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A Tall Tree Reading List

Image by Carolyn Wells

“I’m a lumberjack and I’m OK/ I sleep all night and I work all day.” This is what was playing in my head, in an incessant loop, as I worked on this reading list. It’s a song from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a British comedy show, and includes the line: “Leaping from tree to tree/ As they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia.” This is accurate. British Columbia is where I now live, and I have seen for myself the vast swathes of felled logs clogging up rivers around the province — just without the leaping lumberjack (aka Michael Palin).  Logging is a huge industry here, a business that comes with its share of controversy — which in turn has inspired some thought-provoking writing.

And it isn’t just logging that writers have chosen as a subject matter — the beauty of trees, their communication, their struggles, and their many mysteries have all been tackled. It’s not hard to see the inspiration. On many a hike, I have stood in awe before a towering tree, tried to wrap my arms around a huge trunk to no avail, or breathed in the heady scents of the distinct species as they drift across a trail. Trees are magnificent, and so it came as no surprise that some of the words written about them are as well.

1) The Wolf Tree and the World Wide Web (Suzanne Simard, Wired, May 2021)

This essay from Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard is a wonderful way to start our journey into the woods. Simard conjures a forest scene for us with great reference, almost affection. Here she is in among some Canadian trees, researching the fascinating connections that link a forest together. Fungus plays a huge role for Team Tree, linking old trees and young seedlings by delivering nutrients and messages between them. She beautifully describes this underground network: “This courageous root was as vulnerable as a growing bone, and it survived by emitting biochemical signals to the fungal network hidden in the earth’s mineral grains, its long threads joined to the talons of the giant trees.” This interconnected, familial system leads Simard to ponder on her own family — her children, and a failing marriage.

The roots of these little seedlings had been laid down well before I’d plucked them from their foundation. The old trees, rich in living, had shipped the germinants waterborne parcels of carbon and nitrogen, subsidizing the emerging radicals and cotyledons—primordial leaves—with energy and nitrogen and water. The cost of supplying the germinants was imperceptible to the elders because of their wealth—they had plenty. The trees spoke of patience, of the slow but continuous way old and young share and endure and keep on. Just as the steadiness of my girls steadied me, and I told myself I was strong enough to endure this season of separation. Besides, I’d have a sabbatical in a year, and I could make their lunches again, drumsticks and sliced cucumber and oranges cut into smiles, and I could show them how to build go-carts and plant flowers, and Nava and I could read together more, alternating turns through pages of Mercy Watson to the Rescue. But until that magical year, I’d spirit across the mountains each weekend to reabsorb their lives, my motherhood like time-lapse photography.

2) Do Trees Talk to Each Other? (Richard Grant, Smithsonian Magazine, March 2018)

Others have also been inspired by the intimacy of forest networks, and in this article for Smithsonian, Richard Grant takes a walk into the woods with Peter Wohlleben, a German forester, and author, who has developed a unique way of talking about trees — one that has earned him some scorn among the scientific community. Wohleben takes anthropomorphism to a new level, discussing mother trees who “feed their saplings … and warn the neighbors of danger,” compared to fickle young trees who take “foolhardy risks with leaf-shedding, light chasing, and excessive drinking.”

While trees may not have “will or intention,” it can still be argued that they are more social and sophisticated than people once thought. This is what Wohleben wants his audience to realize, and it seems his imaginative descriptions deliberately slip into the world of fairytales. People love a story, and this wordsmith uses his narrative skill to engage people with the forests he adores. In the slow-moving world of trees, adding a little drama to the “Crown princes” who “wait for the old monarchs to fall” is a clever tactic, and Wohleben does not seem too phased by the criticism: “they call me a ‘tree-hugger,’ which is not true. I don’t believe that trees respond to hugs.” A dive into Wohlleben’s world certainly isn’t boring — his language, after all, is rather delightful.

Trees can detect scents through their leaves, which, for Wohlleben, qualifies as a sense of smell. They also have a sense of taste. When elms and pines come under attack by leaf-eating caterpillars, for example, they detect the caterpillar saliva, and release pheromones that attract parasitic wasps. The wasps lay their eggs inside the caterpillars, and the wasp larvae eat the caterpillars from the inside out. “Very unpleasant for the caterpillars,” says Wohlleben. “Very clever of the trees.”

A recent study from Leipzig University and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research shows that trees know the taste of deer saliva. “When a deer is biting a branch, the tree brings defending chemicals to make the leaves taste bad,” he says. “When a human breaks the branch with his hands, the tree knows the difference, and brings in substances to heal the wound.”

Our boots crunch on through the glittering snow. From time to time, I think of objections to Wohlleben’s anthropomorphic metaphors, but more often I sense my ignorance and blindness falling away. I had never really looked at trees before, or thought about life from their perspective. I had taken trees for granted, in a way that would never be possible again.

3) Illuminating Kirinyaga (Tristan McConnell, Emergence Magazine, October 2020)

In this essay for Emergence Magazine, we go on another forest walk, this time alongside Tristan McConnell, who is documenting a “stubbly, hollow-cheeked sixty-four-year-old” named Joseph Mbaya. Walking in the mountain forests that surround Mount Kenya, Mbaya finds a portal to a “slower and more meaningful world,” and also treatments for ear infections and “pungent wind.” His knowledge of herbal cures makes walking the forest tracks with Mbaya, “like walking the aisles of CVS with a taciturn pharmacist.”

It is lovely to share an insight into the mystical remedies a forest can offer, but this essay quickly takes a darker turn, detailing how these magical forests are shrinking. Fire-clearing for farming, timber plantations, and climate change are all taking their toll — but so is simply the poverty of this region. For many here, “conservation is an unaffordable luxury” — with the forest offering a resource they need to exploit, rather than protect, in order to survive.

DEEP INSIDE THE fractured forests that still ring the mountain, a hallowed sense of wonder persists. One morning, soon after the sun burns mist from the mountainsides and clouds shroud the peaks, I visit part of the mountain’s few remaining areas of old-growth woodland with a pair of young Kenyan foresters from the Mount Kenya Trust. Marania Forest, on the mountain’s northern fringe, is a revelation: thickly towering trunks of eight-hundred-year-old rosewood reach overhead, the trees’ crowns held up to the light of the canopy, pencil-straight cedar and craggy-barked olive are draped with lichen, and moss carpets the earth, muffling sound to a church-like silence. It is dark, crowded, and otherworldly—the ground soft underfoot, the trunks damp to the touch, the trees centuries old, the sunlight breaking through in narrow shafts. At our feet, fallen trunks breach the understory like shipwrecks, gradually decaying and returning to the soil—to its subterranean fungal networks and the spreading roots of neighboring trees—as food for the rest of the forest. We all smile, the foresters and I. It is a routine venture out for them, and my first to these old forests, and yet our reactions are the same: joy and reverential wonder. We instinctively drop our voices to a whisper. We walk and talk, feet sinking into the damp, spongey soil as the foresters teach me about the trees.

4) Inside the Pacheedaht Nation’s Stand on Fairy Creek Logging Blockades (Sarah Cox, The Narwhal, July 2021)

The forests around Mount Kenya are not unique — forest exploitation is a controversial issue around the world. Within my own community in British Columbia, the debate has recently been focused around the logging of old-growth trees in an area called Fairy Creek. For many months now, protesters have been blocking access to the logging cut block — and more than 300 people have been arrested, making it one of the largest civil disobedience actions in recent Canadian history.

A few pieces have been written about Fairy Creek, but I was particularly struck by the insight Sarah Cox provided in her article for The Narwhal. Cox not only looks at the perspective of the protestors and the police, but at the viewpoint of the people on whose territory Fairy Creek lies — the Pacheedaht First Nation. It’s complicated. The Pacheedaht co-manages the annual cut on its territory, and forestry has helped them to provide revenue and jobs — even allowing them to buy back some of their ancestral lands. The Pacheedaht First Nation’s elected leadership has asked the protestors to leave, but an elder, Bill Jones, has welcomed the protestors and garnered extensive media coverage. Cox deftly peels back the layers to look at the tensions within a community that has often been overlooked in this debate.

We scramble onto the boggy shore of an island where four Pacheedaht members in hip waders are planting sedges and grasses to repair damage to fish habitat caused by decades of industrial logging — logging in which the nation played no part and from which it received no benefit. An eagle lets out a high-pitched whistle. Our boots squelch in the mud. Then, slicing through the stillness, comes the throaty chuckachuka-chuckachuka of a RCMP helicopter.

For the Chief, “everything that’s been happening,” refers to the blockades taking place in and around the Fairy Creek watershed on Pacheedaht territory and in the neighbouring territory of the Ditidaht First Nation. From the estuary, we can almost see the green spirals of the Fairy Creek valley, only a few kilometres distant, that has become the epicentre of a flourishing movement to save the last of B.C.’s unprotected old-growth forests. At this very moment, RCMP are arresting protesters wedged into tall tripods hammered together with discarded logs or lying under tarps with their arms chained inside “sleeping dragons” — metal tubes dug into the ground. When the RCMP leave each day, more protesters (or land defenders, tree protectors, tree-huggers or intruders, depending on whom you talk to) drive their cars, camper vans, trucks and SUVs up the inclines of logging roads that provide access to planned logging in the Fairy Creek watershed.

5) When The Toughest Trees Met the Hottest Fires (David Ferris, Greenwire, August 2021)

The past few months have brought home to me that logging is not the only threat to our forests — climate change is increasing the impact of fires year on year. This summer the area where I live reached an unprecedented 46 degrees, a whole town burned to the ground, and I witnessed for myself flames licking up a forested mountain, gleefully jumping from tree to tree with ease.

Old-growth forest is more fire-resistant — and in fact, this is one of the arguments for saving old growth from the saws — but as David Ferris points out in his poignant essay for Greenwire, even the very oldest are now being wrecked by blazes. Ferris tells the story of last August, when the CZU Lightning Complex Fire “climbed the ladder of lesser trees and into the crowns of the giants,” ruining redwoods that had formed “an unbroken living line from today’s Silicon Valley to the times of the Bible.” Ferris peppers his stories with these jaw-dropping facts — the trees in question are up to 2,500 years old, 350 feet tall, and have six chromosomes compared to a mere two in us humans — they are simply incredible. He also paints a vivid picture of their home, a “cloud forest, dripping and primeval,” steeped in time. In contrast, the story of the fire is tense and fast, the drama played out through the eyes of Cal Fire’s Dan Bonfante, who almost lost his life.

As the forest burns every year, the humans who live near the redwoods will experience heat waves, and evacuations, and blackouts, and droughts, and mudslides, and smoke hanging in the air. Creatures that don’t measure their lives in millennia could find their life spans nastier and shorter.

The shaggy, patient trees that form an unbroken living line from today’s Silicon Valley to the times of the Bible are in ruins. The sprouts bursting from their trunks suggest that the shaded cathedrals could return, though the healing may take so long that no one now alive will see them. Today’s adults will take their children to Big Basin, and to landscapes across the West where once-verdant forests have been withered by fire. They will point and talk, not of the desolation that is, but of the Eden that used to be — and could be again, one distant day.

“In my lifetime, yeah, it’s not going to look like it used to look,” said Kerbavaz with a shrug. “But in the next lifetime, probably.”

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

LOS ANGELES, CA - MAY 19: Theo Henderson from We The Unhoused podcast speaks from the steps of LA City Hall as members of Unhoused Tenants Against Carceral Housing (UTACH), a newly formed tenant organization, held a news conference to demand humane treatment in Project Roomkey programs and request a meeting with city officials. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images).

This week, we’re sharing stories from Ciara O’Rourke, Haley Britzky, Alissa Walker, Julie Sedivy, and Arika Okrent.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

1. The Fugitive and the Chameleon

Ciara O’Rourke | Deseret News | August 2, 2021 | 6,154 words

“Mario’s father had gone by many names. Luis Archuleta. Lawrence Pusateri. The man the son knew as Ramon was just a fraction of his way into what may be one of the longest fugitive runs in U.S. history — a 50-year game of cat-and-mouse that played out across the West, from the streets of Colorado to the shores of California and many dusty, sun-bleached points in between.”

2. ‘We Are All Suffering in Silence’ — Inside the US Military’s Pervasive Culture of Eating Disorders

Haley Britzky | Task & Purpose | August 2, 2021 | 6,213

U.S. military service members develop harmful and unhealthy habits to maintain “body composition standards” that are outdated.

3. Theo Henderson’s Podcast Influences L.A. City Policy. For 7 Years, He’s Lived Mostly in the Park.

Alissa Walker| Curbed | October 14, 2020 | 2,505 words

“There are 60,000 unhoused people in L.A. County — (Theo) Henderson prefers ‘unhoused’ because he says ‘homeless’ has become a slur — as many as 40,000 of whom are considered, like him, to be ‘unsheltered,’ living outside the shelter system in tents, informal communities, and camps.”

4. The Strange Persistence of First Languages

Julie Sedivy | Nautilus | November 5, 2015 | 3,440 words

“Spurred by my father’s death, I returned to the Czech Republic hoping to reconnect to him. In doing so, I also reconnected with my native tongue, and with parts of my identity that I had long ignored.”

5. Typos, Tricks and Misprints

Arika Okrent | Aeon | July 26, 2021 | 3,401 words

“Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable? Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology.”

My Seat at the Table

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Bernice L. McFadden | Longreads | August 2021 | 15 minutes (4,049 words)

I discovered through DNA testing that my first maternal ancestor in the United States came from the country in Africa now known as Cameroon. This Cameroonian ancestor was a member of the Bamileke tribe — an ethnic group which originated in Egypt.

The table and the chair were invented in Egypt around 2500 B.C. Egypt is a country located in Northeast Africa and not in the Middle East as people have been misled to believe. Do you find it ironic that gaining a seat at the table has become a metaphor for the advancement into spaces that are historically and predominately white and male and generally resistant to Black and female representation?

Recently, Black people and women have been crashing those homogenized parties, bringing with them their own chairs or filling vacant ones at those proverbial tables.

Some of the gatekeepers feign acceptance of the racial modifications of these platforms, while others have no qualms conveying their disdain or outright outrage at the presence of a Black person at said table. For example, on Jan. 25, 2012, Jan Brewer, the former governor of Arizona, stood on the airport tarmac and chastised, like a child, one Barack Hussein Obama — a Black man who was, at the time, the sitting president of the United States of America. Moments later, when Brewer was asked about the incident she said, “He was a little disturbed about my book.”

Other gatekeepers are covert with their contempt, preferring to close their arms around unwelcomed Black people in an insincere embrace as they sink a blade into their backs.

I have a longtime friend. She and I are BFFs and are as close as sisters. She is white and Filipino, and we have been friends since 1979, when we first met at our mostly white boarding school in the rural Pennsylvania town of Danville.

We are both the eldest of four children, both raised in two-parent households.

