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Before I left for Indiana the next morning, Grandmama asked if I would go outside on the porch. Everyone else was either watching Tiger Woods beat white men in golf or they were in the kitchen assembling two-pound plates of food and slicing up German chocolate cake and sweet potato pie to take home. I sat in the same yellow peeling chair I sat in fifteen years earlier. I told Grandmama I couldn’t believe how full and green the woods looked when I was a kid. She told me no part of the world stops changing just because you leave it. “Why you tapping your foot like Jimmy Earl, Kie?”

I didn’t even notice I was tapping my toes on the porch.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I probably need to go for a run. I want you to take better care of yourself, Grandmama. For real. Don’t wait until the last minute if something is wrong with your body. And don’t try to fix your body if you know someone else can fix it better. You getting enough exercise?”

“You gone exercise crazy,” Grandmama said. “You lost all that little fat and now you trying to coach folk? The worst kinds of teachers be the teachers that teach other folk how to be like them. We all got ears. We all know when folk talking down to us. My whole life, I been exercising. You seen them big ol’ bags of cans in the backyard? I walk up and down this twice a day picking up cans to take to the can man. Them nice Mexican folk off in the trailer park next door, they brang me some of they cans after seeing me walk up and down this road. So I get my exercise. Worry about yourself.” I laughed off Grandmama’s comment. “Listen, Kie. Something in the milk ain’t clean. I want you to call your mama and Jimmy Earl more.”

“I talk to Mama every few days, Grandmama.”

“Well, talk every day then,” she said. “Twice a day. Call your uncle Jimmy Earl more, too.” I looked at Grandmama, who was now playing with the bandages wrapped around her head. “Do you hear me? It ain’t but about one or maybe two ways to get a blessing. But it’s a million ways to give a blessing away. And some folk, they be so good at giving away blessings. You give away your blessings enough, one day the Lord will up and take whatever blessing you need and leave you with nan blessing at all.”

“Nan blessing, Grandmama?” I asked, bent over laughing. “You need your own show.”

“Nan blessing, Kie. I’m telling you what I know. And I ain’t just talking about no money. I’m talking about anything the Lord seen fit to bless you with.”

“I hear you, Grandmama,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

“What is it, Kie? I’m not trying to talk about nothing crazy out here on this porch now.”

“I hear everything you’re saying about blessings and talking to Mama. I’m just wondering what happened to your scale?”

“Lord have mercy,” Grandmama said, and started slow- blinking her eyes. “Sometimes I wonder if your bread is all the way done.”

“My bread is so done, Grandmama,” I told her. “I just really love losing weight.”

Grandmama’s eyes slowly and steadily blinked out on that porch that day.

On our way up to Indiana, I did not eat or drink. I had no way of knowing how much I weighed until I paid the dollar to weigh myself on the raggedy bathroom scale at a rest stop in Tennessee. According to the scale, I was 186 pounds, up two pounds from when I weighed myself at the hospital.

When we crossed the Arkansas state line, Uncle Jimmy stopped at a KFC and ordered some gizzards to go. A few miles down the road, we stopped at a grocery store that sold hot food. Uncle Jimmy told me to wait in the van. He came out with nothing and headed to another grocery store that served hot food. This time, he came out with two beige Styrofoam containers filled with greens and corn bread. He was trying to right his wrong.

“Want some, nephew?”

“Naw,” I told him. “I’m good.”

Uncle Jimmy sat in the parking lot of that grocery store eating what must have been a pound of greens and corn bread. When he was done with both containers, he told me Grandmama complained to the rest of the family that I’d been in school long enough. According to Uncle Jimmy, Grandmama said it was time for me to get a real job so I could help the family with money. Uncle Jimmy lied a lot, but I knew it was Grandmama’s style to tell the truth about whoever wasn’t in the room.

I told Uncle Jimmy I made about twelve thousand dollars a year at Indiana. After paying my rent and my bills, I had about two hundred and twenty dollars left every month. A hundred went to the student loans from Millsaps I defaulted on when you left all the notices in the mailbox. Forty went to Grandmama. Twenty went to savings. Sixty went to food.

“Mama said she want you to get a real job,” he said again. “So you should go ahead and get on that directly. Make some real money.”

I decided in Uncle Jimmy’s van that instead of working toward my PhD, I’d take my MFA and apply for a fellowship that placed grad students of color in liberal arts colleges to teach for two years. If I could get the fellowship, I’d revise the books I was working on while teaching, then I’d try to sell them and get a decent paying job somewhere else.

