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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Want some, nephew?” he asked.

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

“You good?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You picked up.

“Hey,” I said. “What y’all doing?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What you eating, Jimmy Earl?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Talking about Clarence Thomas?”

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

“Anita Hill.”

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What you reckon it is?” Grandmama asked.

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

“Okay,” I said. “But why?”

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Want some, nephew?”

“Naw,” I told him. “I’m good.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

The New Feeling

TonisPan / Getty

 

Anna Moschovakis | An excerpt adapted from the novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love | Coffee House Press | August 2018 | 11 minutes (2,908 words)



The story she was reading was about a forty-three-year-old unarmed civilian shot to death in a Tampa Bay movie theater by a seventy-two-year-old retired police captain who’d become “agitated” by the man during previews. Eyewitnesses said the victim had been “texting loudly.” Popcorn had been thrown.


She looked down from the screen at the bead of blood on her thumb. She watched it form a rivulet that ran down her palm and onto the white down comforter her friend had laid out on the bed for a Ukrainian folk singer arriving that night to teach a workshop in bilij holos at a nearby club. The blood formed a spot, brighter than the bead itself.


“He was a good, genuine person,” it was said of the deceased.

“He was just a funny guy. He brought life into every room.”

“Fate brought these two people together—it was ridiculous.”


None of the witnesses tried to stop the altercation. The movie was about Navy seals on a mission in Afghanistan. Its title was Lone Survivor.


She stared at the spot and then back at her thumb, where fresh blood coagulated. She thought again of the thing that had happened—that she had made happen, or at least not prevented from happening. The room had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the expressway, from which she could hear the variegated moan of afternoon traffic. She was having a hard time getting up.


Charles Cummings, a former Marine and Vietnam veteran who left the theater with the victim’s blood on his clothes, said he was shocked and saddened by the incident, which took place on his sixty-eighth birthday.


“I can’t believe anybody would bring a gun to a movie,” said Cummings.

“I can’t believe I got shot,” said the victim before he died.

The recipient of the texts was the man’s three-year-old daughter, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Read more…

25 Years of Vibe Magazine

Courtesy of VIBE

For Billboard,  Dan Charnas compiles an oral history of Vibe magazine, the first issue of which was published in September, 1993. Founded by Quincy Jones in partnership with Time Warner (and still publishing digitally today), the magazine represented a “new black aesthetic” that “championed hip-hop but thought broad and wide about the genre’s connections to the past and the future.”

Mimi Valdes (editorial assistant, 1993-94; assistant editor, 1994-95; style editor, 1997-98; executive editor, 1999-2002; editor-at-large, 2002-03; editor-in-chief, 2004-06): Jonathan [Van Meter, editor-in-chief 1992-93] booked Madonna and Dennis Rodman as a cover. And Eddie Murphy’s publicist was mad as hell that Madonna was getting the cover over Eddie. We all wanted Eddie over Madonna, so we were upset about it too. When [word of the cover choice] started to get out in the industry, we all felt the need to save Vibe’s reputation.

Scott Poulson-Bryant (senior editor/writer, 1992-96): I said [to Jonathan], “The staff needs to have a conference. People are really not happy about this.”

Van Meter: I said, “This isn’t The Village Voice. We’re not unionized. You can’t come in here representing the staff.”

Valdes: We were all standing by waiting for Scott to give us the go-ahead to come in. When Jonathan saw us, he got really upset.

Van Meter: I felt like I was losing control. And I said [to Scott], “You’re fired.” People in the hallways started crying. Mimi Valdes was screaming as if she’d just found out her mother was shot and killed. And I was like, “Oh, my God, I made it worse.”

Poulson-Bryant: He came to my office: “You’re not fired. Look, we’ll have a staff meeting.”

Quincy Jones: I was staying away from editorial policy. I got involved when Jonathan put the Beastie Boys on the cover and told me he was following up with Dennis Rodman and Madonna. He had already shot it!

Van Meter: I guess Quincy was getting a lot of shit from people for putting the Beastie Boys on the cover, and when he sees the Madonna cover, he went crazy.

Jones: I said, “Over my dead fucking body! That’s the way you blow an urban magazine.”

Van Meter: Madonna was queen. You can’t not put her on the cover. I couldn’t conceive of killing the best cover story we had done so far. [Quincy and I] ended up having a fight on the phone, and I smashed my phone into a thousand pieces and cleared off the top of my desk onto the floor. I think I said, “I quit.” I went home. And then the phone calls started. Everyone tried to get Quincy to change his mind. Even Madonna called me at home. She was really pissed.

Jones: I called Madonna and I said, “I’m telling you as a friend: it’s not personal, but you cannot pander with an urban magazine this early.” She said, “Quincy Jones, you and I can take over the world if we want to. See you around, pal.” I haven’t talked to her since then.

Read the story

The Gilded Age of (Unpaid) Internet Writing

Apple Computer / AP, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | September 2018 | 12 minutes (2,976 words)

The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.

* * *

In 1998, my first real job — at which I was terrible — was as an editorial assistant for a New York book publisher. My breathtakingly privileged days consisted of emailing mean jokes about the assistants I didn’t like to the assistants I did, and slacking off at my desk during my boss’s long lunches. That’s when I discovered these things called “webzines.” My 1993 black-and-white PowerBook had been powerful enough for abysmal college essays on Heinrich von Kleist, but not for something called a browser, so it was not until my entrée to the professional world and its professional-issue Windows 98 that I began “surfing the ‘Net” in earnest.