For most of our relationship, race was not a topic of discussion. However, that changed in the early 2000s when she came to New York to spend a weeklong holiday with me. She’d spent the day in Manhattan, catching up with friends and taking in theater. Over dinner that evening, she shared that she’d had an extra ticket for the play she’d seen but hadn’t considered inviting me because she assumed I wouldn’t be interested in a staged production that did not have Black characters.

That statement stalled me. I asked if she thought that because I was Black, that my interest lay only in Black-centered entertainment?

She said yes.

I was stunned by her misconception of me and Black people on the whole. I asked if she, a biracial woman living in America, was only interested in European and/or Filipino art? She confessed that her interests were indeed diverse but couldn’t explain why she presumed it did not hold true for me or others who looked like me.

I explained that contrary to what she’d been told, Black people are not a monolith. I told her that we are diverse in every conceivable way.

This was the conversation that set us off on a journey about the myth of race, systemic racism, and what it’s really like to be Black in America.

At our school I was just one of a handful of Black students. On Saturdays, we girls, Black, white, and other, would walk from school into town, to lunch at the Arthur Treacher’s or the Hoagie Shop. Oftentimes, we would go to the local Woolworth’s to buy books, candy, and millinery supplies for sewing class. Even though I knew my white classmates were secretly slipping nail polish and lip gloss into their pockets and backpacks, it was me and the other Black girls that the store employees followed and hawk-eyed.


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Sometimes I spent weekends in the homes of my white classmates, those day students who lived in and around the town. It was always a treat to get away from campus, to sleep in a cozy bed and eat a home-cooked meal.

At the time, my family and I lived in a crowded two-bedroom apartment. The kitchen was tiny, leaving little space for a dining table large enough to accommodate a family of six. So, we children ate our meals in the kitchen while my parents ate in the living room, on the couch, plates in their laps.

My father believed that children should be seen and not heard, especially at the dining table, so talking was not permitted during meals. In contrast, the parents of my white friends encouraged and participated in mealtime discussions.

It was at one of those family dinners that I remember how my BFF’s father, a tall, slim, kind man with glasses, responded aloud to a question that I had not heard posed:

“Of course, the white race is the superior race.”

To this day, I do not know who asked the question or if in fact a question was actually asked. Perhaps, this man, who had always been nothing but kind and welcoming to me, found it necessary to remind me that even though I was in his Victorian home, sitting at his dinner table, eating the food that had been lovingly prepared by his Filipino wife — I was inferior to him.

I cannot recall if my friend and her siblings fell silent, or if my friend, her siblings, or her mother looked at me for a reaction or in consolation. I remember that I kept my eyes lowered to my plate, that the grip on my fork tightened, and the leisurely pace of my heart launched into a sprint. I was 15 years old and the situation my family had warned and prepped me for as a Black person living in white America had arrived yet again.

Before that incident, another incident took place in Brooklyn in the waning days of autumn when I was on my way home from middle school. On that day, I exited the subway on the south side of Prospect Park, in a neighborhood where very few Black people lived at the time. There, I was followed by two white teenage boys who pelted rocks at me, shouting, “Nigger, go back to Africa!”

A year or two before, my younger brother and I were walking down Rockaway Boulevard in South Ozone Park, Queens, a neighborhood that in the ‘70s was still majority Italian. As we made our way to our grandparents’ home, a group of white teenage boys and girls stalked us for blocks, hurling soda cans, bottles, and racial slurs.

The fact that my BFF’s father chose that moment to express his deepest held beliefs about his racial superiority is not beyond me. Indeed, my presence at his table was conditional — permitted only because I made his daughter happy and he enjoyed seeing his daughter happy because his love for her was unconditional.

Do I believe his declaration was meant to wound and degrade me?

Yes, I do.

Not only was I hurt, but being an empath, I also absorbed the humiliation on behalf of his Filipino wife who had not batted an eye at the insult.

Do I think that my friend’s mother believed that she, a Filipino person of color, was less than her husband because he was white, and she was not?

Yes, I do.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the Indian anti-colonial nationalist and spiritual leader, believed that Europeans were the most civilized of the races and that Indians were almost as civilized as Europeans and Africans were wholly uncivilized.

Perhaps my friend’s mother held similar beliefs.

Nevertheless, I would return to that house and eat at that table again and again, without further incident. But I would never forget the shot fired because the wound it left would not allow me to forget. The memory is lodged in me like the bullet it was intended to be.

I would return to that house and eat at that table again and again, without further incident. But I would never forget the shot fired because the wound it left would not allow me to forget. The memory is lodged in me like the bullet it was intended to be.

***

Some years after that dinner, my friend and her family traveled to the Philippines to visit her maternal family. Not too long after her return to the United States, she and I met for dinner at a Manhattan restaurant. I sat across the table from her and listened, enthralled as she recounted her trip in vivid detail. Near the end of her monologue she mentioned that when she ventured out without her Filipino mother or another Filipino family member for a walk or an excursion to one of the many marketplaces — she was baffled about why strangers addressed her in Tagalog, which is perhaps the most widely spoken language in the Philippines.

I frowned, asking, “Why was that so confusing?”

“Well,” she said, “because I don’t think I look Filipino.”

“What do you think you look like?”

“American.”

I am keenly aware that people who look like me — people born Black, without “the complexion for the protection” as comedian Paul Mooney described it — understand that when people say American, that means white. Those of us born in America who are not white are hyphenated to stress that we are not real Americans, but hybrids — like broccoflowers and limequats.

My BFF is tall, beige-complexioned with almond-shaped eyes, and long straight black hair. To me she looks Asian, but I admit, she could also pass for Native American. The one thing she cannot pass for is white, which is how she saw herself.

My BFF is tall, beige-complexioned with almond-shaped eyes, and long straight black hair. To me she looks Asian, but I admit, she could also pass for Native American. The one thing she cannot pass for is white, which is how she saw herself.

I smiled, reached for the wine glass, and asked, “Well, friend, if you look American, then what do I look like?”

I watched the epiphany rise in her eyes like the morning sun.

***

In his 1997 essay, “Deconstructing the Ideology of White Aesthetics,” John M. Kang wrote:

Like male chauvinism, the ideology of White aesthetics assumes that the politically dominant group, White people, are inherently superior to a weaker group, people of color. The ideology of White aesthetics holds that people of color, by virtue of their aesthetic inferiority to White people, deserve to remain subordinated.

Kang’s observation was validated during the 2014 National Book Awards, a major literary event that honors the best and brightest writers.

In 1953, just three years after the award was conceived, Ralph Ellison would win for his novel, Invisible Man. Ellison was the first Black writer to win a National Book Award. Two decades would pass before another Black writer would be so honored. In 1975, Virginia Hamilton received the award for her children’s book, M. C. Higgins, The Great.

In 1983, both Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor received National Book Awards for their novels: The Color Purple and The Women of Brewster Place. So if you’re counting, only four Black authors were awarded National Book Awards over a 30-year period.

The 2014 National Book Awards dinner was held at the ritzy Cipriani Wall Street restaurant located in NYC’s financial district. The nominees, their guests, and ticket holders, all dressed in their finest threads, sat at tables covered in white linen cloth. Before the awards were given, the attendees were treated to a sumptuous meal complete with wine and cocktails.

That year, Jacqueline Woodson, a Black woman, received the award in the Young People’s Literature category for her novel, Brown Girl Dreaming. After Woodson gave her acceptance speech, host Daniel Handler — aka Lemony Snicket, a white man best known for his children’s books, A Series of Unfortunate Events and All the Wrong Questions — returned to the stage and gleefully bellowed:

“I told you! I told Jackie she was going to win. And I said that if she won, I would tell all of you something I learned this summer, which is that Jackie Woodson is allergic to watermelon. Just let that sink in your mind. And I said you have to put that in a book. And she said, you put that in a book.”

Handler continued: And I said I am only writing a book about a Black girl who is allergic to watermelon if I get a blurb from you, Cornell West, Toni Morrison, and Barack Obama saying, ‘this guy’s OK! This guy’s fine!'”

“Alright,” he chuckled when he realized the crowd was uncomfortable. “Alright, we’ll talk about it later.”

***

The Laugh Factory in Los Angeles is a well-known comedy club that has hosted many legendary comics of all backgrounds, creeds, ethnicities, and genders. The audience sits in chairs that are arranged in the form of a C around the stage.

Back in 2006, Michael Richards, former star of the popular syndicated television show Seinfeld, was performing at the Laugh Factory when he became enraged because Black audience members were heckling him during his standup routine.

The infuriated Richards took the opportunity to remind the Black audience members that: “Fifty years ago we’d have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass.” Richards continued, “You can talk, you can talk, you’re brave now motherfucker!’

He demanded that the Black people be removed from the club, barking, “Throw his ass out. He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! A nigger, look, there’s a nigger!”

***

If the lunch counter is the heir to the table, then the chair is the progeny of the stool. For decades, Black people, those offspring of enslaved Africans, were barred from service at lunch counters in the Jim Crow south.

On Feb. 1, 1960, the Greensboro Four, who were students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College — Ezell Blair Jr. (who later took the name Jibreel Khazan), David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil — walked into the Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the lunch counter, and ordered coffee and sandwiches.

Soon, their mission to disrupt and dissolve the segregationist edicts that supported Whites Only counters were adopted by Black people and their white allies in other segregated Southern states, and the “Sit In” movement was born.

The “Sit In” crusade was an act of non-violent, civil disobedience that was frequently met with violence.

Activists were spat on, milk poured over their heads, smoke blown into their faces —in some cases they were punched, slapped, and brutally removed from the lunch counters.

***

A news desk is similar to a luncheonette counter. Journalists sit at these desks to report the news. Guests are often invited to sit at news desks to enlighten viewers on a topic on which they may or may not have expertise. Sometimes, multiple guests are summoned to debate an issue.

On April 7, 2010, AWB (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) secretary-general Andre Visagie, a white South African man, appeared with political analyst Lebohang Pheko, a Black South African woman on e.tv’s current affairs show Africa 360, to discuss race relations in the wake of Eugène Ney Terre’Blanche’s murder.

Terre‘Blanche was a white supremacist and Afrikaner nationalist who founded the AWB. According to Wikipedia, Terre‘Blanche swore to use violence to preserve minority rule. In 1997, Terre’Blanche was convicted and sentenced to six years in Rooigrond Prison for assaulting a gas station attendant and for the attempted murder of a Black security guard. He served three years before being released. Terre’Blanche was murdered on his farm on April 3, 2010.

During the TV show exchange, Andre Visagie became enraged when Pheko continuously interrupted him. In the video, Visagie rips off his microphone and springs from his chair. The incensed Visagie aims his finger at Pheko, declaring: “You won’t dare interrupt me!”

Chris Maroleng, the Black South African host of the show, planted himself between Pheko and the irate Visagie. For a millisecond, it seems as though the two men might come to blows until finally, Visagie addresses Pheko again, warning, “I am not finished with you.”

Andre Visagie was born and raised under an apartheid system dissolved in 1994. In 2010, he was a silver-haired old man living in a country where Black people were no longer required to be subservient to the white minority.

As I watched the exchange between the white Visagie and the Black and female Pheko, I could sense the radiating fury of Visagie as he tried to grapple with the fact that a Black woman was asserting herself, holding her ground, and speaking her mind as if she was his racial equal.

Only that the world was watching kept Visagie from pummeling Pheko to death.

***

In some academic institutions, students sit on furniture known as a combo school desk, which is a chair with a small table attached.

In October 2015, a 16-year-old Black girl was seated in a combo school desk in her math class at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina.

In South Carolina the school system remained partially segregated until 1970. In February of 1970 the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit Court ordered that a school desegregation directive be issued in Lamar, a town just one hour from Columbia.

Nearly 200 hundred angry white parents, irate that their children would be taught alongside Black children, armed themselves with guns, chains, bricks, and axe handles and descended on buses carrying elementary- and high school-aged students from Lamar. The mob overturned two school buses and clashed with law enforcement before they were finally subdued with tear gas. During the melee, six Black students were injured.

The young lady in the math class at Spring Valley High School was on her cell phone, which is against the rules, but not a crime. When asked to put her phone away, she took her sweet time doing so. This infuriated her white teacher, who asked her to leave the class. When she refused, the vice principal was called in. He too asked her to leave the class. Still, she refused to leave.

Senior Deputy Ben Fields, a white school resource officer, was called in to handle the situation.

According to the LA Times, Fields “… wrapped his arm around her neck and tried to pull her from her desk, which flipped backward to the floor. He dragged her out of the desk, threw her across the floor, and arrested her for disturbing the classroom.”

***

One of the games I remember playing in grade school was musical chairs. The teacher would arrange a circle of chairs that equaled one less chair than the number of players. For example, if there were 10 students, there would be nine chairs.

The teacher would play a song on the record player and we children would march around the circle of chairs. When the teacher stopped the music, we would all scramble to secure a seat. The student left standing — because he or she failed to capture a chair — was the loser.

Afterward, the teacher removed a chair, turned on the music, and the game continued until there were only two students and one chair left.

As the number of chairs decreased, the anxiety among the players heightened. Oftentimes the game turned violent. Students would push and shove their fellow classmates to keep them from stealing the chair away from them.

The point of musical chairs is to teach children fair play and sportsmanship.

***

In May of 2019, my high school friend married the love of her life in a lovely church ceremony in Pennsylvania. The intimate wedding reception, attended by close friends and family, was held at a rustic, stylish restaurant.

The bride, her groom, and all 60 of her guests sat at a long wooden table. Good wine and delectable food were served.

I was the only Black person in attendance. I was aware of my Blackness but not uncomfortable with it.

Across the table from my friend and her new husband, I sat sandwiched between my BFF’s youngest brother and a woman who was filled with so much joy that her laughter sounded like sleigh bells.

Seated next to the happy couple was the brides’ middle brother and his wife. The teenage children of both brothers filled out the remaining seats at the west end of the table.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the wife of the second brother stealing long, probing glances at me. When I suddenly turned to meet her inquisitive eyes, her face brightened with embarrassment.

We gazed at each other until flustered she asked, “So, how do you like living in New Orleans?”

I told her that I liked it just fine, to which she nodded, looked away, and wondered aloud to no one in particular how the family cat was getting on in her absence.

Afterward, I returned my attention to the woman with the jingle-bell laughter.

There were several conversations happening at once around the table. Everyone spoke at an even decibel — just loud enough to be heard by the person they were speaking to, but not so loud that their exchange could be heard by guests seated two or three seats away.

The woman I was conversing with said something funny, and I chuckled into my palm, stifling my usual, open-mouthed guffaw, because I was aware that more often than not, white people find Black joy invasive.

I was conscious of this even before August 2015, when the Black women members of the Sistahs on the Reading Edge Book Club, were kicked off of a Napa Valley wine train in California because white passengers found their laughter “offensive.”

The woman I was conversing with said something funny, and I chuckled into my palm, stifling my usual, open-mouthed guffaw, because I was aware that more often than not, white people find Black joy invasive.