When Uncle Jimmy dropped me off, he didn’t hug my neck. He didn’t dap me up. He thanked me for not telling on him and told me he’d see me next year.

“Sometimes I wonder if maybe we could talk on the phone?” I asked him from outside the van.

Uncle Jimmy took off without responding to my question. I didn’t know exactly what Uncle Jimmy was putting in his body during our trip down to Mississippi. I knew on our trip back up to Indiana he’d eaten more greens than I’d ever seen a human eat in one sitting. After he dropped me off, I knew he was going to get back to flying and crashing because flying and crashing were what people in our family did when we were alone, ashamed, and scared to death.

After jogging up the stairs to my apartment, I got on my knees and thanked God I wasn’t flying and crashing like Uncle Jimmy, or crying and scratching crusted scabs out of my head like Grandmama, or moping and regretting all the money I lost in a casino like you. I rubbed my palms up and down my abs, searching for new muscles. I ran my fingers over my pecs, flexed both to see which one was more defined. I slid my hands into the gap between my hard thighs and squeezed as hard as I could. I traced the veins in my calves down to my ankles and back up behind my knees. Whenever I looked at myself in the mirror, I still saw a 319-pound fat black boy from Jackson. When I touched myself or saw how much I weighed or my percentage of body fat, I knew I’d created a body. I knew I’d made a body disappear.

I got off my knees and asked God to help y’all confront the memories you were running from. I asked God to help all of y’all lose your weight. I planned to do everything I could not to give my blessings away and provide for y’all. The first thing I had to do was sprint down to the gym before it closed. I wanted to know exactly how much I weighed so I could decide if it was okay for me to eat or drink before going to bed.

* * *

From Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon. Copyright © 2018 by Kiese Laymon. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

* * *

Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Kiese Laymon, Ottilie Schillig Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi, is the author of the novel Long Division and a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He is also the author of the memoir Heavy.

‘As a Grown Woman, I Still Have To Continuously Learn To Say No’

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Wei Tchou | Longreads | October 2018 | 14 minutes (3,646 words)

We’re certainly living in a time of revolution. I feel a great deal of wonder when I reflect on the fact that we’ve witnessed our society’s cultural norms regarding sexual assault and consent shift in real time, on the most public of stages: Washington, Hollywood. Yet I’m perhaps less attuned to the shifts happening within myself, in light of the national conversation. I know that I conceive of my own consent and agency more intentionally now, from day to day. But where I most often notice this evolution is in the way I think about my past — it’s as if many of my memories have been entirely rewritten.

I was thinking of all of this as I read Tanya Marquardt’s Stray: Memoir of a Runaway. In the book, Marquardt writes about escaping her dysfunctional home at age sixteen and finding community within the early-nineties underground goth scene in Vancouver, British Columbia. The book is haunting and spare, and wrestles with the nuances of one’s agency, in the face of cyclical abuse. Marquardt is an award-winning performer and playwright. Her play Transmission was published in the Canadian Theatre Review, and she has published personal essays in HuffPost UK and Medium.

We became friends, back in 2011, while we we both attending the M.F.A program at Hunter College, and we sat down recently to speak about the art of crafting memory into literature, the ongoing stigma against personal writing, and the ways in which the cultural conversation surrounding consent affected the writing of her book, among other topics. Read more…

A Woman, Tree or Not

Longreads Pick

In this essay from our Fine Lines series about age, Terese Marie Mailhot questions the value of Native coming of age ceremonies she missed out on.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 11, 2018
Length: 9 minutes (2,419 words)

On Subtlety

AP Photo/LM Otero

Meghan O’Gieblyn | Interior States | Anchor | October 2018 | 13 minutes (6,551 words)

 

I.

In ancient Rome, there were certain fabrics so delicate and finely stitched they were called subtilis, literally “underwoven.” The word—from which came the Old French soutil and the English subtle—often described the gossamer-like material that was used to make veils. I think of organza or the finest blends of silk chiffon, material that is opaque when gathered but sheer when stretched and translucent when held up to the light. Most wedding veils sold today use a special kind of tulle called “bridal illusion,” a term I’ve always loved, as it calls attention to the odd abracadabra of the veil, an accoutrement that is designed to simultaneously reveal and conceal.

 

II.