In the nascent years of online ubiquity — when CHHHHHHHHHH BEEboo BEEboo BEEboo became a household noise, and not just something for extreme nerds — the web was both very big and very small. In 1996 there were only 100,000 websites in the Whole Wide World. (Today there are almost two billion.) Plus, aside from a few early leaders in e-commerce, ’90s sites were usually personal homepages, accessible only to the visitor patient and accurate enough to type the precise address, down to the tilde. Alas, what made the webzines of the late ’90s the best was also what would end up making the internet the worst: anyone could publish anything about anything, and very few people expected to be paid.

Read more…

‘I Didn’t Have the Language to Call It Racism’: An Interview with Nicole Chung

Catapult Books / author photo by Erica B. Tappis

Victoria Namkung | Longreads | October 2018 | 11 minutes (3,020 words)

Since the early 1950s, parents in the United States have adopted more than a half-million children from other countries, with the vast majority of them coming from orphanages in Asia, South America, and, more recently, Africa. South Koreans are the largest group of transracial adoptees in the U.S., and by some estimates, make up 10 percent of the nation’s Korean American population.

Nicole Chung, however, was born prematurely and placed for adoption by her Korean immigrant parents in Seattle, and raised in a sheltered Oregon town five hours outside of Portland. Adopted by religious and loving white parents, she grew up as an only child who always felt a bit out of place. The narrative she was always told — that her biological parents made the ultimate sacrifice to give her a better life — comforted Chung as a child, but as she came of age, experiencing racism and finding her own identity as an Asian American and a writer, she began to question the “prepackaged myth” of her adoption. After getting married and becoming pregnant with her first child, a daughter, she went in search of her lost roots.

All You Can Ever Know, her memoir of this search, confronts the ways in which traditional adoption narratives rarely tell the whole story and shows how idealistic and well-intentioned white adoptive parents are often wildly unprepared for raising children of color in a society that is nowhere near the post-racial future of many Americans’ imaginations. She writes: “It feels like my duty as my white family’s de facto Asian ambassador to remind them that I am not white, that we do experience this country in different ways because of it, that many people still know oppression far more insidious and harmful than anything I’ve ever faced. Every time I do this, I am breaking the sacred pact of our family, our once-shared belief that my race is irrelevant in the presence of their love.”   Read more…

The Underground Magazine That Helped Shape Portland, Oregon

Snipehunt 1994, cover by Sean Tejaratchi, courtesy of Portland Mercury

It’s hard to imagine now, but Portland used to be a tiny ignored little city that a lot of bands didn’t want to play and national media largely ignored. Those were sweet times. In that relative cultural isolation, a poster artist named Mike King started a music fanzine named Snipehunt to both harness and serve Portland’s small arts community. Enlarged and fully realized by editor Kathy Molloy, her volunteer team designed, edited, published, and distributed the magazine themselves. Snipehunt had a devoted following and helped launch the careers of its then-unknown freelance writers. Then in 1997, it abruptly quit publishing, and Molloy ghosted everyone and moved to British Columbia.

In an oral history for the Portland Mercury, local writer Joshua James Amberson goes on his own snipe hunt for Molloy, and he lets those who were involved with her artistically piece together the magazine’s creation and influence. One artist called Molloy “the punk mayor of Portland.” Molloy remains a mystery who, like her magazine, cannot be found online. Thanks to Amberson, Snipehunt now sort of has web presence.

The scene that inspired Snipehunt featured bands that weren’t getting media coverage and writers and artists without an outlet. The magazine soon became a breeding ground for local creators, and its contributor list is a peek at the kind of local talent and energy emerging during that time: novelist and screenwriter Jon Raymond, current Portland city commissioner Chloe Eudaly, filmmaker and installation artist Vanessa Renwick, local writer and publisher Kevin Sampsell, novelist Rene Denfeld, Crap Hound and Liar Town creator Sean Tejaratchi. For many of the contributors, Snipehunt was their first publication, their first opportunity to regularly try out their ideas on an audience.

A typical issue of Snipehunt had interviews with local and national bands, pages of comics from independent artists, scene reports from West Coast cities, oddball prose pieces, political action coverage, and pages of reviews—albums, zines, live shows, films, and books. It was a broad take on DIY culture, loosely based in the punk scene but covering artists and subjects far beyond the imposed limitations of that world.

With the magazine’s history largely absent from the internet, its name unfamiliar to the majority of current Portlanders, and physical evidence of its existence difficult to come by, I reached out to a couple dozen of its contributors to provide me—and the rest of new Portland—with a much-needed history lesson.

Read the story

Ugly, Bitter, and True

AP Photo/Eric Risberg

Suzanne Rivecca | Zyzzyva | April 2018 | 84 minutes (16,714 words)

 

The most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being. –Michel de Montaigne

 

There’s a tiny park on Hyde Street in San Francisco, on the cable car line, and for about a year I half-heartedly planned to kill myself in it. The park is slightly sunken, set off from the street, mostly concrete: one of those wedged-in, rarely utilized “mini-parks” common to this part of the city. There are a few rickety maroon-painted benches, a banner of tattered Mexican party flags, some scattered plants and trees. Sometimes, on warm nights, people sit there and eat ice cream cones from the famous ice cream parlor on the corner. Sometimes people take their dogs there to pee. But most of the time it’s empty.

I zeroed in on it because it’s near my apartment and ill-lit. I’d made only a cursory stab at formulating the logistics. Mostly I fantasized in broad strokes, visualizing the final result rather than the step-by-step labor. I knew this much: I wanted to put my California ID in my pocket, along with a piece of paper with my sister’s contact information, swallow a bunch of Xanax with alcohol, and hang myself from a tree. I didn’t think about what I’d use to hang myself, or what I’d stand on to reach the tree, or what kind of knot I’d tie. I didn’t even know which tree. My reluctance to hammer out these details probably indicated a lack of genuine resolve. Or maybe it was just indicative of the bone-shaking agitation that made it impossible to focus on anything intently enough to make a plan.