I had wiped a tear from my eye with one hand and was reaching for my water glass with the other, when one of the teenagers asked a question, loud enough for the entire table to hear:

What’s the name of that song by NWA?

I brought the water glass to my lips and even though I kept my eyes trained on the woman who’d made me laugh my eyes wet, I could no longer hear the words tumbling out of her mouth, for my ears were tuned for the response to the question. Heat crept through me and I realized that my anxiety had escalated from low-risk stage green to warning-risk stage yellow.

The question was repeated — this time a decimal above the initial inquiry.

What’s the name of that song by NWA?

To me the question sounded like the clearing of a throat, a tap on my shoulder, a nudge in my side — which is to say it yearned for my attention.

The question had been posed twice — by two of the grandchildren of the man who wounded me decades earlier. He had been dead for years, leaving his progeny to continue his legacy.

I believe his grandchildren wanted me to turn around so they could see the fire that they’d lit in my eyes. Perhaps too, they wanted to witness, firsthand, the infamous angry Black woman that is lore in white imaginations.

But I did not give them the satisfaction of seeing my anger and my pain and the leaking wound their words had reopened. Instead, I maintained my position — head turned, back to them — enduring the mental and emotional weathering — the erosion those words inflicted on me.

The microaggression veiled as an innocent question about a group whose name is an acronym for Niggaz Wit’ Attitude was asked a third time, this time by the mother who had abruptly ended her short conversation with me to wonder about her cat.

No,” she giggled, “I don’t remember the name of that song by N … W … A.

She dragged the letters for effect.

Nigger was the trigger to which I was expected to react. And even though the foul word itself had not been uttered, its implication was as clear as the crystal wine glasses on the table.

I understood that this word play was my verbal reminder that my seat at that table was untenable. I understood that my presence was tolerated but not welcomed and that if they had to deal with my company because the bride loved me and they loved the bride, well then, their lenience would come with a side of cruelty.

Nigger was the trigger to which I was expected to react. And even though the foul word itself had not been uttered, its implication was as clear as the crystal wine glasses on the table.

***

The table and the chair were invented in Egypt. Egypt is a country located in Northeast Africa and not in the Middle East as people have been misled to believe. I am a descendant of the Bamileke tribe — an ethnic group which originated in Egypt.

Egypt is in Africa.

Egypt is in Africa.

* * *

Bernice L. McFadden is the author of 15 novels and the recipient of the 2017 American Book Award as well as NACCP Image Award for Outstanding Literature for her novel, The Book of Harlan. She is a Professor of Practice at Tulane University.

* * *

Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

Typos, Tricks and Misprints

Longreads Pick
Source: Aeon
Published: Jul 26, 2021
Length: 13 minutes (3,401 words)

The Bison and the Blackfeet

Longreads Pick

“The species biologists call Bison bison is known in the Blackfoot language as iinnii, in Arapaho as bii or heneecee, and in any Indigenous plains language as a synonym for life itself.”

Source: Sierra Magazine
Published: Jun 14, 2021
Length: 14 minutes (3,660 words)

‘Every Single Person Migrating Has a Story’: Caitlin Dwyer on the Emotional Underlayers of Family Separation

Photos and artwork courtesy of Wafa Almaktari. Illustration by Cheri Lucas Rowlands.

For couples and families separated by borders, financial circumstances, and national policies beyond their control, their relationships remain in limbo. As people spend months and often many years physically apart — not knowing when or if they’ll see their loved ones again — love can take on a new shape: It might evolve into pain, or defiance, or patience.

Caitlin Dwyer

“Perhaps a cross-border relationship is less about cathartic reunion than the slow, patient intention to help someone else find joy,” Caitlin Dwyer writes in “The State of Waiting,” her new Longreads essay about a Yemeni couple — and their long-haul love — in the shadow of war and immigration policy.

Dwyer, a writer in Portland, Oregon, produces and hosts Many Roads to Here, a podcast on migration and identity in which immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the U.S. tell their own stories. I last worked with Dwyer in 2019 on a story called “Shared Breath,” in which she beautifully explored the intimate, unique connections between organ recipients and donor families. Read more…

Queens of Infamy: Boudicca

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | May 2021 | 18 minutes (4,866 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on world-historical women of centuries past.

If you love Queens of Infamy, consider becoming a Longreads member.

* * *

She was tall — terrifyingly large, in fact. Her tawny hair fell in a “great mass” to her hips. She was dressed in a colorful tunic and cloak, her outfit completed by a giant fuck-off gold torc. Her voice was harsh, unfeminine. She had spent the last weeks murdering and maiming her way across the British countryside, and now she led a force of hundreds of thousands of Britons in a standoff against the occupying Romans. She had a rabbit hidden in her skirt for occult purposes. She was a bloodthirsty barbarian, devoted to a ghoulish religion, out to destroy the social order of the known world. At least, this is how historian Cassius Dio described Boudicca, a British tribal queen, over one hundred years after her death — every civilized man’s worst nightmare.

Looking for a Queens of Infamy T-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.

But before we dive into the revolt that literally burned London to the ground, we need some context. The Romans had first cast their eyes toward Britain back in the good old days before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and got himself murdered. Caesar, who had been conquesting his way through Gaul for a few years, decided to take a break in 55 BC and invade Britain as a little treat, although “invasion” is probably a stretch since he didn’t do much more than visit Kent and then turn back. But it must have been a fun caper, because he returned the next year, this time managing to cross the Thames and score a few victories against the Britons. After that Caesar had to put a pin in it due to other pressing business; he had a republic to bring down, after all, and a back that needed stabbing. In the chaos that ensued, Rome more or less ignored Britain for the next hundred years until the Emperor Claudius decided to invade again in 43 AD.

Boudicca appears in the narrative about 17 years after Claudius’ invasion. Her husband, Prasutagus, was the ruler of the Iceni, a British tribe whose territory included modern-day Norfolk and parts of Suffolk. The historian Tacitus, who gives us a near-contemporary account of Boudicca’s uprising, wrote that she was of royal blood, but beyond that we don’t know much about her. Did she come from Iceni nobility or was she a princess from another tribe who had married Prasutagus as part of an alliance? Was Boudicca her given name, or since it’s believed to come from a Proto-Celtic root word meaning victory, was it a title she adopted? We don’t even know how old she was in 60 AD — she had two daughters by Prasutagus who were probably in their tweens or early teens, and if those were her first and only children, she could have been as young as 30. Then again, if there had been other children who had died or if, for some reason, she’d married later or hadn’t been able to conceive right away, she could have been in her 40s or even 50s. All we know about her life are the scraps that Tacitus and Dio left us, and those are the highly biased Roman accounts describing an enemy they considered to be primitive and sub-human.

BOUDICCA: I mean, the Romans barely consider their own women to be people

BOUDICCA: even the ones they allegedly like

BOUDICCA: you know, the ones who’ve mastered the skills of shutting up and spinning wool

BOUDICCA: neither of which are exactly my forte

The Iceni had allied themselves with Rome and been allowed to live fairly autonomously with Prasutagus as their client king in the standard Roman model. They were apparently quite wealthy and prosperous, even as neighboring regions were gutted by invading forces. As long as the Iceni kept bootlicking paying their taxes, everything was going to be fine. Or at least that’s what they believed right up until Prasutagus died and all hell broke loose.

BOUDICCA: my husband had a will, as all responsible adults should

BOUDICCA: if you don’t have one yet, close this tab and go make one right now!

BOUDICCA: anyway, he split his assets between our daughters and the Emperor Nero

BOUDICCA: the Romans, being always fair and just, honored that agreement

BOUDICCA: oh my god, I’m sorry, I can’t even say that with a straight face

BOUDICCA: of course they didn’t honor it

BOUDICCA: but seriously, you need a will if you don’t have one already

The fact that Boudicca was not named as one of Prasutagus’ heirs, even though she was his wife and the mother of his children and was going to rule as regent until they came of age, might be a clue as to what kind of person she was. Some historians speculate that she might have had strong anti-Roman sentiments even before shit went sideways — that perhaps her family of origin may have been involved in some of the earlier revolts against the Empire. Maybe Prasutagus had strategically left her out of his will as a way of reassuring Rome that he was on their side. After all, nothing was guaranteed to stir up ire like naming a possible insurrectionist as your successor. But, as it turned out, the Romans’ ire was going to be stirred no matter what. Prasutagus’ death was the perfect opportunity for a land grab, and the Romans were going to use whatever excuse they could to make it look legitimate.

All we know about her life are the scraps that Tacitus and Dio left us, and those are the highly biased Roman accounts describing an enemy they considered to be primitive and sub-human.

The Romans claimed that Prasutagus’ agreement with the Emperor Claudius was now null and void as both parties were dead. Since there existed no contract between Boudicca and Claudius’ successor, Nero (yes, that Nero), they were under no obligation to honor Prasutagus’ will. When Boudicca pushed back, the Romans turned violent. Their army plundered Prasutagus’ lands and enslaved various members of his family. They stripped the most powerful Iceni men of their land and possessions. Worst of all, they publicly flogged Boudicca and raped her daughters. This last act was not only meant to terrorize the girls both physically and psychologically, but, from a Roman perspective, the soldiers were also marking them as damaged goods. One of the foundational myths of Rome involves a noblewoman killing herself to escape the perceived dishonour of having been raped — that was the only way she could restore her lost virtue. The assault on Boudicca’s unnamed daughters was a way to harm not only their present but also their future prospects as wives, mothers, or even just respectable women. And considering that the girls were the heirs of the King of the Iceni, it may even be seen as an attempt to curtail the future of the tribe itself.

BOUDICCA: I guess they thought they could break me

BOUDICCA: beat me into submission, that kind of thing

BOUDICCA: they weren’t used to women who fight back

BOUDICCA: or women who fight at all, full stop

BOUDICCA: which is why they failed to notice or care when I started rallying my own troops

BOUDICCA: told my daughters to get in the chariot, because we are going to burn this fucker DOWN

PASSING ROMAN SOLDIER: awww, it’s cute that a little lady thinks she has troops!

BOUDICCA: you see what I mean

Part of the reason the Romans were less than attentive to Boudicca’s casual fomenting was that they were distracted by a different British problem. Suetonius, the governor of Britannia, was tired of the turbulent British priests — the Druids — and decided to stamp them out. His official reasons? The Druids were sheltering anti-Roman political refugees on the Isle of Mona (modern-day Anglesey) and it was alleged they practiced human sacrifice. It’s honestly kind of rich that the Romans — who had only stopped ritually sacrificing people about 150 years before and who loved to, you know, watch gladiators fight each other to the death — were so hung up on the sanctity of life or whatever, but people can rationalize anything. Anyway, the real reason that Suetonius and his peers wanted to take out the Druids was because they held an uncomfortable sway over the British population and refused to be assimilated. Basically, the Romans were worried that they would stir up rebellion, and also they just found them kind of spooky.

Worst of all, they publicly flogged Boudicca and raped her daughters. This last act was not only meant to terrorize the girls both physically and psychologically, but, from a Roman perspective, the soldiers were also marking them as damaged goods.

When Suetonius and his men arrived at Mona, they could see the Druids raising their arms and chanting, while a bunch of messy-haired women in black swung burning sticks around. Tacitus would later compare these women to the Furies, which might explain why the Roman soldiers were so uncharacteristically unnerved.

SUETONIUS: it was just, you know, so uncivilized

SUETONIUS: I had to … god, this is embarrassing

SUETONIUS: I had to remind my men that women aren’t worth being afraid of

SUETONIUS: anyway, we pulverized their sacred groves

SUETONIUS: we pulverized them GOOD

SUETONIUS: Druids delenda est and all that

It’s hard to overstate the level of desecration at Mona. It wasn’t just that the island was an important place of worship; in the belief system of the Celtic Britons, every river, every lake, every grove had its own individual god. By destroying the groves, the Romans quite literally killed British gods. The tribes were already primed for revolt, and as the news about Mona reached them, it must have added fuel to their fire.

Another result of Suetonius’ decision to take on the Druids at Mona — which was on the opposite side of Britain from the Iceni territory — was that the Roman governor was conveniently out of the way when Boudicca and the Iceni set off on their tear.

Boudicca found an ally in another local tribe, the Trinovantes. Like the Iceni, the Trinovantes had an axe to grind with the Romans, namely the colonia they had established in Camulodunum (modern-day Colchester), and the rebels chose that as their first target. But before we go deeper into that story, we need to take a brief detour.

One of the Empire’s grifts was that legionaries who fulfilled their enlistment terms received a small parcel of land. So if you were an enlisted nobody from a poor family, you could pull yourself up in the world by serving the required 25 years and getting your own land grant (assuming you lived that long; plenty of legionaries didn’t). The problem, of course, was that land is a finite resource, and these land grants typically stayed in families for generations. This meant that to fulfill their promise to their veterans, the Empire had to keep expanding outward into the ether, annexing more and more territory. Of course, the Emperors had their own reasons for wanting to broaden the Empire’s boundaries! But a side benefit to all that growth was that it meant more available land for veterans — once they’d cleared out those pesky native inhabitants, of course.


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Anyway, back in the pre-Roman times, Camulodunum had been one of the most important settlements in Britain, serving at one point as the capital of the Trinovantes tribe. Naturally the Romans thought it would be the perfect spot for them to settle down. In doing so, not only did the Romans drive the Britons out, but archeological evidence shows that they forced the displaced people to live and work in brutal conditions while re-building the town to Roman specifications. According to Tacitus, the soldiers posted encouraged this abuse of the Britons, even though it went against Roman policy (this was, after all, supposed to be a peaceful settlement, not a battlefield); he noted that those soldiers saw their future selves in the retired veterans and hoped they too would be allowed to treat native populations however the fuck they wanted someday.

BOUDICCA: you can’t spell colonialism without colonia!

BOUDICCA: yes, I know that’s the point

BOUDICCA: I understand how language fundamentally works

BOUDICCA: root words, et cetera

BOUDICCA: but since my husband’s death I’ve had to take up the mantle of dad jokes in our family

As Boudicca travelled across the country, her following grew. Those joining her cause weren’t just warrior-type men from the Iceni and the Trinovantes, they were people of all genders and ages. Farmers abandoned their fields and women loaded their children into carts to join the throng. With every British settlement they passed, the mass of people bearing down on Camulodunum increased in size; according to Dio, by the time they reached the city, they were 120,000 strong. The Britons were done hedging their bets — they were either going to solve the Roman problem once and for all, or they were going to go down in a blaze of glory.

Meanwhile, in Camulodunum, strange things were happening. A statue of Victory fell over, apparently for no reason. Women went into a frenzy, speaking in tongues and making frightening prophecies. South of the city, at the Thames Estuary, people saw visions of drowned houses in the water and the North Sea seemed to turn the color of blood. But even with all these portents and the news of Boudicca’s approach, the leaders told the townspeople not to worry. It was just a rag-tag group of women, after all — and not just any women, but primitive, uncivilized British women. No big deal. There was time to evacuate, but why bother? The procurator of Roman Britain, Catus Decianus, ordered an extra two hundred men to Camulodunum and figured the problem was solved.