Doris Lessing once complained that her novel The Golden Notebook was widely misinterpreted. For her, the story was about the theme of “breakdown,” and how madness was a process of healing the self’s divisions. She placed this theme in the center of the novel, in a section that shares the title of the book, which she assumed would lead readers to understand that it was the cipher. Rather than making the theme explicit, she wanted to hint at it through the form of the novel itself, “to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.” But in the end, her efforts did not translate. “Nobody so much as noticed this central theme,” she complains in the introduction to the 1973 edition. “Handing the manuscript to publisher and friends, I learned that I had written a tract about the sex war, and fast discovered that nothing I said then could change that diagnosis.”

 

There are people, of course, who will argue that divergent readings are a sign of a work’s complexity. But whenever I return to Lessing’s account of her novel’s reception, I can’t help but hear a note of loneliness, one that echoes all those artists who have been woefully misunderstood: Lewis Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a protest against abstract math. Georgia O’Keeffe insisted that her paintings of poppies and irises were not meant to evoke female genitalia (flowers, her defenders keep pointing out, fruitlessly, are androgynous). Ray Bradbury once claimed at a UCLA lecture that his novel Fahrenheit 451 was not about censorship, but the dangers of television. He was shouted out of the lecture hall. Nietzsche abhorred anti-Semitism, but when Hitler came across a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he interpreted the image of the “splendid blond beast” as a symbol of the Aryan race. One wonders what might have happened had Nietzsche simply written: “lion.” Read more…

To Tell the Story, These Journalists Became Part of the Story

Hiroshi Watanabe / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Martha Pskowski | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (4,194 words)

 

The attention paid to the U.S.-Mexico border seems to ebb and flow like the tide. News coverage spikes and then recedes, giving the impression that migration itself must be doing the same, when in fact the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has been stable for the last 10 years. In summer 2014, it was the wave of unaccompanied minors arriving from Central America drew our scrutiny. The year 2018, as in so many arenas, brought new horrors, with young children forcibly separated from their parents and the ensuing debacle of reunification.

I spent the first few months of 2014 as a volunteer at a migrant shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca. On the side, I was dipping my toes into journalism, pitching to small non-profit websites. On a typically sticky afternoon in Ixtepec, I asked the priest who runs the shelter, Alejandro Solalinde, what changes he had seen so far that year. More children than ever, he said. And more of them coming alone. I wrote about the rising number of unaccompanied minors for the Americas Program that April.

Just a few months later, I watched with a mix of relief and bewilderment as international media flocked to the U.S.-Mexico border to cover the full-blown controversy. Few outlets had bothered to look at what had been apparent in refugee shelters in Southern Mexico for months: minors travelling solo. Only when these adolescents and children arrived on the doorstep of the United States did their situation become a “crisis” meriting media attention and presidential action. But then as now, Central American migrants were compartmentalized, and their stories simplified for easy consumption.

I stayed in touch with some of the young men and women I met in Ixtepec, meeting up in person when possible. In strip malls in Northern Virginia and Van Nuys, California, I have caught up over pupusas with young Salvadorans who made it across the border after passing through Ixtepec. Instead of writing about just a snapshot of individual border crossings, I wanted to fit together the disparate pieces of their shared stories into the bigger picture; leaving home, the dangerous journey through Mexico, and now, adjusting to the United States.

When I needed more substance, and a respite from flash-point news coverage of the border this summer, two books satisfied my desire for depth, context and nuanced empathetic storytelling: Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers and The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life by Lauren Markham. Both trace the stories of families migrating to the United States and explore the gap between the myths the immigrants had heard before arriving and the reality of the life they experienced in America. Hilgers and Markham unravel the complicated circumstances that led their subjects to come to the United States, and the unexpected barriers they faced once arriving in their respective destinations. Read more…

Charting the Love — and Betrayal — in Our Stars

Longreads Pick

A personal essay in which Cherise Morris turns to astrology and Beyonce lyrics to move through of a difficult moment in her relationship.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 9, 2018
Length: 18 minutes (4,598 words)

Charting the Love — and Betrayal — in Our Stars

Illustration by Helen Li

Cherise Morris | Longreads | October 2018 | 22 minutes (4,598 words)

 

“What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of ‘love’”? I asked you this question four months into our relationship, while writing an essay about love for a contest I never entered.

This was long before we exchanged the L-word, back when the winter’s cold gave us short days and long nights spent with no one but each other.

“Uh, can we come back to that one? Gimme some more options first.”

So, we did a quick word association activity. I stated words and you responded with the first thing each brought to mind.

I said, “water.”

You said, “me.”

“Tree.” “Life.”

“Windows.” “Light.”

“Ground.” “Floor.”

I said, “air.”

And you said, “love.”

Then, with the smile of a fox you replied, “Ah, I see what you did there.”