I walked by the park almost every day, but found it hard to enter. Sometimes I’d stand on the sidewalk and just stare into it, my heartrate accelerating. I knew this was the place, but I didn’t want to go in and scope out coordinates and vantage points. If it was going to happen, I didn’t want to be methodical about it. I was waiting for some trigger that would make it inevitable: some fresh humiliation, some galling failure. Something that would make it all fall into place, get the ball rolling organically, negate the need for foresight. I may have also been waiting for an irrefutable reason not to do it at all.

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Hiking With Nietzsche

AP Photo/Keystone/Desair

John Kaag | Hiking with Nietzsche | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | September 2018 | 30 minutes (6,007 words)

 

I often tell my students that philosophy saved my life. And it’s true. But on that first trip to Sils-Maria—on my way to Piz Corvatsch—it nearly killed me. It was 1999, and I was in the process of writing a thesis about genius, insanity, and aesthetic experience in the writings of Nietzsche and his American contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson. On the sheltered brink of my twenties, I’d rarely ventured beyond the invisible walls of central Pennsylvania, so my adviser pulled some administrative strings and found a way for me to escape. At the end of my junior­ year he handed me an unmarked envelope—inside was a check for three thousand dollars. “You should go to Basel,” he suggested, probably knowing full well that I wouldn’t stay there.

Basel was a turning point, a pivot between Nietzsche’s early conventional life as a scholar and his increasingly erratic existence as Europe’s philosopher-poet. He had come to the city in 1869 as the youngest tenured faculty member at the University of Basel. In the ensuing years he would write his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in which he argued that the allure of tragedy was its ability to harmonize the two competing urges of being human: the desire for order and the strange but undeniable longing for chaos. When I arrived in Basel, still a teenager, I couldn’t help thinking that the first of these drives—an obsessive craving for stability and reason that Nietzsche termed “the Apollonian”—had gotten the better of modern society.

The train station in Basel is a model of Swiss precision—beautiful people in beautiful clothes glide through a grand­ atrium to meet trains that never fail to run on time. Across the street stands a massive cylindrical skyscraper, home to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the most powerful financial institution in the world. I exited the station and ate my breakfast outside the bank as a throng of well-suited Apollos vanished inside on their way to work. “The educated classes,” Nietzsche explained, “are being swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy.” The prospects for life in modern capitalist society were lucrative but nonetheless bleak: “The world has never been so worldly, never poorer in love and goodness.”

According to Nietzsche, love and goodness were not realized in lockstep order but embodied its opposite: Dionysian revelry. His life in Basel was supposed to be happy and well-ordered, the life of the mind and of high society, but upon arriving, he fell into a fast friendship with the Romantic composer Richard Wagner, and that life was quickly brought to an end. He’d come to Basel to teach classical philology, the study of language and original meanings, which seems harmless enough, but Nietzsche, unlike many of his more conservative colleagues, understood how radical this sort of theoretical excavating could be. In The Birth of Tragedy, he claims that Western culture, in all of its grand refinement, is built upon a deep and subterranean structure that was laid out ages ago by Dionysus himself. And, in the early years of their friendship, Nietzsche and Wagner aimed to dig it up.

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Speak Truth to Power

Nastasic / Getty, Scribner / Simon & Schuster

Lacy M. Johnson | Excerpt adapted from The Reckonings: Essays | Scribner | October 2018 | 32 minutes (6,472 words)

The first time I admit in public to having been kidnapped and raped by a man I used to live with, I am at a nonfiction reading at the university where I work. I’ve given enough readings now that I’m usually no longer nervous, but as I sit in the front row at this reading, waiting for my turn to approach the podium, I feel profoundly ill. Because I was, some time ago, a graduate student at this same university, audience members include my former professors and mentors—people I now consider colleagues and friends. Also in the audience are former students, current students, future students, as well as people I’ve never met before, and for all I know will never meet again. One reader goes before me, but I don’t hear a word he says. My hands shake as I hold the book I will read from—still only a galley copy then. My legs nearly buckle underneath me as I stand from my chair. My armpits swim. Bile burns the base of my esophagus. The blood rising to my face tells me that what I am about to do is shameful, embarrassing, wrong. But for 14 years, I have kept a silence. Today I want to break it.

The blood rising to my face tells me that what I am about to do is shameful, embarrassing, wrong. But for 14 years, I have kept a silence. Today I want to break it.

The story of Philomela seems relevant here — that ancient cautionary tale against speaking about rape, which is in many ways about the impossibility of speaking about rape. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Philomela is considered a minor character — a princess from Athens who is raped by a somewhat less minor character, who happens to be her sister’s husband, King Tereus, a tyrant from a war-waged kingdom across the sea from Philomela’s home in Greece. After the rape — after she has torn her hair and scratched and beat her arms — she curses Tereus and vows to tell everyone what he has done. Half out of fear, half out of rage, Tereus draws his sword. But instead of killing her, as she hopes he will do, he cuts out her tongue to prevent her from speaking.

It seems impossible to speak about rape precisely because this threat of violent retribution is real, whether explicit or implicit, but also because of the widespread belief in our culture that rape is an aberration: a violence so unthinkable, so unfathomable, so taboo as to render it unspeakable. It is unspeakable, we are told, because respect for the sanctity and integrity of a woman’s body is the norm. This is, of course, not the way most women have experienced their own bodies throughout history. For most women, rape has been the norm and respect the exception.