BOUDICCA: obviously misogyny sucks

BOUDICCA: and no one likes to be underestimated

BOUDICCA: but sometimes that kind discrimination is a gift

BOUDICCA: a gift called the element of surprise even though they saw you coming

Boudicca’s army did not just attack Camulodunum, they razed it. They slaughtered every Roman they could find, even children and the elderly. They defaced graveyards and set buildings ablaze. The head of a statue of Emperor Claudius was crudely hacked off and thrown in a river. Some townspeople barricaded themselves in a temple, but even that couldn’t save them — after two days’ siege, the Britons stormed it and killed everyone inside. The destruction was so intense and so fiery that the layer of soil from that period is a strange orange-red.

BOUDICCA: some people use the term “scorched earth” metaphorically

BOUDICCA: but I’d say I’m more of a literalist

BOUDICCA: some women just want to watch the Roman world burn, I guess

BOUDICCA: again, not in a figurative sense

One curious thing about Boudicca’s sacking of Camulodunum is that it seems to have left no bodies behind. There’s plenty of archeological evidence to show that the city was gutted, but there are no mass graves or deposits of human remains, even though everyone agrees that the Queen of the Iceni authorized wanton mass-murder. Some historians theorize that the Romans later came back and cremated the dead, while some wonder if the high death toll was a bit of exaggeration. Still others have suggested that Boudicca and her people removed the bodies to a nearby oak grove for darker purposes, perhaps some kind of religious rite to Andraste, a local goddess of victory. While Celts of all stripes did enjoy dismembering those they had conquered in battle — they would apparently embalm their heads and put them on display in their homes as trophies — this last theory is probably a little too far-fetched to be true. Then again, given some of the allegations Dio would later make against Boudicca, maybe not.

The destruction was so intense and so fiery that the layer of soil from that period is a strange orange-red.

After Camulodunum, Boudicca turned her gaze toward Londinium. Although it wasn’t a particularly big or important city, Londinium made sense as her next target because, unlike many of the other towns in Roman Britain, Londinium had likely never been a British settlement — it was a Roman enterprise, a trade outpost whose location was chosen because the river there was narrow enough for a bridge but deep enough to accommodate Roman seagoing vessels. By the time Boudicca went on her tear, the young city had already become a bustling centre of commerce, with goods from such distant locations as Spain, Greece, and Syria later uncovered in archeological digs. To strike at Londinium would, in Boudicca’s mind, have been like striking at the heart of the Roman occupation itself.

The Romans had, of course, by now figured out that this was more than a throw-two-hundred-men-at-it-and-call-it-a-day kind of problem. The IXth legion (or, at least, part of it) was dispatched to deal with the unpleasantness at Camulodunum, but they were routed by Britons just north of the colonia. Meanwhile, Suetonius himself, having finished butchering those old harpies on Mona, rushed to Londinium. He somehow made it there before Boudicca, even though he had to cross the breadth of the country and the Britons only had to saunter down the coast. That’s one of the benefits of travelling without children, I guess!

Suetonius had, at least according to Tacitus, initially hoped Londinium could be used as a military stronghold against the Britons. He quickly realized that Londinium was not fortified and was in no way capable of withstanding the type of attack that Camulodunum had suffered. He immediately abandoned the city to its fate.

SUETONIUS: look, I’m a real-talk kind of guy

SUETONIUS: I tell hard truths, and some people think that makes me an asshole

SUETONIUS: but I think it just makes me honest

SUETONIUS: so I honestly told them they were honestly fucked

SUETONIUS: I’m not a magician, I can’t make defences appear from nowhere!

SUETONIUS: so I told them I was going to make a last stand somewhere else

SUETONIUS: and I invited all the able-bodied men to join me

SUETONIUS: which I feel was very generous

It’s not known how many people took Suetonius up on his offer; it’s not even known how large the population of Londinium was at the time, although some estimates place it around 30,000. The residents there were Suetonius’ own people, they were Romans, they were the ones he was supposed to be protecting. But what are a few civilians — women, children, the elderly or disabled — worth when it comes to protecting the Empire? Not much, as it turned out.

Boudicca did to Londinium what she’d done in Camulodunum, but worse. Her brief presence there is also marked by a red layer of soil, about 13 feet below the surface. It’s full of smashed treasures, ruined food stuffs, and debris from the cataclysmic fires that swept through Londinium, which archeological evidence shows burned in excess of 1,000 degrees Celcius. The Britons continued to show no mercy, and slaughtered everyone they could find, sometimes in exquisitely cruel ways.

Boudicca did to Londinium what she’d done in Camulodunum, but worse. Her brief presence there is also marked by a red layer of soil, about 13 feet below the surface.

After Londinium, Boudicca and her forces descended on the settlement of Verulamium, which might seem like a curious choice, since it was neither a settlement full of veterans like Camulodunum or a Roman merchant town like Londinium. In fact, it was a town populated by Britons — specifically, Britons who were friendly to the Roman cause. Although Verulamium suffered the same fiery fate as the two cities that had been sacked before it, excavations of the red layer there show far less debris from personal possessions, which suggests that the inhabitants had time to gather up what was precious to them and flee. Still, according to Tacitus, Boudicca’s tear across the country had left 70,000 dead (although, again, many modern historians agree this figure is likely inflated).

The Britons didn’t just kill citizens of the cities they razed — according to Dio, they often tortured them first. The Roman historian vividly describes the gruesome acts the Britons were alleged to have committed: stripping the “noblest and most distinguished women” naked, cutting off their breasts and sewing them into their mouths, then “impal[ing] the women on sharp skewers run lengthwise through the entire body.”

Was this another Roman hyperbole meant to paint the Britons in a savage light, or is there some truth to it? Again, dismemberment or disfigurement of enemies was not outside the realm of Celtic practices. If it is true, Boudicca might have found a certain poetic justice in the act of defiling Roman women’s bodies after the violence their men had inflicted on her and her daughters. Sure, these Roman women were innocent civilians, but to the Britons they were still the enemy — interlopers, invaders, colonizers. Hadn’t the British tribes been pushed off their own lands, defrauded, and even killed so that these women could live in peace? A passive beneficiary to violence is still, in some ways, an abettor of it.

The red layer of soil in present-day London has the same curious problem as that in Camulodunum, namely that it isn’t filled with human remains. According to Dio, the Britons followed up each round of sacking with visits to groves dedicated to Andraste and other “sacred places.” There, they held sacrifices and banquets and indulged in “wanton behavior.” It’s possible that the events he’s describing — if they happened at all — were little more than boozy victory celebrations, distorted to fit Dio’s agenda. At this point, who knows? What does seem clear is that Boudicca’s spiritual beliefs seemed just as fervent and uncanny to the Romans as those of the Druids on Mona.

Speaking of the Romans, what were they up to while Boudicca was slashing and burning her way across the country? They were making plans, of course. The Britons had numbers on their side — Dio writes that by the time of the final battle, Boudicca’s army had swollen to 230,000 strong. The Romans only had a tiny fraction of that, but they had the benefit of intensive training and organization, something their enemy sorely lacked.

In fact, the Britons’ whole escapade was a bit haphazard from beginning to end. They seemed more interested in killing and plundering than they were in actually engaging the Roman forces. They’d missed several key chances to attack Suetonius while he was travelling to and from London. Why hadn’t they set an ambush for him the way they had for the IXth Legion back at Camulodunum? Maybe, drunk on their successes (and, no doubt, actual alcohol), they believed themselves to be invincible, or maybe they genuinely didn’t realize that the absolute worst thing they could do was give the Romans more time. Maybe they just thought their uprising was just too big to fail. Whatever their reasoning, it’s possible that victory may have been within the Britons’ grasp and they fucked it up.

No one is quite sure where the final battle took place, although many historians think it was somewhere in the West Midlands. According to Tacitus, Suetonius chose a spot with a forest on one side and open fields on the other, and then positioned his troops so that they weren’t vulnerable to British ambushes. Tacitus also tells us that Suetonius had 10,000 men with him, which means that even if there were only half as many Britons as Dio says, their forces were still more than ten times bigger than that of the Romans. As the two sides arranged themselves on the field, more than one Roman soldier must have wondered if this was going to be a battle or a bloodbath.

Both Tacitus and Dio have Boudicca addressing her troops before the battle; this is where Dio’s description of her as a large, be-necklaced woman with a bossy voice comes from. He has her finish the speech by calling out an invocation to Andraste and then releasing a hare from underneath her skirts (the direction it ran was supposed to predict who would win the battle). In Tacitus’ version, she speaks from her chariot, riding up and down her lines with her daughters on either side of her, telling those assembled that “it was indeed usual for Britons to fight under the leadership of women.” Both versions of the speech give off a noble savage sort of vibe: together, the Britons would throw off the shackles of Rome! Their ways were superior and more natural than those of their invaders! It would be better to follow the ways of their ancestors in impoverished freedom than to live as slaves with Roman wealth! Of course, there’s almost no chance that either of these speeches could be accurate — Boudicca would not have been speaking Latin to her people, and the Romans who were present would not have understood the British language. The words that Dio and Tacitus put in Boudicca’s mouth say more about them and how they wanted to portray the Britons than they do about anything else.

BOUDICCA: I mean, my people don’t need me to explain to them that we don’t mind women leaders

BOUDICCA: especially not when I’m literally in front of them?

BOUDICCA: but I guess Tacitus’ audience needed to hear it

BOUDICCA: at least he didn’t say my voice was ugly, unlike some historians I could name

The battle was an absolute shitshow for the Britons. They might have been numerous, but they weren’t seasoned warriors like their opponents — don’t forget that Boudicca’s following was largely made up of random men, women, and children who had joined her ranks as she marched across the country. They were far more likely to be farmers than trained soldiers, and they lacked the weaponry and armour of the Romans. Not only that, but the Britons had stationed their wagons — packed with their animals and children — in a ring around the back of the battlefield, which meant that when the Romans started pushing forward, the Britons were effectively trapped by their own people. And push forward the Romans did, killing everything in their path — even the women and “beasts of burden,” according to Tacitus. He also reported that 80,000 Britons died, as compared to only 400 Romans.

The words that Dio and Tacitus put in Boudicca’s mouth say more about them and how they wanted to portray the Britons than they do about anything else.

Boudicca died too, although not in battle; Tacitus says she drank poison, while Dio merely tells us that she “fell sick and died.” It’s possible that the Romans had her killed — Tacitus never specifies exactly who administered the poison — but that wouldn’t have been their style. They were more a “dress our conquered enemies up in golden chains and publicly humiliate them in the streets of Rome” type of people. Then again, it’s possible that Suetonius knew that parading a defeated Boudicca around might not have the effect he hoped for. There would have been little glory in having bested a woman on the battlefield, and in showing off Boudicca to a home audience, there was a good chance that he was the one who would have been humiliated. What kind of man nearly has his territory wrested from him by a lady, and a barbarian to boot? This is why the size of the British horde had to be exaggerated, why Dio had to go out of his way to describe Boudicca as large and hyper-masculine — to have struggled so hard against a smaller number of backwoods savages led by a woman would have been emasculating in the extreme. That being said, suicide is the more likely option. Boudicca had seen first-hand what the Romans did to British women who disagreed with them. Like Cleopatra before her and, possibly, Zenobia after her, she might have felt that self-inflicted death was the least painful course of action.

What kind of man nearly has his territory wrested from him by a lady, and a barbarian to boot?

What about her daughters, the two girls who helped spark the rebellion? Neither Dio nor Tacitus says what happened to them, so we can only speculate. Maybe they died in the battle. Maybe Boudicca slipped them a dose of poison. Maybe the Romans captured them. Maybe they escaped, went into hiding, lived out the rest of their lives as farmer’s wives who, on cold nights, would spin tales for their children about watching Londinium burn.

It’s frustrating that so little concrete information about Boudicca exists, not just because it would be satisfying to fill the gaps in her story, but because the existing records reduce her to this one, brief period in her life. What was her life like back before she entered recorded history as a bloodthirsty warrior queen? I try to imagine her in quiet moments of bliss — on her wedding night, or touching her daughters’ hair as they sleep, or hurtling alone in a chariot down a track. I hope that even in her last days she had times when she felt happy, or at least powerful. I hope she enjoyed every second of those debauched victory feasts.

There is no record of where Boudicca was buried. Several theories have sprung up over the years, including one that says her remains are somewhere under Platform 8 at King’s Cross Station. English writer Jane Holland published a collection of poems called Boudicca & Co. in 2006, the final poem closes with the lines “The end/was confused. Some screaming, vomit./It hurt, I know that much./Nothing else. Just good British dirt/and closing my mouth on it.”

This is how I like to imagine Boudicca: somewhere deep in the rich, dark, earth, nothing but nourishment now. She is reborn again and again, in the stories that we tell, in the fires in our bellies, in every fight against injustice, even the ones that feel unwinnable. She is the opposite of those dead red layers of earth that mark her passing. She is nothing but life now.

LONG LIVE THE FUCKING QUEEN

* * *

Previously:

* * *

Anne Thériault is a Toronto-based writer whose bylines can be found all over the internet, including at the Guardian, the London Review of Books and, obviously, Longreads. She truly believes that your favourite Tudor wife says more about you than your astrological sign. She is currently raising one child and three unruly cats. You can find her on Twitter @anne_theriault.

Editor: Krista Stevens Fact Checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo Illustrator: Louise Pomeroy

The State We Are In: Neither Here, There, nor in Heaven

Image courtesy of Madhushree Ghosh. Illustration by Carolyn Wells.

Madhushree Ghosh | Longreads | May 2021 | 16 minutes (4,261 words)

Seventeen years ago, I receive the call most immigrants dread. It is inevitable, and yet. The call announces that my Baba, my indefatigable, extroverted, positively enthusiastic father, was felled by a massive cardiac arrest. On a heart that was the most giving one among all the people I’ve known. Life in America at that second continues without a ripple. Only, my life changes, divided into before-the-call and after-the-call.

I ask my now-ex. “Will you come with me?” — like a child.

Awkwardly, he says, “Do you want me to?” — like he has an option and he could escape this uncomfortable moment. I call him my now-ex for a reason.

“My Baba is dead,” I say mournfully. As if saying it over and over would make it real. It wasn’t real. It still isn’t.

Journalist Aman Sethi talks about the burning funeral pyres that light up India’s cremation grounds in the New York Times. With over 300,000 new daily infections and over 21,000 dead in the last week in April, the pyres are lit in the parking lots of crematoriums. Author Rani Neutill writes about the pyres and her own journey back to cremate her mother five years ago. We both acknowledge these images transport us back to our own trauma of losing our parents, our loved ones. PTSD all over again.