 

***

I was born in the image of my mother with broken teeth and a half-broken heart to match; air gave birth to air. My mother is an Aquarius, and I, a Libra — both “air signs” — and perhaps that’s why we’ve always gotten along.

I watched her, full-hearted and lonesome my entire childhood and adolescence, longing to be consumed by a certain kind of fairytale love. A love which never lies to you, never takes you for granted, never hurts or harms. But if I know anything to be true, it is that the perfection of fairytales is a grandiose illusion, which is why we love them so. Little girls are taught to long for the fairytale love stories of princesses far more than the bittersweet kind that grow us into goddesses.

According modern western astrology, Libra is the cardinal air sign of the zodiac, ruled by Venus, the planet named for the Roman goddess of love, which governs the ways Libras seek and build relationships. We value affirmation, aesthetics and the rosier side of justice above all else. At all costs we seek to avoid the topsy-turvy shakiness of conflict and anything less than perfect equilibrium, while often settling for pseudo-perfect if it will keep the boat from rocking for a while. Those living under the sign represented by the cosmic scales are obsessed with the romance of keeping up appearances, and thus, are predisposed to a sometimes-never-ending quest for alignment and acceptance through partnerships. They exalt a fabled euphoria, a dream of being made to feel weightless by the love of another. But if I know anything to be true, it is that love, despite its intangibility, is the weightiest of matters.

Although, one’s approach to love and relationships can’t be simply boiled down to the properties associated with one’s sun sign. Astrology is more complex than that. But back when I started to live this story, I did not yet have a nuanced understanding of the workings of the cosmos. I fell into the predictability of the Libran archetype, wanting to fall in love only to feel what it was like to be loved.

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Why Are We Still Ignoring Lee Krasner?

(Photo by Tony Vaccaro/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

According to art critic Clement Greenberg, Jackson Pollock was “the most radical alcoholic [he] had ever met.” At the same time, though, Pollock’s paint splattered-and-dripped canvases, a method he pioneered and honed for a three-year period in the late 1940s, “broke the ice,” says Willem de Kooning, who added a postscript-like qualifier, “It was another step in space‐time.”

More than 60 years after Pollock rammed his green 1950 Oldsmobile-88 convertible into a tree off an East Hampton, Long Island road, Vox considers whether Pollock’s stature as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century is truly deserved. Or, more bluntly, how he “became so overrated.” That’s a bold stance for Phil Edwards, host of Vox’s Overrated video series, to take, but Edwards posits that without Greenberg and his writings for the Partisan Review, ArtForum, and others, Pollock’s stature wouldn’t have achieved the same heights. Which, as a premise, has some merit: though not the only art critic opining at the time, Greenberg was not only the loudest voice in favor of “modern art,” he immersed himself in the world in which the artists lived.

As he explained in his seminal 1939 essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Greenberg felt that there was nothing more avant garde than abstract expressionism, an art movement fueled by emotions, that resisted politicizing art (which had consumed art during the period after World War I). Through Greenberg’s embrace of Pollock, whom he indeed hyped up in his writings, the artist became an emblem of the Ab-Ex movement. A by-product of Pollock’s rise was the increasing shift of the art world’s gaze away from Paris and towards New York City, where artists like Pollock, De Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and others (including Greenberg) were living. The group of artists involved in Ab-Ex were a huge force, and thus NYC transformed into art’s epicenter.

So while Vox addresses how Greenberg’s influence within art criticism greatly benefited Pollock, effectively branding the artist as “the most powerful painter in contemporary America,” the video glaringly sidesteps any mention of Lee Krasner, a brilliant artist in her own right who just so happened to be married to Pollock. Krasner elicits one mention in the video, a throwaway reference during the captioning of a photo of Pollock and Greenberg at the beach, which is not only astonishing, it is frankly dismaying.

The video’s narrative is marred by a tunnel vision approach to explaining Pollock’s rise and enduring importance — yes, Greenberg boosted him, but Krasner, with her management and stability, sustained him. It was Krasner whom Pollock first turned to when his art began to radically depart from norms at the time, asking her upon completing Lucifer in 1947, “Is this a painting?” Prior to Lucifer, writes critic Jerry Saltz, “All seemed lost for him. I love his early work, but much of it is labored, muddy and glutted. Pollock is in hell. Then it happens.” And it was Krasner who convinced Pollock to agree to an interview with Life magazine in 1949; the article’s headline — “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” — and a spread featuring Pollock’s painting introduced the artist to mainstream America (and to those who didn’t regularly read Greenberg — or even know the critic’s byline). And finally, it was Krasner who managed Pollock’s estate for nearly twenty years after his death; under her stewardship, prices for Pollock’s works tripled and quadrupled, setting the standard for modern American art. More so than Greenberg, Krasner deserves credit for maintaining Pollock’s relevance and importance — without Krasner, Jackson Pollock doesn’t become Jackson Pollock.