I learn first from social media that, in the early-morning hours of August 12, 2011, a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville, Ohio, woke up in her front yard, still a little drunk, unsure how she got there. She learned by checking Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr what happened the night before. She got drunk at a party, where she was very possibly drugged, before a group of high school football players also at the party taunted her, urinated on her, carried her unconscious by her wrists and ankles from that party to another party, and to another, while they fingered her in public, in the back seat of a car, on the sidewalk as she vomited into the street. They flashed her breasts to anyone wishing to see, stripped off her clothes, and took turns slapping her with flaccid penises.

When her parents took her to the police station two days later to file charges, the pictures and tweets and videos bystanders recorded of “the incident” had mostly been removed. “My daughter learned about what had happened to her that night by reading the story about it in the local newspaper,” the girl’s mother tells the press. In a video recorded that night, one of the party-goers, Ohio State football player Michael Nodianos, jokes about men raping and urinating on a dead girl. Between each line, each riff, each variation on the joke, he and the person recording the video laugh hysterically.

“She’s deader than Obi-Wan,” Michael Nodianos sputters in the 12½ minute video to his own hysterical laughter.

She’s deader than Andy Reed’s son.
She’s deader than Chris Henry.
She’s deader than OJ’s wife.
They raped her harder than that cop raped Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction.
They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson raped that one girl.
They raped her more than the Duke lacrosse team.
She is so raped right now, she is just a dead body.

During the rape trial in Ohio, it emerges that the person who recorded the 12½ minute video, in which Nodianos jokes about the rape, is the same person who recorded a video of one of the defendants molesting the victim in the back of a car. He’s a witness for the prosecution and has been given immunity for his testimony. Although he admits later deleting the video because he realized “it was wrong,” he says he recorded it because he thought the girl should know what had happened to her. It’s something he wanted her to see: how she was naked, molested, exposed. The witness admits it was his basement where the 12½ minute video is filmed. It’s his laughter we hear. It’s his hand trying to steady the camera. In another room of that same basement, maybe even while he is filming the video, another boy takes pictures of the 16-year-old girl: naked, unconscious, lying facedown on the floor.

Two boys, both juveniles, are found “delinquent” (the juvenile equivalent of guilty) in the case. “Such promising futures,” one anchor says on network television. At the reading of the verdict, one of the boys breaks down in tears in the courtroom, sobbing like a child: “My life is over. No one is going to want me now.”

The girl remains anonymous in all of this, though a few reports have carelessly revealed her identity and then quickly redacted it. It doesn’t matter; most of the people in the town already know who she is. She receives death threats. She is ostracized, abandoned by her friends. In the comments section of any of the articles about the case, she might be called a slur I won’t repeat. Her attorney speaks for the girl, says she feels relieved: “She just wants to get back to her normal life.” He’s nodding as he says this, as if this were not already “normal life” for many girls.

Each day, women and girls come forward to voice accusations against men who are famous or unknown, who are powerful or paupers. They voice accusations against Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Matt Lauer, and Peyton Manning; against men whose names we haven’t heard before at colleges and prep schools and high schools and middle schools, in hospitals and universities and prisons, in the military, in law offices, even in the White House. We are told that these accusations are the exception, or that this is an affliction particular to our present moment, or that these women are lying or trying to get even or get attention or extort money.

“The finest trick of the devil,” writes Baudelaire, “is to persuade you that he does not exist.”

Each day, women and girls come forward to voice accusations against men who are famous or unknown, who are powerful or paupers.

In Houston, where I live, a 16-year-old girl known simply as “Jada” comes forward to publicly accuse two men of drugging her at a party, gang-raping her, and posting pictures on social media of her unconscious body, one arm tucked behind her back, legs akimbo, naked from the waist down. That these men post these pictures without fear of the consequences is only proof they have no reason to believe there will be consequences. Jada was not the only girl at the party assaulted in this way. These same men, along with other adult men, drugged other girls, raped them, recorded video of themselves raping them, and posted these photos and videos to social media, where they are shared and shared and shared.

After her assault goes viral, Jada appears on MSNBC to speak with Ronan Farrow, who draws connections between her story and the story of his own family’s history of violence and abuse. That February, Ronan’s sister, Dylan Farrow, had penned an open letter about her experience of sexual abuse at the hands of her famous and powerful father, Woody Allen. The New York Times published Farrow’s 936-word letter in an online column; six days later, the Times gave Allen 1,800 words in the print edition to respond, a retaliatory account in which he denies the accusations, calls them “ludicrous,” their malevolence “obvious.” According to Allen, the whole thing is a long-enduring revenge plot by Mia Farrow, Dylan’s mother, who was, he says, hysterical and vindictive that he had an affair with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, herself a teenage girl when their affair began. In his account, Mia can’t be believed because of her own history of dating much older men, because of her spite at being spurned, because perhaps she lied about the paternity of her son Ronan — that Dylan’s experience is a fiction created by her mother, that he couldn’t have committed this crime because of his fear of enclosed spaces, that in fact the accusation is a crime and he is its victim.

When two men — Clinton Onyeahialam, who is an adult, as well as an unnamed juvenile — are arrested in December, Jada returns to MSNBC to speak with Ronan Farrow again. As before, she appears with a family friend, a self-described activist named Quanell X, who is her advocate, her spokesperson, helping to call out the police for dragging their feet and to draw media attention to the case. This seems to be Quanell X’s main skill. In 2011 he held a rally in Cleveland, Texas, in support of a group of 21 men who were later convicted of gang-raping an 11-year-old girl. At that rally, he blamed the girl’s parents for the men’s violence, blamed the girl, pointed to her social media profiles as evidence she had already been sexually active with adult men, accused the police of letting the investigation be run by the KKK — all of this in spite of the crime having been caught on video, which had gone viral by the time the girl went to the police. The excerpts of the video that could be shown over and over on the news were extremely graphic, though not as graphic as the portions that were not shown. All 21 men were convicted, but only because they had pled guilty to lesser crimes, some receiving sentences as minor as seven years of probation.