***

On an August evening last year, now Vice President Harris tells the world, “Family is my uncles, my aunts and my chittis.” — as she accepts the Democratic nomination. I — and I am sure, millions of Indians, Indian Americans like me — weep with unbridled joy. To me, this kvelling was surprising, because I didn’t realize the depth of unbelonging I had felt. I have lived in America longer than in India, my birth country. I’m not even Tamil, and yet, that word, “chitti” — younger sister of an aunt, mausi, mashi, moushi in other Desi languages — reverberates in bursts of validation all through our immigrant communities. Two months later, author, host, and activist Padma Lakshmi notes what that ripple effect would be when a woman of color is vice president. Padma articulates what we all felt — we may not agree with everything Vice President Harris said/did, but we do like what she represents. We are hopeful.

As Indian Americans who have lived most of our lives outside our birth country, we abide by unwritten rules. We work hard, we internalize racism by being “model” immigrants. We follow American rules and norms, in effect, we try to create very large waves of “good immigrants.” We sympathize with other people of color but try not to draw too much attention to ourselves, except when we are excelling at academics, Spelling Bees, or inventions. To say we have internalized our colorism and racism is minimizing what we feel — we try so hard to “fit in.”

***

For Hindus, death is the final stage of life, the next journey where the soul travels different levels of earth, the nether lands, and on to heaven. The concept of reincarnation is an idea one grows up on, even if we have moved far away from it.

It takes me almost 36 hours to get to my Baba. A layover in Kuala Lumpur watching a somewhat famous Bollywood star hamming it up for his fans in the lounge, waiting for Didi, my sister to join at the airport connection area, both of us now fatherless, rudderless. I do not remember those 36 hours. I remember every moment of those 36 hours.

In the lounge, waiting for Didi, my sister to join at the airport connection area, both of us now fatherless, rudderless. I do not remember those 36 hours. I remember every moment of those 36 hours.

When we reach Chittaranjan Park, the Bengali neighborhood of middle-class former refugees of the 1947 Partition of India, my Ma is already waiting, eyes swimming in tears, but a hopeful smile on her tired lips. Her daughters are home. She isn’t alone in her grief anymore.

The house is filled with neighbors and strangers. Everyone looks at Didi and me, expecting us to collapse, weep, wail, because only a frantic acknowledgment of loss matters to the neighbors. Didi and I don’t cry, though we hug our Ma despite us not being a hugging family.

The neighbors want to know, “Who will give mukhagni?” — only menfolk are allowed to go with the dead to the cremation grounds. Only sons or designated male family members are allowed to light the pyre, mukhagni (adding fire to the mouth of the dead). Women are second-class, not permitted. Women are to bear children — souls may get attached to them when they return from the cremation grounds — not allowed, not allowed.

Didi tells the crowd and to no one in particular, “Ma will give mukhagni. We will be there with her.”

I hear the collective soft gasp of horror. But no one says anything. The Ghosh daughters are foreign-returned, with Western ideas. They don’t see how wrong this is. How men and women aren’t equal.

We have my father to cremate. We have no time to worry about what the neighbors think.

We have my father to cremate. We have no time to worry about what the neighbors think.

***

In a country that brought in immigrants and slaves for centuries, Indians are the “good” ones, who are still shocked in the ‘80s when the Dotbusters attack them in Jersey City. “We are Americans too,” we say, the hatred is incomprehensible.

Post-9/11, the first immigrant to be gunned down in Mesa, Arizona, isn’t a Muslim but a Sikh. Balbir Singh Sodhi is killed at the gas station he managed by a man who didn’t want “towel heads” in his country. As Indians who give up their birth country’s citizenship when we become U.S. citizens, we gulp down that discrimination, that unnamed fear, to pay taxes, buy property, wave the U.S. flag, vote in elections, because we have earned it. We are model citizens, even when we remain entwined with what our birth country does. What we become is casual observers of what’s happening in “desh,” but very involved in the American way of life. We choose, because we are made to.

***

As the years go by in a country not our own, we spend time teaching non-Indians what India represents. Soon it is descriptions of the festivals, the cuisines, the food, our saris, politics, and minimizing how much cricket is a religion. We minimize because it’s easier to do that than push Americans to explore cultures other than American. We minimize sports, religion, food, life.


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But then, when we interact with Indians in India, our attitudes are of condescension toward those we left behind, mixed with cultural respect for elders as we were taught. We roll our eyes at WhatsApp Good Mornings and rose gifs from family and classmates pinging at midnight. We send back things like Costco cashews, or thick socks for the family, and college advice for future generations. We are stuck in the decade we left desh — for me it’s the ‘90s, the advent of Madhuri, Rani, Shahrukh, and revenge movies.

We still hate the social media forwards, but surreptitiously sign up for Signal because the WhatsApp gang told us to. However, we dare not leave the high school group of middle-aged classmates because they connect us to our long lost childhood. We post pictures of dishes we’ve created during the pandemic, but secretly, we crave the spicy paapri-chaat mix of crunchy goodness from the stall next to the bus stop at Delhi University. We scroll online sites for the Desi dhurrie, spices, fabrics. We’re more up to date with the politics from desh than ever.

After a few decades in America, we miss the things we consider ours. We may return “home,” armed with U.S. citizenship because we have the freedom to do so. But lately, we go home, not because we can afford to but because we’ve reached a stage in life where our people are getting older, sick, or dying. Guilt that we abandoned our parents, our extended family, our home for better lives in America, is what usually guides us back. But even then, we visit for two weeks at most, because work in America beckons like an angry, righteous, and indignant spouse.

But lately, we go home, not because we can afford to but because we’ve reached a stage in life where our people are getting older, sick, or dying. Guilt that we abandoned our parents, our extended family, our home for better lives in America, is what usually guides us back.

***

In 2004 when Didi and I get to the Lodhi cremation grounds, we are part of a handful waiting. The priest and the “body handlers” ask for cash to expedite the services. They speak only with the menfolk who accompany us. When we go in, with Baba — his body clad in a new dhoti and kurta hurriedly bought to make him look good on his last journey on a flat wooden bed covered with marigolds and rajnigandha — Baba looks like he’s sleeping. We sprinkle him with his favorite aftershave, as if we want him to arrive at the heavenly gates like it’s his first day at his new job.

We sprinkle him with his favorite aftershave, as if we want him to arrive at the heavenly gates like it’s his first day at his new job.

The priest says the prayers that guide the soul on its journey. They ask us to throw flowers at the body. They sprinkle ghee all the while chanting shlokas that mean nothing to us. Then they ask Ma to hold a bunch of incense, and place them on Baba. She does, howling, because among the Ghosh survivors, she knows what comes next. They light camphor and place it near Baba’s head. Handing a small fragrant sandalwood piece, they tell Ma, “Isko yahaan lagaaiyeh.” — put this here, pointing at Baba’s chest. I know they mean his mouth. Mukhagni. Fire to the mouth.

Handing a small fragrant sandalwood piece, they tell Ma, “Isko yahaan lagaaiyeh.” — put this here, pointing at Baba’s chest. I know they mean his mouth. Mukhagni. Fire to the mouth.

Ma does that. Didi and I hold her between us. Those cries haunt me. They will haunt me till I die. The wood bier trundles away from us as if he’s on a makeshift train ride. I did not realize that would be the last time I’ll see Baba. The crematorium fire roars like a hungry dragon at the far end. Baba enters the flames, the orange fire taking over our world.

That is the last time my family is together.

***

The Great Pause has thrown that nostalgia out like trash. The vaccines cannot be developed fast enough. Being part of the scientific community gives me the privilege of receiving the Moderna vaccine within the first month of 2021. I haven’t seen my extended family and friends in India for over three years — life, then work, and then the pandemic happened. Staying alive in a pandemic has been the reason to stay put.

My life, as it is for many of us immigrants, revolves around phone calls to India early on weekend mornings. India, roughly half a day ahead of us, is also used to those calls. There were times when those calls were short, maybe 10 minutes, our eyes on the clock indicating the $2/minute price on a calling card. Not anymore. Our privilege is calling our cousin for a masur dal vada recipe. Our privilege is us tweeting anti-Indian government comments without concern for whether our families will be harassed by Modi-bhakts. Our privilege is that we are Americans and our bravado too, is American.

***

India watches us in 2020 grappling with the virus racing through New York, L.A., Texas, and Florida like the California fires usually ravage our canyons, jumping highways, towns, and roads resembling acrobatic dragons.

“Ah, we can’t afford shutdowns. We had the BCG vaccine, we’re immune,” my former classmates say, noting why the TB vaccine may lead to a lower coronavirus infection rate.

The first wave doesn’t phase India. It’s Modi’s India — brash, young, arrogant, and complacent. In May 2021, the Lancet notes the government’s response of “[f]ully opening society with unrestrained crowding, mass gatherings, large scale travel, and lack of personal protective measures such as masks” gave the public a false sense of healthcare and vaccine security — that the pandemic had passed India by, much like the first wave.

Madhushree Ghosh’s high school classmates.

During the first and many waves in America meanwhile, we stay home. “Hunkering down” is a phrase I never want to hear again. Then religious places, movie theaters, stores, and restaurants shut down. The owners and workers protest.

Our Indian families and friends find the outrage amusing, “Ah, you’re all such rule-followers!” The condescension we had shown Indians as green card holders, as Indians who’d escaped to a better life, returns against us with a vengeance. The public, our extended families, and friends laugh at our caution.

“Yes, but this will contain the virus,” I counter.

“Sure, but in India, we’re so many people, nothing will work. We’re done with the pandemic here, Madhu,” my WhatsApp classmates opine.

***

During the first wave, in 2020 at the end of March, a 21-day lockdown is established by the Modi government to curb the virus. Over 120 million migrant workers left stranded, walk back to their villages and homes, making it a migration ten times larger than when Hindus and Muslims moved between British-divided India and Pakistan during the 1947 Partition. The Desis who can stay home are the privileged ones.

Indian-Americans have our own lockdown issues to handle. Beside a few articles, tweets, prayers, and thoughts, we don’t worry about the migrants. A very well-known American activist tells me that Americans get “crisis-fatigued” quickly, and not to expect them to think much about issues outside of America.

During a WhatsApp call, architect and high-school friend Anuj Arya says, “Migrants who I’ve worked with as daily wage construction workers, can’t survive without their wages. If they live in a 20X20 foot space with 10 more people, one of them getting COVID means the rest of them do too.”

He adds, “A COVID QPCR test is 1500 rupees (about $20). It’s beyond their reach.”

***

When the second wave hits India in April 2021, no one is prepared. Not the government. Not the healthcare system. Not the people.

When the second wave hits India in April 2021, no one is prepared. Not the government. Not the healthcare system. Not the people.

A country of 1.3 billion is now gasping for air. By April 21st, 2021, the oxygen requirement is over 8000 metric tons per day. India, as per the government, produces 7127 tons daily. People aren’t dying because of the virus. The COVID-compromised patients are dying of suffocation.

***

We sit outside the crematorium in October, watching Baba’s remains burn at high heat. The chimney above the oven spews out hot carbon air.

“That’s my Baba in the air,” I think, feeling nothing.

A few hours later they call us.

They tell us, “Hold your palms to receive the ashes.”

Didi and I hold the clay matka with the ashes and bones. It is harsh, real, immediate. There aren’t pretty urns priced according to your financial ability. It’s a reddish clay pot, with gray ashes. A priest-helper adds, “Yeh dekhiya, your babuji’s nerves are connected at the nabhi.”

Baba’s nerves are knotted near the navel — which never burns completely. This is why Hindu philosophy says we are connected to our ancestors through our nabhi, navel. This is added to a separate dish, covered with another clay plate. We are to take it to the Ganges, the holy river that will connect my father’s soul to the gods. Much as we don’t believe any of it, we do what we are told to.

Didi and I head to the Yamuna river in her best friend’s car. My father’s ashes rest on my lap. The clay pot is still hot from the crematorium. It is surreal and yet, here we are. Here we are.

We get out of the car close to the Yamuna, a tributary that connects to the Ganges. The river is thick with grease, decaying animal corpses, feces, and industrial effluents. The smell is nauseating and yet, Hindu religion tells us this river will connect Baba to the gods. And who are we to deny that?

The river is thick with grease, decaying animal corpses, feces, and industrial effluents. The smell is nauseating and yet, Hindu religion tells us this river will connect Baba to the gods. And who are we to deny that?

Ma gets out of the other car, her arthritis makes her older than she is. She waits silently for us as Didi and I climb over rocks slick with dirt, shit, and dead animals. Didi looks ahead, one step at a time, no words. I follow. This isn’t what Baba would have wanted. This is all we can give him.

The priest stands next to us, chanting hymns. “Put the ashes here,” he points.

Didi lets the pot float. We have the nabhi in its clay dish. He points at it and tells me to throw it inside the turgid river. I do.

“Walk, walk! Don’t look back,” the priest says like we are suddenly in an adventure movie.

It must have something to do with the soul latching onto live people. I don’t know. I don’t care. I want to look back, but I don’t.

At the car, my now-ex says, “Uff, that river sucks, doesn’t it?” — like a naïve American would.

I ignore him. My Baba is dead.

***

Twelve months after the first wave, before the Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela encourages millions to congregate at Haridwar, near the Ganges river bank, the B.1.617 double mutant is already circulating among the people. The Mela is held every 12 years, but the Hindutva nationalist government appeases Hindu astrologers to allow a super spreader event to happen a year earlier. On April 1st, millions descended. The Mela was stopped two weeks later. A double mutant with an exponentially increased infectivity rate has now taken over the entire country — larger metropolitan cities like Delhi reached a COVID positivity rate of 30% in 12 days. Only 9% of the total population has been vaccinated.

On WhatsApp group messages, I now see posts about where one can buy more oxygen, or how to kill the virus by drinking water. Vaccine hesitancy, and misinformation circulates as rampantly as the virus through uneducated guesses, pro-government media rumor mills, and government silence on the total failure of the hospital and healthcare system. There’s a vaccine shortage which was expected to abate by May 1. It hasn’t.

A month ago, citizens and the Indian government were complacent enough to not mandate masks, nor ban large gatherings. The political rallies to pander to the public and gain votes took place like 2021 was a normal year.

***

On my high-school and middle-school WhatsApp groups, there are no rose gifs anymore, nor are there midnight pings of “Good morning!” The threads are somber, humming with stress, slow panic, and calls for help. The only requests are pleas for oxygen cylinders and hospital beds in Delhi suburbs. We hear of patients gasping for breath in hospital hallways and parking lots, dying in ambulances. Neighbors help neighbors cremate their loved ones.

A relative dies in Hyderabad and his family waits for hours to get the paperwork completed before he is hurriedly cremated. Crematoriums and cemeteries operate beyond capacity. Families wait for hours at cremation grounds in lines snaking through Noida and Ghaziabad to cremate their own. The Noida Hindon crematorium sets 14 funeral pyre platforms on the sidewalk for the COVID-19 dead to perform the last rites there instead. Dead and dying line hospital pathways. There is no respite.