As she told the New York Times in 1981,

Look, they don’t take de Kooning and put him up that way. And if de Kooning or Motherwell takes from Pollock, nobody even breathes a word about it. But with Lee Krasner, wow, wow. It’s been a heavy, heavy number. It’s hard for them to separate me from Pollock in that sense, you know.

Which is why omitting her from a video on Pollock’s legacy is so discouraging, especially with the wealth of research, reporting, and examination of Krasner as an artist and a person in recent years. Krasner attended the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union and then later studied with Hans Hoffman, and in the years following Pollock’s death, her own abstractions evolved, earning not only acclaim but also space in museum collections worldwide. She derisively dismissed being labeled as Pollock’s widow, which many had saddled her with: “I may have resented being in the shadow of Jackson Pollock, but the resentment was never so sharp a thing to deal with that it interfered with my work…By and large, people look at my work and it is connected with me, and a lot of those old hurts are no longer there. I have utter confidence in what I’m doing.”

In Mary Gabriel’s recently published Ninth Street Women, Krasner is a main character — she was one of the 11 female artists whose work was selected to be displayed at the historic 1951 Ninth Street Show, and over the course of a thousand pages, Gabriel highlights how the artist’s experiences and work align with those of her peers (and, if some cases, veer from drastically). Krasner once told the Times that she wished feminism “should have come along 30 years earlier…We could have used it then.” But Gabriel’s impressive work doesn’t seek to explore the import of these artists merely on their gender — as Elaine de Kooning (another central figure in Gabriel’s text) said, “To be put in any category not defined by one’s work is to be falsified.”

Without Krasner, Vox’s video is incomplete. There is no point to any argument that questions Pollock’s artistic worth that neglects to mention Krasner’s own contributions. And while Greenberg did give Pollock a boost, Krasner remained with Pollock after the photographers from Life left. To ignore Krasner 34 years after her death is frustrating, especially in this day and age. In the most recent New Yorker, Claudia Roth Pierpont delves into both Gabriel’s work and Krasner’s own legacy:

The real advance has come through the dedication of feminist scholars, such as Linda Nochlin, Hayden Herrera, and Kellie Jones, who have revitalized the discipline of art history and expanded the protest against exclusion to consider race along with gender. Gabriel’s firsthand sources are extensive, but her work stands on the shoulders of biographies by other women with a mission: Gail Levin on Krasner, Patricia Albers on [Joan] Mitchell, Cathy Curtis on de Kooning and [Grace] Hartigan. (There is no biography of [Helen] Frankenthaler, as yet.) Perhaps the tipping point will come when men write about women artists as easily as women have always written about men.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Trump Tower against cloudy sky. Midtown Manhattan. New York. USA. January 2018. (Getty Images.)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig, and David Barstow, Nicole R. Fleetwood, Jaeah J. Lee, Shelley Puhak, and Sarah Miller.

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Of Politics and Prose

Should art — and more specifically, literature — be instructive? Adding her perspective to the never-ending debate, Roxane Gay has an essay at Lithub in which she reveals how she chose the short stories for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2018: with an eye toward writing that engaged with the political in thoughtful, engaging, diverse and inclusive ways.

Writers are divided on whether or not it is their responsibility to address the contretemps in their work. Some writers stubbornly cling to the idea that writing should not be sullied by politics. They labor under the impression that they can write fiction that isn’t political, or influenced in some way by politics, which is, whether they realize it or not, a political stance in and of itself. Other writers believe it is an inherent part of their craft to engage with the political. And then there are those writers, such as myself, who believe that the very act of writing from their subject position is political, regardless of what they write. I know, as a black, queer woman, that to write is a deeply political act, whether I am writing about the glory of the movie Magic Mike XXL, or a novel about a kidnapping in Haiti, or a short story about a woman eating expired yogurt while her husband suggests opening their marriage.

When I am reading fiction, I am not always looking for the political. First and foremost, I am looking for a good story. I am looking for beautifully crafted sentences. I am looking for a refreshing voice or perspective. I am looking for interesting, complex characters that I find myself thinking about even when I am done with the story. I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed, but I also love when a story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about the world, when a story shows me just how much I don’t know and need to know about the lives of others.

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