Quanell X is sitting beside Jada when Farrow asks how she feels about these two men being arrested, what she wants to see happen to them. There is a long pause. She blinks several times, then says, “I would like to see justice. That’s it.”

All across the country this situation is replicated with slight variations: a woman reports rape, is told that boys will be boys; a woman reports rape, is not believed. She is shamed. She is ostracized, traumatized, and retraumatized. At best, the woman’s life is forever and irrevocably changed. At worst, she self-destructs. Men, however, seem to thrive in a culture in which they can rape women with near impunity.

I know, I know. Not all men.

One man — a white professor in Georgia — learns his memoir has been rejected by a publisher YET AGAIN, around the same time that I give that reading at the university where I work. “What do I have to do to sell a memoir in this country?” he laments to his female colleague. “Get kidnapped and raped?” His female colleague thinks first of ignoring him, of saying nothing at all, but instead asks him if he is talking specifically about me, about my book. He says yes and makes some kind of James Frey reference, maybe accusing me of making the whole thing up to get attention and a publication. Months later, the female colleague resigns her job — I don’t know if the two things are related — and much later she tells me this story while standing in the kitchen of my house.


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Susan B. Anthony, writing in 1900, twenty years before women earned the right to vote, offers this: “No advanced step taken by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public. For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonized.”

I am on the phone with an editor at a women’s magazine known more for its sex advice than for its coverage of contemporary literature. The editor has a British accent — I think it is British anyway — and she is asking thoughtful, sensitive questions about my book and my life, about what connections I see between BDSM and sexual violence, if any, and about my advice to women who have survived sexual assault and domestic violence. It does not feel strange or uncomfortable to tell her about being raped. I cannot, after all, see her face.

After we hang up the phone, I don’t hear from her or anyone else at her magazine again until weeks later, just before the issue is scheduled to go to press, when the lawyer for the parent company of this magazine asks to see the police reports from my case, claiming they need to do due diligence to protect themselves against a defamation lawsuit from the man I accuse of kidnapping and raping me.

Keep in mind: I do not name this person — not in the book, and not in the interview. I give no identifying information about where the assault took place — not the city, not the state, not even the region. The man is an international fugitive, wanted on the same charges I recount in my book.

Nevertheless, the lawyer for the parent company for the women’s sex advice magazine is concerned this international fugitive might bring a defamation lawsuit against them, so he asks me to provide copies of the police reports from my case. This makes me very uncomfortable. But after gnashing over the idea for a couple of days, I agree to send the reports.

Hours later, the lawyer responds by saying that these reports are insufficient to satisfy their burden of proof. I might have forged the reports, the lawyer says; there’s nothing preventing me. Now he needs the police reports to come directly from the police department itself. I offer a contact name and number. The lawyer calls and the sergeant from the records department informs him that though, yes, she can confirm that there is indeed a warrant for the man’s arrest, and though, yes, she can confirm the exact charges, she cannot send him the records because the state has laws to preserve a victim’s confidentiality rights, which prevent the police department from releasing any information about the case. The lawyer then asks me to waive my confidentiality rights and ask the police department to send the files from my case directly to him. He alone will determine their veracity.

I learn at this moment that there are some people who will believe I am lying about what men have done to my body no matter what evidence I present to the contrary. I also learn it is not my responsibility to convince them.

I learn at this moment that there are some people who will believe I am lying about what men have done to my body no matter what evidence I present to the contrary.

Jon Krakauer points out in Missoula that, unlike murder, which results, very convincingly, in a dead body; or a kidnapping, which results in the clear absence of one; or even a violent physical attack, which results in medically verifiable wounds or contusions; rape is the only violent crime with a victim who is subject, and subjected, to doubt.

We find expressions of this doubt in our long and troublesome history of men deciding what rape is and what it is not. Several years ago, Representative Todd Akin of Missouri waxed ignorant on the phenomenon of so-called legitimate rape, wherein he opined that pregnancy never results from “legitimate rape” because a woman apparently “has ways of shutting that whole thing down.” Although this claim shows appalling ignorance about human biology, the choice to distinguish “legitimate rape” from other supposedly lesser crimes is not without precedent in the law. Many states, following the Model Penal Code created by the American Law Institute in 1962 to influence and standardize criminal lawmaking, still require prosecutors to prove that a man used force in order to find him guilty of raping an adult woman, and in every state, there is a distinction between the rape of an adult woman and the statutory rape of a girl, which, surprisingly, is a fairly recent development. For most of the history of this country, statutory rape existed only as a crime of “seduction,” punishable not by imprisonment but by fines.

Critics of harsher punishments claimed young girls should be held responsible for protecting themselves or for failing to: “In point of fact, the white girl of twelve anywhere throughout the civilized world, unless she is degenerate and imbecile, is abundantly qualified, so far as intellect is concerned, to protect her virginity if she so desires,” wrote Representative A. C. Tomkins of Kentucky in 1895. He opposed raising the age of consent since “sexual desire belongs equally to the male and female human being, and the law-makers of this state were then, and are now, unwilling to inflict the heaviest penalty of the law on the male when there is a possibility that the female is also to blame.” He goes on to make his case further against raising the age of consent from 12 by drawing on “science”—specifically the “scientific” fact that “negro girls” go through puberty earlier than white girls, become sexually active earlier than white girls, and are more “naturally sensual” than white girls—a “fact” he cites as proof that it is impossible to rape a woman of color.

I refer to this abominable text only because this “science” still survives today. We see evidence of it in our justice system, our literature, our television shows and movies. It survives as attitudes, as biases, as stereotypes, as bigotry.