***

Meanwhile in America, for us, India feels like what New York did in 2020. But Modi continues to punt to states to determine healthcare logistics, while he and his administration have created one of the largest humanitarian crises in this pandemic. On Twitter, we watch an interesting trend of the entire world going about their lives as Indians gasp for breath. It’s as if India isn’t a country that needs to be helped. We hear that the U.S. government didn’t allow for vaccine raw materials to reach India but the blame lies with the internal decisions made at the Indian government level.

We see “trauma porn” photos of funeral pyres burning through the night skies in India. The Western world watches those images over and over, and the Western people react to it. This is showing TV ads of malnourished African babies for us to donate instantly. This is Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” playing for animal shelters and pulling at our heartstrings.

But where does one donate? Does it go to the PM Cares Fund, run by the nationalist Prime Minister with no way of knowing how your money was used? Where there is no guarantee that the money reaches the migrants dying hungry, or the patients waiting for oxygen or Remdesivir?

I wonder if daughters were able to accompany their dead father’s body to the pyre. The cremations are taking place morning through sundown. Overworked priests are charging more. The lower-class Dalit funeral grounds helpers work round the clock, as do the hospital ward workers, the caregivers. Are the family members able to pay their last respects like I was able to? Do they know if the dignity expected of the dead was given to theirs?

***

Hospitals shouldn’t be overburdened. Oxygen supplies should have been available. Vaccines in the world’s largest manufacturing country, should be, well, available. And yet, the latest news cycle asks not to blame but to unite, to blame America for holding the raw materials for vaccine production instead. It’s easier to hate the Western country, hand-wave over the flouting of social distancing rules, because religion and elections are more important than gasping-for-breath Indians.

***

As an Indian who is a U.S. citizen, the guilt I feel is one that paralyzes me. I have abandoned my country of birth to choose the country of citizenship for personal material gain. Of that I am sure. How am I to assuage this guilt? The American way is to donate. But where do I donate? Not to the government that has systematically pushed against unity, religious, and caste freedom creating a Hindutva country. What do I do? How do I amplify this without tokenizing Indian grief?

We hold onto phone calls, reach out to friends, family members, find out ways, or “jugaad” as we call it in India, to make sure our people are safe. Others want to donate, but don’t know how. They See Blue GA circulates a Google doc of places that’ll accept our dollars. We want to do anything, something, something to help. Because if we can’t help, and if we can’t be there, and if we can’t do anything, the guilt we’ve always felt as Indians who became Americans will be fueled enough to rage on further.

As immigrants who love this country, we are grateful for the privilege and we also love our birth country that’s in such hell. Behind the scenes, my group of Desi authors text each other bemoaning the state we are in, neither in desh/home, nor in heaven. COVID is definitely a stark reminder of the choices we made. Feeling guilty is our state of being, besides a state of exhaustion and fear.

It’ll take India decades to recover from this and I am but a bystander, whether I like it or not.

Twitter asks about the use of funeral pyres and how disrespectful it is — do you not rage when they do this to your people, Twitter asks. No, I say, no — because what is disrespectful is how and why Indians are dying.

It takes President Biden two weeks before he does a U-turn and announces millions of AstraZeneca vaccine doses to be routed to India. Two weeks, with thousands dying daily. America and American leaders are silent. Only with social media outrage, behind-the-scenes negotiations lead to Biden behaving like the leader he says he is. Those pyres speak much more than the world’s largest humanitarian country. Are those photos disrespectful? Not if they coaxed my country of choice to act like the leader it says it is.

***

I hope Vice President Harris comments, perhaps shows solidarity with the country her mother comes from. It isn’t her job, but I’d like to think her chittis would be doubly proud of her if she did.

Right now, as an Indian American, the guilt propels me to doomscroll like I did with other Americans last year. Now I call my friends, and I tell them, “Stay safe,” like it’s a mantra that’ll save them all when their government has failed them.

My Baba’s cremation has stayed with me for decades since he left. The families losing their loved ones can’t even touch their dead as they’re whisked to the cremation grounds. COVID-19 has destroyed life in ways unimaginable.

The guilt I feel, buzzes like a loud bee.

***

Madhushree Ghosh‘s work has received an Honorable Mention in Best American Essays in Food Writing. Her work is Pushcart-nominated, and has been published in the Washington Post, The New York Times, Longreads, the Rumpus, Catapult, Hippocampus, Atlas Obscura, Unearth Women, Panorama, Garnet News, DAME, and others. As a woman in science, an immigrant, and daughter of refugees, her work reflects her roots and her activism. Her food narrative, “Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey” is forthcoming Spring 2022 from University of Iowa Press. She can be reached @writemadhushree.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact checker: Lisa Whittington-Hill

 

You Robbie, You Baka

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Brian Trapp| Longreads | April 2021 | 26 minutes (7,917 words)

 

At the request of the families involved, some names in this essay have been changed to protect privacy. It includes depictions of bullying and cruelty and contains language that some people may find upsetting.

***

When I first saw him, I thought for a second that it was my twin brother sitting in his wheelchair. It was the beginning of sixth grade, and I was on the dirty gym floor trying not to hyperventilate. I had just moved from a small Catholic school in Baltimore with a class of 25 gentle Christians to a large public school outside Cleveland, and our whole class was crammed into the gym for orientation. 

I spent the summer of 1994 studying MTV with my older sister, taking precise notes on how to be cool, and came that first day armed with a binder covered in band names written in black Sharpie: Mazzy Star, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Belly, Nirvana, The Crash Test Dummies. Never mind that I was thigh-chafingly fat and had boats for feet, wore surfing shirts hundreds of miles from any kind of ocean, and covered my bedroom in puppy centerfolds cut out from Dog Fancy magazine — I knew the names of cool bands, as if I could just walk up to a kid with a skateboard, whisper “Green Day,” and get invited to his house. 

Then, across the gym, I saw him sitting up high in his wheelchair, his wrists curved down like a praying mantis, his body stiff with cerebral palsy. He was skinny with choppy brown hair, his mouth pinched into a nervous grimace with an occasional smile. Just like my twin.

I’d hoped in the move that Danny and I could finally go to the same school, that I could give him wheelies down the halls, slip him high fives in between classes, use his dimpled smile to attract girls, and listen to him laugh when someone got in trouble. We could ride the bus together and play our call-and-response, where my brother heckled me with his version of my name and I gave it right back: “I-an! Danny! I-an! Danny!” I knew twins sometimes switched places and went to each other’s classes, waiting to see who’d notice the difference. With his severe cerebral palsy and bone-thin frame, no one would ever mistake Danny for me, though it would’ve been fun to try. I at least wanted my twin to be in the same building instead of an absence I always had to explain. But Danny — who in addition to CP had intellectual disabilities, was legally blind, and could only say 12 words — was deemed too disabled to be accommodated at my school, and was bused to a larger special ed program 30 minutes away.

So perhaps, in the gym, I was missing my twin and shocked to see this stranger where I wanted my brother to be. His name was Robbie Baka. I introduced myself and said “hi” to him a few times in the halls. Maybe I didn’t need the bands. Maybe, through my brother, I had found my first friend.

***

Initially, I thought Robbie was like my brother but upgraded. While their bodies shared a similar spastic choreography, Robbie could fully control his head, which he used to nimbly toggle his power chair around corners and down ramps, dodging classmates and desks as he navigated the middle school. While my brother was limited to “eh” for “yes,” “eh-eh” for “no,” and several people’s names, Robbie was fully verbal, and spoke with a squeaky voice grounded in his sinuses. My brother was almost all vowels, but Robbie could fit his mouth around every consonant, every “ch,” “sh,” “f.” My brother revealed his intelligence through the jokes he would laugh at or a well-timed “eh-eh!” but couldn’t, for instance, read a sentence or solve a math problem. Meanwhile, Robbie was in mainstream classes — he needed his aide to write and take notes, but he completed the same book reports and took the same tests as I did.

But I quickly learned Robbie was not cool. In the hallways, he sang Disney songs at the top of his lungs, belting out in his gratingly high voice “A Whole New World” from Aladdin. He lapsed into revelry with The Lion King’s “Hakuna Matata.” If he got started on The Little Mermaid’s “Under the Sea,” he would not stop. Then he’d somehow raise that voice an octave higher, and imitate his hero: “Whoo-hoo! Hey guys. It’s me, Mickey Mouse! Whoo-hoo!” If all that wasn’t awful enough, he was also a narc. He told on kids for saying bad words and throwing pencils into the ceiling. In his annoying nasal voice, he’d say, “Mrs. Schoffer, Nate threw a pencil!” Or he’d whisper to his aide, who passed up the intel to the teacher, a game of narc telephone. In the hallways, he drove recklessly, and would run over people’s feet without so much as a “sorry.” In choir, he shout-sang every song, ruining whatever harmony we had. And in history class, he’d derail the lesson to ask stupid questions: “Are there a lot of forests in China?” Sometimes his aide would raise her hand, and he wouldn’t even ask a question, saying, “Oh. Um. I forgot.” Only later did I realize that he was playing the heel, that he knew people like me thought he was annoying, and he wanted to annoy us even more. He wanted to run over our feet.

Robbie was one of the few physically diverse students at our school. In our grade of 130, there was one Egyptian, one Asian, and two Hispanics. Our only Black kid was adopted and swore he was Sicilian. Otherwise, it was an able-bodied white-out. Did I like thinking that the only visibly disabled kid in my school was insufferable? No. I wanted him to be as charming and funny as my brother but with all the words, to be one of the cool and witty crips you see on television nowadays: Speechless’ J.J., Special’s Ryan, or even that wheezy best friend from Malcolm in the Middle. But back then, they were not on television, and every time Robbie opened his mouth, I gritted my teeth.

Part of me hated Robbie for his abilities. What my brother could do with those functioning eyes, that coordinated mouth, that agile head. I rarely wished I had a “normal” brother. What I wanted were more opportunities for my actual brother to express himself: to drive his wheelchair where he wanted, to say, “Hey asshole. Shut up.” If Danny were like Robbie, he would just be more of himself. But what did Robbie do with his abilities? He was a rolling advertisement for Walt Disney. 

And part of me hated Robbie because I was terrified about my own social status. I barely talked that first year. A girl in my class nicknamed me “the silent dude.” If I was his friend, I would have to eat lunch with him and the kid who reeked, the boy who talked to himself and still played with Power Rangers, or the girl who got bit in the face by a horse. He was a dark star of unpopularity, drawing losers into his orbit. Contact with Robbie risked revealing the real me: the Brian with puppy centerfolds.

But no matter how much I hated Robbie, the cool kids hated him even more. Mostly, they ignored him, as if to say, Are you still here? Though sometimes the boys mocked him behind his back, strangling their vocal cords into high-pitched imitations and chopping their hands spastically against their chests. When he was alone on the bus, they bounced erasers and spitballs off his face. They wondered aloud whether, in addition to helping him urinate, his aide also helped him whack off.

At my Catholic grade school, when my friend said “retard,” I told him to stop. I told my mother, who told his mother, and then my friend called me sobbing to apologize. But here, “retard” was everywhere: “Why are you such a retard?” “God, are you retarded?” “You retarded retard.” “You el-retardo.” My generation loved the word “retarded,” using it as a catch-all for anything bad. It was the bottom. It was the worst thing you could be. And it was so fun to say. Maybe we liked how it rolled off the tongue: Curve back and then three quick taps on the roof of your mouth —  re-tar-ded. You could cut it up, remix it: Tarded. Tard. Re-re. Fuck-tard. At my new school, they said it so much that I got tired. I let it happen. I was the silent dude.

But here, “retard” was also Robbie. They made it personal. They said to each other: “You stupid Robbie. You’re such a fucking Baka.” In a twist of the penis game, they’d have competitions to see who could yell “Baka!” the loudest in a crowded room. “Baka! Robbie Baka!!!” In the end, I was relieved my brother wasn’t here. I didn’t want to find out what they’d do with his name. 

“Stop,” I said. “Don’t.” I defended Robbie from the worst of the bullying, but I would not beat up Jim for a thrown eraser or punch Phil for saying “you fucking Baka” every other sentence. I would not fight for him. Because even I found him annoying. If he were my brother, I reasoned, I would make them stop. If he were my brother, I would kill these kids. But he was not my brother.

***

In seventh grade, I brought a Sunny Delight bottle to lunch half-filled with vodka and finally made some friends. They were into cool bands, were in cool bands. We took guitar lessons together. We shared CDs. We smoked cigarettes. We smoked pot cut with pine needles. We slept over at each other’s houses and skimmed our parents’ hard liquor into foul brown tinctures we sipped from Schweppes bottles. 

If he were my brother, I reasoned, I would make them stop. If he were my brother, I would kill these kids. But he was not my brother.

They did not make fun of Robbie. They just felt bad for him. When they met my brother, I was terrified about what they’d think. Would they concentrate on his crossed eyes, his tight and wispy arms, his bony knees, his pastel dog-paw bib, the cavernous gape of his mouth, the string of drool rappelling down his chin? Would they think: Retard. Re-tar-ded. Or would they wait to discover the person in there who laughed when you burped or said the word “bathroom,” who flirted with their mothers, who heckled me with his version of my name: “I-an!”

They were nervous. “Hi,” they said. “Does he shake hands?” They picked up his stiff fist as if it would break. 

My brother, shy at first, flashed them a smile. They smiled back. “Yeah,” they said, breathy with relief. “What’s up, Danny?”

When we were alone in the basement, they asked me questions: What happened to him? Will he ever get better? Can he not talk at all? How much does he understand? How does he go to the bathroom? Do you have to change his diapers? 

With our pool table and my mother’s apple cake, my house became the preferred sleepover destination, and their curiosity developed into acceptance. I’d carry my brother down into the basement, where he’d lie on the couch and listen to us make fun of each other. When they’d catch him laughing, they’d say, “See, even Danny thinks you’re a little bitch.” 

They’d use him to rib me: “Danny, how can you stand your little brother?” and Danny would respond, “I-an!” like I have no idea.

“Oh shit,” they’d say. “He’s making fun of you.” 

We’d play with his adaptive equipment. We took turns torturing each other in his electric hospital bed, jacking up both head and feet, folding our victims into pretzels. We put each other in his Hoyer lift, the small portable crane my parents used to lift him, which held us six feet aloft in its netting and made us vulnerable to kidney shots from below. We convinced one of our friends that Danny’s Hoyer could understand English and would move up for “yes” and down for “no,” hiding the switch behind our backs. The Hoyer moved up and agreed. It thought our friend was a “fag.” When one of us bragged that he could escape from anything, we duct-taped him to Danny’s wheelchair and parked Houdini screaming in the middle of the road. Through it all, Danny smiled and laughed.

They did not treat him like Robbie. They said, “What’s up, Danny? You player. You pimp. You ladies’ man. Dan, you’re the man. Dan the man.” I felt proud to be his twin brother.