In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelou writes how, at seven years old, she is raped repeatedly by her mother’s boyfriend, who threatens to murder her brother if she speaks about what they’ve done. What we’ve done? she wonders. When the man’s crime is finally discovered, far too late, and when young Maya, then called Marguerite, is hospitalized with injuries and the man is finally arrested for his crimes, Marguerite testifies against him. The lawyer asks her if it was just the one time or if it was many times, and Marguerite feels herself caught in a trap: if she tells the truth and says yes, it was many times, the lawyer will use it as proof of her “natural sensuality,” that she in fact could not have been raped by this adult man; and yet if she lies and says no, it was just the one time, she fails to convey the full force of his crimes against her. No is what she feels everyone in the courtroom expects her to say, even wants her to say. The lie enters her mouth and she lets it escape.

Her rapist is sentenced to a year and a day in prison, though his lawyer arranges his release later that afternoon. That night, he is found beaten to death, likely by Marguerite’s brothers and uncles, seeking justice where the courts failed to deliver it. She is struck mute with guilt about his death and does not speak for the next six years.

Rape is the only violent crime with a victim who is subject, and subjected, to doubt.

When an institution like a court, or a police department, or a district attorney’s office, or a university, or a family does not listen to a woman who speaks about her sexual assault, they betray an attitude that women’s speech does not matter — not when we give testimony, not when we make appeals, not when we report the violent crimes committed against us, not even when we say, very clearly, no.

Perhaps the lesson isn’t, then, that the violation of women’s bodies is unthinkable, but that men wield immense power when they think about, plan, and perform an act that we are told is forbidden. To be sure, one can often find pleasure in doing things that are expressly forbidden. We can each, no doubt, think of examples from our own youth. And yet I do not believe that the exclusive reason men rape is because they find pleasure in breaking a taboo. There are also taboos against cannibalism, but we hear of people eating other people almost never. But men rape women every day.

* * *

“I don’t hear her say anything,” Bill Cosby tells a team of lawyers during his deposition in the Andrea Constand civil suit. “And so I continue and I go into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection. I am not stopped.” Cosby’s euphemisms and innuendoes call to mind an image of the violence without the language of violence. To speak frankly, to admit drugging and raping this woman, would produce horror and revulsion, because drugging a woman in order to rape her is supposedly an unthinkable act. Cosby’s language is playful, as if the woman—what she says, what she does, what she might want for herself, the goals she might have set for her life—are entirely beside the point. It’s as if the fact of his eventual conquest has the power to remove his culpability for committing a crime, to remove the crime from history, to remove it even from the realm of possibility.

This trick, in which a man disappears himself (or is disappeared) from his actions, isn’t magic. We perform it on behalf of men whenever we talk about this violence that is supposedly unthinkable. We talk about the number of women and girls who are raped—in high school, in college, in marriages, in an attic, on a Tuesday—but not the number of men who rape women and girls. We talk of the women and girls who are murdered, kidnapped, found decapitated or frozen or barely alive in the front yard, or on the porch, or tossed on the side of the road, but not the number of men who murder, or kidnap, or maim, or destroy them. Nicole Brown Simpson was a “battered woman” before she was a dead one, but the man who beat her, and very possibly murdered her, escapes our sentences. We call Andrea Constand an “accuser,” a label we apply also to each of the dozens of women, individually and as a group, who have come forward to demand justice for being drugged and raped by Bill Cosby. Our language shields him, disappears him from the scene of the crime, transforms his crime into an allegation, a suggestion, a rumor.

This trick, in which a man disappears himself (or is disappeared) from his actions, isn’t magic.

The lawyers for Owen Labrie — a student at a private preparatory school in New Hampshire — disappeared him in exactly this way from accusations that he had raped a 15-year-old classmate. The girl’s testimony was harrowing: Labrie took her to a locked mechanical room, where he took off her pants and removed her underwear, where he kissed and bit her breasts as she was crying and telling him, “No, no, no,” where he scraped inside her vagina with his fingers, and held her hands above her head, and penetrated her with what she believed to be his penis. On the stand, Labrie denied this version of events, telling jurors, “I thought she was having a great time.” He denied penetrating her, denied that she had said no — although, when pressed by his lawyer about whether he had perhaps kissed the girl’s breasts too aggressively, he acknowledged that he “may have been a little carried away.”

If getting “carried away” is intelligible as any part of a defense, it is because some part of us believes that all men have this inside them — an instinct to which he had simply succumbed. And in the end, that defense succeeded. The prosecutors could not prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” to the jury — made up of nine men and three women — that the sex was “nonconsensual,” so they acquitted him on the charge of felony rape. But they could prove that he used a computer to lure a minor for sexual activity, a felony, and that he endangered a child, a misdemeanor, and these are the crimes for which he was convicted, along with 3 misdemeanor charges of sexual assault. He wept as the verdict was read, even though his defense had prevailed in what it set out to prove: that he was, in fact, just a “normal” young man.

* * *

“One in five women who goes to college will be assaulted,” Vice President Joe Biden says in a press conference. The year is 2014. A presidential task force has just released the results of a study on sexual assault on college campuses. I know these numbers are inaccurately low, since estimates predict that only 13 percent of women who are raped report the assault to authorities. The rest keep silent out of fear they’ll be shamed, fear of retribution, fear of invasive, inappropriate, and insensitive questions. “It’s a parent’s worst fear when you drop your daughter off at college,” the vice president says to his audience. “You say a little prayer for one thing: that your daughter will be safe. You pray that your daughter will be safe.”