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***

While my friends seemed to accept Danny, my other classmates still called each other “retard” and “Baka.” I pretended it didn’t bother me but I held so much anger inside my body. I started taking kung fu lessons. I replaced the puppy centerfolds with pictures of bald and fierce Shaolin monks crouched with spears. I bought a heavy bag and punched the skin off my knuckles. In kung fu class, my classmates said, “It’s like you want to kill somebody.”

They were right. While training after school in my basement, this was my recurrent fantasy: I am pushing my brother at a high school football game, and we walk where the middle schoolers cluster and gossip below the bleachers. I push my brother past the boys who torment Robbie and they say the usual: “You fucking Baka.” But this time, they say it to my brother. 

Cue the violins. “What did you say?” I drawl, readying my fighting stance, tightening my grip on Danny’s wheelchair handles. I’m a pudgy David Carradine. “Say it again,” I say. “See what happens.” 

They surround us, and they say it: “You retards. You fucking Bakas.”

Techno music. My opening salvo: Launch a flying double-side kick from Danny’s wheelchair handles, followed by tipping his chair back for a “footrest of fury.” Then I step out from behind Danny’s wheelchair to snap-kick their knees, to upper-cut their ribs, to crescent-kick their temples, to dragon strike their faces (palm smashing nose into the brain, fingers raking eyes).

When they’re rolling on the ground, writhing in pain, when they know they’ve lost, the last one standing lunges for my brother, and I stop him with a flying kick to the solar plexus and grind my foot into the back of his neck until I hear his bones click. If they survive, they won’t even be mainstreamed like Robbie. They’ll be bused out with my brother, and somewhere in the back of their brain-damaged minds, they’ll be sorry. 

Then I’d come upstairs covered in sweat and chug a glass of milk, my real brother safe in his wheelchair with no idea how many classmates I’d just murdered for him.

***

In eighth grade, my friends and I started a band, with me as the lead singer. My voice was too high and I got kicked out. No hard feelings. We traded copies of Penthouse and porno tapes, wishing that actual girls would let us touch them. We smoked better pot without pine needles. We got older siblings to buy us beer with fake IDs. We snorted Ritalin in the library. We wore hemp necklaces and cargo shorts. We played hacky sack in the middle of town, where we spat and smoked and slouched. We participated in zero extracurricular activities and declared so many things “gay.” When we grew tired of being cool, we escaped into my basement and pretended to be Jedi knights with pool-stick lightsabers.

When my friends slept over on the weekends, they marveled at Danny’s new augmentative communication device, which looked like a chunky proto-iPad. A small speaker on his headrest whispered phrases into his ear and he chose his option by clicking a switch with his wrist. The computer announced in a scary robot voice: “My bro-ther Bri-an is an id-i-ot.” My friends cheered.

But sometimes at school, my violence would squeak out. Once, in the gym, I watched sixth graders pour through the doorway as Robbie and his aide waited for someone to let them outside for recess. “Excuse us,” the aide said. “Please.” No one would stop. 

“Wait,” I said. “Wait!” And still they streamed through. Finally, I stepped into the doorway and hockey-checked a boy onto the ground. The line halted. He stared up at me with tears welling in his eyes. “Why?” he asked. “Asshole!”

Robbie’s aide shook her head. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said.

Yes, I did.

One day at lunch, at the beginning of ninth grade, my friends stared across the cafeteria at Robbie eating Mexican pizza. They watched as Robbie’s aide fed him cut-up bites with a fork, Robbie’s mouth clumsily masticating as the pizza fell onto the napkin stuffed into his shirt. They watched Robbie as he coughed, as his face bloomed red and he struggled to breathe, as he took long swigs from his giant water bottle. 

“Ugh,” one of them said. “Can you imagine what it’s like to be Robbie?”

“I know. You can’t even hold your dick to piss.”

“To never whack off?” said another. “Or touch a girl?”

I got quiet and still. Another friend shook his head: “Dude, I can’t imagine.”

“Someone has to take you to the bathroom? You can’t even wipe your own ass. I mean, look at her feeding him. Fuck.”

“Yeah, I can’t imagine,” said another friend. They all shook their heads, united in this not imagining. My fist clenched. My stomach knotted. But I was silent.

“If I was like that,” my friend said, “I’d kill myself. I’d blow my fucking brains out.”

They all shook their heads in agreement. It was only now that I slammed my fist on the table. “Stop,” I said. “Shut up.”

I stood. “You say that about him, you say that about my brother.”

“Come on,” they said. “We’re not talking about Danny. Don’t be so dramatic.”

These boys didn’t yell “Robbie” in a crowded room. They were my best friends, kids who’d slept over my house every other weekend, who called my twin “Dan the man” and made him smile by whispering in his ear that his brother was a “pussy.” They stayed for dinner and watched my mother feed my brother the exact same way Robbie’s aide was feeding him now, and when my brother coughed food into their faces, they’d yell, “Dan, you got me!” while my brother laughed. They’d watched with curiosity as I changed his diaper and fed him ground-up pills suspended in a cloud of apple sauce. They’d sat in the soft foam of his wheelchair, tried it out on their own bodies, and competed to see who could do the longest wheelie. I thought these were moments of play, of joy, but now I knew what they were really thinking: If I were like you, I’d kill myself.

Standing there, I wanted to flip over their lunch trays and bash in their heads. I wanted to punch their throats, rake their eyes, break their necks. But most of all, I wanted to run away and cry in the bathroom, to find new friends who wouldn’t say such awful things, who wouldn’t even imagine them.

“You are,” I choked out. “You’re talking about my brother.”

Their faces softened. They looked down into the tortured landscapes of their Mexican pizzas. “Alright,” they said. “Sorry. Now sit down.”

What did I think would happen if I walked away? If I went to sit with Robbie? What kind of adolescent hell did I imagine for myself? It is so difficult at that age to picture yourself cast out from the group. You cling so desperately to that “we” no matter what it costs. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be back in that silent year, that lonely and singular “I” on that dirty gym floor, awkward and alone with my binder of cool bands.

So I sat down. I wasn’t dramatic. We moved on. The next time someone said “retard,” I didn’t even flinch. I said it myself.

You retard. You Robbie. You Baka. You brother. You twin.

***

The rest of high school was both better and worse for Robbie. His bullies grew less cruel or more sophisticated in their cruelty: They mostly just ignored him. But if kids no longer yelled “Baka!” or threw spitballs at his head, he also grew more isolated. His middle school friends matriculated to the more diversified subcultures of high school: the goths, the freaks, the math nerds. His parents stopped throwing him birthday parties after freshman year when only three kids showed up. Sometimes the only person sitting with Robbie at lunch was his aide. And Robbie struggled with the more advanced classes and needed increased accommodations, doing subjects like math entirely in the resource room with the special ed teacher. While no genius myself, I was on the pre-college track. We rarely had a class together.

He still loved to sing, but had trouble with the increased rigor of high school choir. He struggled to learn and pronounce the songs sung in Latin and Italian, though when they started to practice “Candle on the Water” from Disney’s Pete’s Dragon, he already knew every word by heart. The more serious singers resented Robbie for his off-key voice, how he seemed to shout-squawk the lyrics, how in their beautiful wall of sound there was always the crack of his voice. He held them back. When they traveled to state-wide competitions, they were thankful that Robbie stayed home.

They’d sat in the soft foam of his wheelchair, tried it out on their own bodies, and competed to see who could do the longest wheelie. I thought these were moments of play, of joy, but now I knew what they were really thinking: If I were like you, I’d kill myself.

One class I did have with him was 11th-grade drama, where I saw a different side of Robbie. There was a lip-synching assignment, which Robbie refused to fake. He sang “Daydream Believer” by The Monkees, his body exuberant as he spun and writhed around the stage to the beat. For the monologue assignment, he inhabited Hamlet in the famous “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy, which he performed in a low strangled rasp that gave the words a doomed weight: “Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered … .” During improv scenes, he couldn’t stop laughing. He seemed so happy to be performing. On stage, he was comfortable with himself in a way that I envied. Didn’t he know what people might think?

He once told a friend that he loved choir and theater because he liked to express himself; he liked pretending to be someone else for a while. Sure. But I suspect Robbie also liked inviting the audience’s eyes onto his body. When so many people either ignored him or stared at him against his will, up on stage he sanctioned that stare. Elevated and under lights, he was impossible to ignore. He invited us to look and listen, translating the characters into his own choreography. In the able-bodied white-out of our small town, here was his disabled body inhabiting our heroes. Here was the song in his mouth, no matter how much he mangled it, and no, mean girl, he would not shut up.

***

Our senior year, I got my wish. My twin brother finally came to school with me. For the past three years, he’d attended Rosemary Center, a specialized school in Cleveland for severely disabled students, but his teachers worried he wasn’t getting enough opportunities to work on his social skills. So for the first two periods of the day, he’d come to my high school for commons and choir, and then they’d bus him back to Rosemary Center in time for lunch. 

I developed spidey-sense. When he was in the building and I wasn’t with him, I tingled. I was a tuning fork for danger. I wondered: As his aide pushed him through the hallway, would the high schoolers whisper: Retard. Re-tar-ded. Would they imitate his moan? Would they chop their hands against their chests? Would they call each other, “You Danny. You fucking Trapp”? Would they take one look at him and think: If I were like you, I’d kill myself. I knew what my classmates had said about Robbie, and how easily their words could ricochet off his body and onto my brother’s, though I don’t think my brother threatened them the way Robbie did. Robbie was too close to normal — he dared to occupy their same space.

The tingle lessened when Danny was with me in commons, the free period in the cafeteria dedicated to socializing and homework. Robbie was also there but mostly sat in the front of the room, parked with his aide who loved to gossip with other teachers. He would always cheerfully greet my brother: “Hello, Mister Trapp. How are you this morning?” He was so nice and upbeat. He spouted inspirational quotes: “You can do it if you try!” At age 18, he still loved Disney, singing The Lion King songs and imitating Mickey Mouse, if a little less often. He told the kind of jokes found on popsicle sticks. I no longer thought Robbie was annoying. He just seemed immature.

We’d talk for a moment. My brother must have known Robbie was like him; he must’ve heard the spastic warble of his voice, saw with his limited vision the blurry outline of Robbie’s wheelchair. And Danny was the only student in a wheelchair Robbie would see all day. What would’ve happened if I’d let my brother linger? Would Robbie have become his friend? Maybe my brother would’ve liked Robbie’s popsicle stick jokes. Maybe the jokes were just an act, Robbie’s warm-up before he got to the dirtier ones, which Danny would’ve certainly liked. Maybe Danny would’ve called him “Eddie,” the name he gave to all his good male friends.

I didn’t give them a chance. Instead, I pushed Danny past him, into the senior lounge where we’d hang out with my friends in a carpeted corner with couches. Danny brought his Dynavox, his upgraded augmentative communication device. Like the old one, it scanned pre-programmed options across a plastic screen, but when Danny clicked, instead of the scary robot voice, it was me. Technology had improved so much that I could record his options into his computer, giving him my voice.

We asked, “Where’s the party at?”

We sang blues lyrics: “I want one bourbon, one scotch, and one beer.” 

We said, “Shit.”

My classmates gathered around, astonished at my foul-mouthed voice coming from his machine, my brother smiling from his wheelchair with his wrist cocked and ready to click another. 

From the computer, we said, “What’s up, bitches?” 

We said, “Hey girl, can I get your number?” 

We said, “Hey Thompson, you’re a fuck-face.” 

They howled with laughter. Even Ben Stanley, who had loved yelling “Baka” in a crowded room four years before, smiled at Danny. “That’s so bomb,” he said to my brother, and then to me: “You are such a badass.”

“Me?” I asked. “Why? My brother said it.”

“Right,” he said and winked.

But one day we got too close to Robbie and his aide, and my brother clicked, “Steve Cooper sucks balls.” 

Robbie rocked with laughter and said, “Mister Trapp, did you just say what I think you said?”

His aide shook her head. “Come on,” she said to me. “That’s not appropriate.”

“What?” I said. “Danny said it.”

She smiled at my gambit. “I see what you’re doing there.”

My brother laughed, knowing we were getting away with something. We were in trouble at school together like true twins.

But eventually, Danny’s speech therapist discovered our page, and we were busted. Our mother made us erase the most explicit options. From then on, she would monitor my additions. A year later, they erased me completely.

At 17, I had literally given my brother a voice, imagining what he would want to say. I knew my brother mostly through translation. Read his body language, listen to the tone of his “I-an,” analyze the context, and guess what he was thinking as “eh” or “eh-eh” options: “Do you want a milkshake? Are you mad at me? Are you sick of this song? Eh or eh-eh?” Through his Dynavox, I could finally lay down the tracks of his personality, and all he had to do was click himself into existence. 

And what did I do with this awesome power? I made Danny into a crude, potty-mouthed cartoon of a teenager, a mirror of my own ID. I programmed his computer to say “bitch” and “fag” without thinking about their relationship to the word “retard.” I’m not even sure my brother always knew what he was saying through the machine, though he certainly enjoyed his audience’s reactions. 

I knew what my classmates had said about Robbie, and how easily their words could ricochet off his body and onto my brother’s, though I don’t think my brother threatened them the way Robbie did. Robbie was too close to normal — he dared to occupy their same space.

For years, I’ve regretted that I treated giving my twin brother a voice as just another joke. But now I see what I did as a reaction to Robbie. I wanted Danny to be a counterbalance against Robbie’s cheerful Pollyanna personality, his squeaky-clean Disney songs, and his Mickey Mouse impressions. I wanted Danny to be funny and subversive. I wanted him to shock those who would pity him. I wanted my classmates to hear a disabled person say “fuck” and “shit” and “shut up, asshole.” I wanted him to make fun of them. And no matter what Danny really wanted to say, he obliged me. He clicked my version of himself out into the world.

In the end, we played the twin trick. We traded places and waited for them to notice. But to this day, I’m not quite sure if they mistook me for him or him for me.

And yet, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t keep Robbie and Danny apart. After commons, Danny joined Robbie in choir without me, adding his moans to Robbie’s squawks. Together they sang a duet against that beautiful wall of sound. 

***

After we graduated, I lost track of Robbie. I assumed he’d follow the path of most people at our high school: off to college, someplace like Wright State, an accessible campus with ramps and lifts, elevators and attendants where Ohio funneled its disabled students. I expected him to at least continue down the mainstream, for him to find gainful employment someplace with that agile head and coordinated mouth, where his coworkers would enjoy his cheerful presence but secretly wish he’d cool it with the Mickey Mouse impressions. I expected him to have a very different future than my brother, who aged out of the school system and moved on to a day program for people with disabilities at United Cerebral Palsy (UCP) in downtown Cleveland. 