The White House’s 1 Is 2 Many campaign launches with a PSA that stars Benicio del Toro, who is seated in a black leather wing chair in front of a fireplace in a wood-paneled room. “We have a big problem,” he begins, “and we need your help.” The problem, we are told by an A-list roster of celebrities like Dulé Hill, Seth Meyers, Daniel Craig, and Steve Carell, is sexual assault. The PSA encourages men to speak up, to act, to become part of the solution to the problem only they can name. The message is important and necessary, although it may be somewhat undermined by its spokespeople. Daniel Craig, for instance, is best known for reprising the role of James Bond, a character whose reputation for seducing women is topped only by his reputation for disposing of them. “If I saw it happening,” Daniel Craig says in the PSA, tilting his head to one side, “I’d never blame her. I’d help her.”

Del Toro continues: “If I saw it happening, I’d speak up.” It’s uncanny, really, because his characters don’t show this same moral fiber. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, for instance, it’s Johnny Depp’s Raoul Duke who speaks up, who acts, who intervenes when he finds his lawyer, Dr. Gonzo, sequestered in a hotel room with an underage “religious freak,” having plied her with LSD on the plane in order to more easily pressure her into sex once they reach the hotel. In the PSA, del Toro looks directly into the camera: “If she doesn’t consent, or if she can’t consent, it’s rape. It’s assault.”

Which is the real message? The franchise or the PSA? The paycheck or the community service? If our role models tell us they in fact have high respect for women and we all should too, how should we understand the roles they play that reinforce the opposite message: that a man’s value is determined by his virility, by the number of women he’s slept with, by his disregard for a woman’s body, her autonomy, her age? Do they mean it when they say that women matter? Do we matter or do we not?

* * *

I was 14 the first time a man raped me. It was February, Valentine’s Day, and he wore a baseball cap, stood with one hand plunged deep into his jean pocket; the other held out a bottle, offering a drink. We stood in a liquor store parking lot beside the highway. Where did I tell my parents I would be? He was a few years older than me. Tall, like a man, I remember thinking. What did I know? He was on the basketball team, over six feet tall. His mustache and chest hair appeared in earnest patches. He took a drag of his cigarette, blowing the smoke over one shoulder. He never took his eyes off me. What did he see? I lifted the bottle to my lips, tipped it back, and took a drink.

In the morning, my thighs were purpled with bruises from his sharp pelvic bones, a rust-colored stain on the sheet beneath me. My arm was sore at the shoulder, my lips swollen, full and smashed-looking in the mirror. I bent over the toilet while the night returned to me in heaves and waves: our lips met once, and then again, and then he was clawing and desperate. I wanted to move away from him, from what was approaching and unstoppable, and let a “no” fall from my mouth — then a string of them dripping like pearls. Afterward he dressed and slipped out the door. The bile in my stomach surged, acid and cinnamon and sweet.

When people heard what had happened they explained it back to me: “Slut,” they said. “Liar.” “Whore.”

That was ages ago, and very little about our situation has evolved. Then, as now, people will ask questions: What was that girl doing there in the first place? What clothes did she wear? To whom did she talk? At which jokes did she laugh? How did she hold her hand while she was laughing? Did she touch her tongue to her teeth? Did she cross or uncross her legs? What else had she done with her body that day? What about the previous day? What about the weeks or months or years before? What messages did she send, because he must have gotten the wrong ones. He was behaving as boys do, as men do. Men have needs. What did she expect? Then, as now, a community will coalesce to protect him — a chorus of accomplices, of friends, of parents and mentors and law enforcement officers, of district attorneys and judges, of lawmakers and teachers and neighbors, of celebrities and colleagues and football coaches and babysitters — who validate and corroborate and shield the man from the reach of the terrible consequences we might inflict. They have so much more at stake than only him.

* * *

Twenty-one years later, a few months after that first reading in the library at the university where I work, I am standing at the bottom of an outdoor amphitheater in Portland, Oregon, where the seats are filled with people. I feel certain the man who kidnapped and raped me when I was 21 is among them. I am planning, after all these years, to tell everyone what he has done. He’s here, I think. He has come to shoot me with a gun. But nothing, not even that, will prevent me from speaking.

And here I am, alive, still speaking.

If getting ‘carried away’ is intelligible as any part of a defense, it is because some part of us believes that all men have this inside them — an instinct to which he had simply succumbed.

* * *

“Maybe none of this is about control,” Margaret Atwood writes in The Handmaid’s Tale. “Maybe it isn’t really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn’t about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it.”

“Power,” says Foucault, “is a set of relations between two persons.”

“Power,” says Voltaire, “consists in making others act as I choose.”

“Power,” says Hannah Arendt, “belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together.”

We all know that men have power as a group, but I want to be clear about something: women as a group do too.

Before Elliot Rodger murdered six people and injured 14 others in Isla Vista, California, he had a long history of expressing hatred and violence toward women. He planned the crimes, and his premeditation is documented in YouTube videos he posted days and hours before the shootings, citing rejection by women as one of his motivations for the slaughter. In one of the videos he says, “I don’t know why you girls have never been attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.”

When women on Twitter begin pointing out that these attitudes of sexual entitlement are consistent with a broader, misogynistic, sexually aggressive culture, men on Twitter get defensive and assert that “not all men” are misogynistic or aggressive or homicidal. One woman — I wish I knew her name — begins tagging her tweets #YesAllWomen in response to the “not all men” argument, to make clear that, no, not all men are homicidal maniacs, but, yes, all women live in fear of those who are. Within days, millions of women everywhere in the world are tweeting their experiences of fear, intimidation, and harassment. At one point, there are as many as fifty thousand tweets a minute, each sharing an experience of everyday misogyny.