On Christmas break my senior year of college, I went to UCP to visit my brother. In the workroom, among the line of people in wheelchairs, there was Robbie. He was still skinny but now had a buzz cut and stubble on his chin. “Well, hello there, Mr. Trapp!” His body seized in excitement, his arms clenching down. His voice was still grounded in his sinuses but it seemed a bit lower. He had become a man, just as I had. On a long white table were scraps of wood, plastic boxes with nails, screws, and containers of glue. There was a stack of square boards, each with a hole in the middle. They were packaging boxes for birdhouses. 

My mother had mentioned that Robbie was at UCP with my brother, that they actually rode together on the bus, but it was hard to believe. Wasn’t there something more he could do? They were both part of UCP’s sheltered workshop. They did “piece-work,” an absurd parody of work. Instead of earning a set wage, workers are paid “by the piece,” a salary commensurate with their productivity when compared to a “normal worker.” My brother, for instance, would click a hand switch that activated a paper shredder. At the end of the month, they’d mail him a check for 45 cents — negative 90 cents when you factor in the cost of postage and mileage for driving to the bank to cash the check. My mother asked UCP, “Can’t you just keep it?” They could not. 

Certainly, Robbie could make a better living somewhere in the community. Certainly, he could make minimum wage. He had been in the same classes as I was. What did he learn — why endure all the mocking and isolation — if he was just going to end up in the same place as my brother? Surely our high school had prepared Robbie for a different kind of life.

No, my mother said. Robbie had significant learning disabilities. He had health problems — asthma and gastrological issues — so here he was packaging birdhouses with my brother.

Robbie said he liked it here. “They treat me pretty good. Everyone is super nice.”

“I wouldn’t go that far, Robbie Rob!” someone else said from his wheelchair, and they all laughed.

Robbie squealed and said, “Don’t start!” He turned back to me. “And your brother has become a good friend.”

“That’s great, man,” I said. “I’m glad you’re doing well, Rob.” I shook his hand and went to the next room to visit Danny.

***

That spring, to save money, UCP contracted with a cheaper bus company. The bus was late. The bus broke down on the highway. The new bus driver barely talked to Danny or Robbie. A mouth breather, my mother said. He often called in sick, and then they’d send a substitute driver who breathed even more from his mouth. When the bus got a hole in its roof, they didn’t fix it. Once, when it was raining, my mother opened the door of the bus to find Robbie with a tarp draped over his head like he was a piece of furniture. Robbie was good-natured about it, but my mother complained: “You’ve got to be kidding me. Here’s a kid with health problems and you put a tarp over him?” They fixed the bus but not the drivers.

I wanted my classmates to hear a disabled person say “fuck” and “shit” and “shut up, asshole.” I wanted him to make fun of them. And no matter what Danny really wanted to say, he obliged me. He clicked my version of himself out into the world.

I was three hours away on the other side of the state, in my last term of college. If I felt the twin tingle, if I sensed my brother was in danger that afternoon, I mistook it for an overdose of caffeine.

The bus driver pulled into the UCP parking lot to take my brother and Robbie home. I know almost nothing about this man, just what my mother told me: that he was skinny and quiet and in his forties. I know he was polite to her but wouldn’t talk to my brother. I know he worked for a company that paid him the least it possibly could. 

When I imagine him that day, I see him drive into the UCP parking lot, past the brick columns at the front of the building. He’s wearing the bus company polo shirt, the insignia that his friends make fun of at the bar after his shifts, before his shifts. His life has not gone the way he wanted. Like all of us, he was once a child and briefly beautiful but now finds himself driving this bus, making chicken scratch working for the only company that would hire him, so bored with loading the cripples on-and-off, on-and-off, while their mothers eye him suspiciously from the lawns of their nice houses. Maybe on his good days, he makes the best of it: He has a picture of his favorite niece dangling from the rearview mirror; he blasts Fleetwood Mac from the blown-out speakers and taps out beats on the steering wheel; he sometimes turns to classical and practices deep breathing.

But today is not a good day. How much does he drink before he picks them up? He gets blitzed in the neighborhood on his buddy’s porch, passing a bottle back and forth as the bus idles on the curb. Or he drinks in a corner bar, trading stories and shots of whiskey and cheap tall-boys. Wherever he is, he stands up and is drunker than he meant to get but cannot be late again. Maybe he’s battled addiction his whole life and cannot have just one even though he’d like to be a responsible custodian of these vulnerable people. Or maybe he thinks: I don’t have to be sober for this. Look who I’m driving? If we get in an accident, it would be a mercy. If I was like that, I’d … .

He stops the bus in front of the one in the power chair, who is running his mouth, as usual, talking to the other one, who stares blankly into space. They have that pretty aide behind them. He puts the bus in park. As he makes his way to the back, the aide opens the side door, and he stares at her through the metal grate of the lift platform. He feels like he’s in a cage. The hydraulic motor whirs as the platform lowers down perpendicular to his feet. No more hiding. He steadies himself. She won’t notice. “How you doing, sweet thing?” he asks. He has never called her that before. Too far? Or not far enough? She glares at him and pretends not to hear. “Damn. No offense,” he says and laughs. 

The platform lowers down to the blacktop, its lip curling flat, and the boy with the big head and the powerchair loads first, backing himself onto the platform. Robbie Rob, they call him. The aide buckles the belt, and clicks the switch to raise him to the bus floor. He shoves the chair into its space, fetches the Q-tie-downs, and straps him in. God, he hopes the kid doesn’t start singing those Disney songs. It’s too much for a man to listen to for 35 minutes. The kid continues talking endlessly to the other one, who, as far as the driver has seen, is like talking to a pile of meat. But sometimes when he glances back in the rearview, they look like twins.

The aide eyes him suspiciously like those mothers on their lawns. OK. On his best behavior. He’s not that drunk. He stands up straight. The quiet one with the bitch of a mom who got him in trouble for the tarp is already on the lift, waiting. He walks to the boy and pulls him in. “Come on, buddy,” he says. It’s easier today. It’s easier like this.

After he straps the boy to the floor, he climbs down the front steps to sign the pickup sheet. Maybe it’s here where he stumbles. Maybe his eyes are too heavy, his cheeks too flushed. Or maybe the aide has seen the signs this whole time: the swaying in the doorway, taking too long to strap in her clients, the “sweet thing” come-on and jovial laughing, the tell-tale slur. Before this, she’d worked as a bartender and knows what to look for in a drunk. She knows how to defuse his demands for another, how to call him a cab, but she’s at a loss on what to do when he wants to drive her two disabled clients half an hour into the suburbs. Now that he is ground-level, she gets a good look and is sure. She can smell it. “You’re drunk,” she says.

He laughs. “What’re you talking about?”

“You’re drunk,” she says again. “Wait right there.” She turns and runs inside the building to get help.

It’s easier today. He climbs back in the bus, slides the door shut, and fires up the engine. She comes back out and screams “Stop! Call the police!” He hits the gas and guns it out of the parking lot, the wheels screeching as he lurches right onto 101st Street. But it’s only a block to the stoplight on Euclid where the cars stream past one-way, and in the rear view he sees UCP staff members sprinting down the sidewalk, closing in. He lays on the horn and nudges the bus out into the lane. An SUV swerves and honks, nearly clipping his bumper, but the cars behind it brake and beep as he pulls the bus into the lane. There. Thank God. He drives straight, his hands at ten-and-two. He watches the UCP polo shirts grow tiny. He’s done it. He’s gotten away. Easy.

Except Robbie Rob, the one in the power chair, will not shut up. He’s been screaming since they left the parking lot. “Stop! You heard her! Stop! Pull over!”

“Quiet back there,” he barks.

“I heard her. You’re drunk! You’re drunk and you’re driving us! You’re drunk driving! Pull this bus over right now!”

The kid is thrashing in his chair, his face turning red. And now the other one starts, his teeth gnashing: “Ehhhh-ahhh-ehhhh.”

“Shhhh,” he tells them both. “That’s enough.”

He stops at the next light. He acts like everything is normal. He’s pointed the wrong way, going deeper into the city, at 95th Street, down in numbers, not up. He’ll have to turn around. He’ll drive the cripples home and pretend it was just a misunderstanding. He will nod to their mothers. They’ll have no idea. 

The light turns green and he hits the gas. “I’m taking you home, fellas. Relax. That woman was crazy.” He looks in the rearview mirror. Robbie Rob isn’t buying it.

“You think we’re idiots? Fuck you! Pull this bus over right now!” 

So the Disney kid can curse. He didn’t think he had it in him. He calls back, “You want to go home, don’t you?” He feels bad about the veiled threat, but that shuts the kid right up. He turns down a side street and goes east down Carnegie Road, finally in the right direction. “Don’t worry, gentlemen,” he says. “I got you.” He’s feeling good again. It’s easy. But then he swerves a little too much into the left lane and the cars honk. He needs to concentrate.

“You bastard!” the one in the powerchair yells. “Pull over right now, you bastard! Let us off!” The driver grits his teeth. That voice. How can one kid be so annoying? “Stop! Ahhhh!” the kid yells. He will not shut up. He will not give the driver a break.

The kid is yelling so loud that the driver doesn’t notice the sirens. But as Robbie pauses to take a breath, the driver hears the whoop whoop, sees the red and blue flashing in his rear view. “Fuck,” he says. It’s hospital security, the Cleveland Clinic police. They’re not real cops, right? He needs time to think. He could run the lights and speed through the intersections. He could barrel down side streets and ditch the bus in an empty parking lot. He could disappear into the city. And yes, there is a chance he could wreck the bus, that he could smash into another car and end up dead or maimed, not to mention what could happen to his passengers strapped to the floor. Their wheelchairs would not do well with the g-force, their skulls rattling against their headrests. If he overturned the bus, they’d hang from the ceiling like bats.

It could also be so easy. All he needs is to concentrate. All he needs is a little silence. If it was just the other one, the quiet one, he could do it. He could get away.

But the loud one will not shut up. The siren seems to make him worse and he’s thrashing more than ever, practically foaming at the mouth, and now the other one is moaning and for Christ’s sake they will not shut up. That Robbie Rob seizes with rage as he screams: “You bastard! My dad is gonna sue your ass, you bastard!”

And suddenly the driver wakes up to his own life: He is running from the cops in a short bus. He’s very drunk, and he’s kidnapped two disabled men in wheelchairs. And Robbie Rob, so annoying with that nasal voice, is right: He is a bastard. This is what a bastard does, and he is not a bastard. So he slows the bus and pulls off into a side street. He puts the bus in park, raises his hands, and waits.

When the cop opens the door, Robbie is still screaming: “You bastard! You fucking bastard!”

My whole life, I dreamed of protecting my brother. I would be there to put my body in between. I would be there to fight for Danny, to save him. But when my twin brother’s life was truly threatened, when a drunk man was speeding a bus down a Cleveland street with my brother in the back, it was Robbie, not me, who protected him. I cringe to think what would’ve happened if it had been just my moaning brother in the back, with the driver unable to interpret his sounds: What’s happening? Please stop. I’m scared. But there was Robbie being so annoying, yelling in that grating voice grounded in his sinuses, refusing to shut up. It was Robbie who fought for him. It was Robbie who may have saved my twin’s life.

***

When Robbie died five years later, I was away again, this time at grad school. My mother and brother went to his funeral. He’d passed away in his sleep. It felt incomprehensible that Robbie would die before Danny. With those functioning eyes, that coordinated mouth, that agile head, he seemed set up for one long life. But there he was, ashes in an urn. My brother was having his own health problems and my mother felt like she was attending a dress rehearsal for the death of her own son. She was right: My brother would last two more years, until the age of 28, one more year than Robbie’s 27. Now they’re both gone, twins in death, riding that bus together into the unknown.

I wonder, on those long rides home from Cleveland, if my brother ever called him “Eddie,” if he used it to heckle him when Robbie would light into his fourth Disney song that trip, or gush about their cute coworker with the long red hair, or for the second time that week ask him, “How can you tell a vampire has a cold? He starts coffin.” Maybe when I wasn’t watching, Danny learned to fit his mouth around the “r” and the “b” and added another word into his repertoire. I wonder if they passed each other’s names back and forth: Rob-bie. Danny. Rob-bie. Danny.

***

When giving directions, I have heard that instead of saying “hang a right,” the boys who tormented Robbie, now almost middle-aged men, sometimes say, “hang a Robbie,” a cruel artifact from their childhoods, an almost affectionate tribute to their tormentee, who by that time had been dead for almost a decade. After 25 years, his name was still a thrill to say out loud, to map the world with, to drive in its direction.

As I work on this essay, I write Danny’s name. I write Robbie’s too. As I approach the end, I feel terrified, like I’m that lonely and singular “I” again on the dirty gym floor, but instead of my binder of cool bands, I have this essay with their names. I want to retreat into silence again. I wonder what audience I’m writing for, if I’m still holding onto that “we” no matter what it costs. When you read their names, do you pity them? Do you secretly think: Retard. Re-tar-ded. Do you laugh along with my scenes of joy, of play, but really think: “If I was like that, I’d … .” Or can you imagine? Do you have a brother like mine? Do you look like my brother?

You Robbie. You Baka. You Brother. You Twin.

***
Brian Trapp is a fiction and creative nonfiction writer who has published work in the Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, Narrative, Brevity, and Ninth Letter, among other places. He teaches at the University of Oregon, and will be a 2021-2022 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University.

Editor: Carolyn Wells 

Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk

Sensitivity reader: Ian Markauskas

“We Can’t Rush This Kind of Power”: An Educator on Teaching Poetry to High Schoolers During the Pandemic

surreal moment of a butterfly entering the pages of a book
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During this period of remote learning during the pandemic, poet and educator Paola Capó-García decided to reimagine her senior English class into a more immersive and focused eight-week poetry course. Through poems, she thought, perhaps her teenage students could reflect on “the particular chaos of 2020” and begin to process the loss they’d experienced over the year. In a piece at Teachers & Writers Magazine, Capó-García recounts this special time spent with her students, and how she created a safe, quiet space for them to think, to write, and to heal.

Poetry is so often neglected at the high school level, deemed too difficult, too precious, or too esoteric to tackle. And when it is taught, it’s typically filtered through dead white men. But teaching Whitman and Frost does not fit into my politics as a teacher and human, and it certainly does not fit the narrative of the students my school serves. I’m not interested in widening the gap between them and poetry, between them and knowledge. My goal, now and always, has been to make poetry accessible, exciting, and useful to young people. To teach them that the way they speak and live is already poetic. To help them manage the messiness of 21st century youth with 21st century language. And in this extra-messy age of Covid and Zoom and rightful apathy, poetry felt like the perfect way to make sense of it all.

Between a raging pandemic, civil rights unrest, controversial U.S. election, and graduation on the horizon, the students needed a space to explore the enormity of their feelings. To address this, I designed the writing prompts around the concept of loss. The world we’re living in is punctuated by overwhelming loss, and it must be confronted and articulated in cathartic ways.

I value the elegy as a poetic form for teenagers because it invites healing; it’s a way to give grief a name and exit strategy. I believe that one of our most important roles as teachers is to provide authentic opportunities for young people to heal.

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