The backlash against #YesAllWomen is harsh, with women being trolled, harassed, insulted, and threatened. It happens again, years later, with #metoo, as women reveal they have been blacklisted, fired, sued. The threats and punishments are intended to silence us. In this, they must fail.

* * *

The phrase “speak truth to power” applies here. Often considered an 18th century Quakerism, a form of pacifist resistance against King George I of Britain, the phrase actually first appears in a letter from civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who was in fact a Quaker and who wrote a letter in August 1942 to the Quaker leadership urging them against providing spiritual support to troops being deployed in World War II. “The primary social function of a religious society,” Rustin writes, “is to ‘speak the truth to power.’ The truth is that war is wrong. It is then our duty to make war impossible first in us and then in society.”

As I see it, to speak truth to power means to struggle against various silences: the official silencing of a criminal justice system that claims to protect us but instead renders us mute; a cultural silence that seeks to discredit us before we even open our mouths; and the smaller, private silences we have sometimes imposed on ourselves. It is this last kind of silence I have found to be the most dangerous.

* * *

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story of Philomela does not end with Tereus cutting out her tongue. For a year, she remains imprisoned, weaving a tapestry that depicts the crime she suffered at this war-king’s hands — threads of deep purple on a white background. When the tapestry is finished, Philomela gives it to a servant, communicating to him through gestures to deliver it to her sister, the Queen. The servant obeys, not knowing what message the tapestry contains. The Queen understands the message, rescues her sister, and takes her back to the castle in secret. The two sisters conspire together to kill Tereus’s son, Itys, and serve him as dinner to the King. While feasting away, Tereus asks after his son. At this climactic moment, Philomela reveals herself, disheveled, disfigured, smeared in blood, and throws Itys’s head into Tereus’s lap. As he begins to understand what has happened to his only son, he flies into a rage and chases the two women out of the castle, through the woods, and into a field before the gods finally intervene and turn them all into birds.

In some translations, Philomela becomes a nightingale, doomed to sing her attacker’s name for all eternity: tereu, tereu. In others, her sister becomes the nightingale and Philomela is turned into a swallow, a bird that has no song at all.

Two things interest me about this story. The first is Philomela’s metamorphosis at the end, which is either justice or a further injustice, depending on your interpretation. The second, and more important, is her tapestry, an act of courageous speech that is not speech, this way of speaking out despite the impossibility of speaking. There is much to be learned from this.

To speak truth to power means to struggle against various silences.

Perhaps it is useful here to return to those famous lines by Muriel Rukeyser: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” It is a powerful image. But though I have turned to these lines often, I think what she is saying has proved only partially true. Many women have told the truth about their lives, however impossible that may seem at the time, and the world has gone on pretty much as before.

As you must have realized by now, the world does not shatter after I admit publicly to being kidnapped and raped. My mentors hug me and offer kind words of praise and admiration. Yes, I have a few very awkward conversations in which it becomes clear that others find the subject of my rape a more uncomfortable topic than I do. I now realize this has little, if anything, to do with me and have stopped considering myself responsible for other people’s feelings about that. And though I felt compelled to protect my family all these years from the painful story I carried, my mother and I had the most honest conversation of our lives after she read my book. My husband, whose opinion matters to me more than that of any other person on this Earth, said if anything, he loved and admired me more. Though my fear was that this secret would come to define me as “that woman who got raped,” that I would be shamed, ostracized, shunned, what occurs with far more frequency is that a woman approaches me, soaking wet with her own tears. She says nothing, which communicates a story for which she has not yet found the words.

In the 1960s, Betty Friedan called domestic oppression “the problem that has no name.” We might now call the epidemic of sexual violence against women the problem that has no language.

If we are going to do the difficult work of grappling with these failures, it is not enough that we speak our truth to one another in private or behind closed doors, though this is an important and necessary step. I understand the fear of breaking a long-held silence. It is a fear that holds tremendous power. But if there is any hope for justice, we must speak truth to that power. We must tell anyone and everyone who will listen. And those who will not listen must be made to hear.

* * *

From The Reckonings: Essays by Lacy M. Johnson. Copyright © 2018 by Lacy M. Johnson. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

* * *

Lacy Johnson is the author of The Reckonings and the memoir The Other Side, which was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an Edgar Award in Best Fact Crime, and the CLMP Firecracker Award in Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Tin House, Guernica, and elsewhere. She lives in Houston and teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University.

 

Shelved: The Velvet Underground’s Fourth Album

The Velvet Underground at The Record Plant on May 6, 1969, during a session for VU. L to R: Doug Yule, Lou Reed, Maureen Tucker, Sterling Morrison, engineer Gary Kellgren. Photo by William "PoPsie" Randolph.

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | September 2018 | 18 minutes (3,669 words)

 

The Velvet Underground album VU is the binding agent in a career of releases that differ so dramatically one from another as to be almost artistic reversals. VU has the dark majesty of The Velvet Underground & Nico, the neurotic strut (if not the head-wrecking dissonance) of White Light/White Heat, the tenderness and emotional insight of The Velvet Underground, and the pure pop sensibility of Loaded. In its 10 tracks, it contains refined versions of what the band did well during the four years they lasted. The irony is that VU wasn’t released until more than a dozen years after the Velvet Underground disbanded.

Recorded primarily in 1969, after the ouster of multi-instrumentalist John Cale, and later cannibalized by principal songwriter Lou Reed for his solo career, the recordings that make up VU were shelved for 16 years. They stayed in the MGM vaults, mostly unmixed, until discovered during the process of reissuing the band’s catalog in the early 80s. As a result, VU benefitted from much improved audio technology and was released to a world not only better prepared for the Velvet Underground, but one that had largely absorbed its lessons. The album made a beautiful tombstone for the band’s career, at a time when all the members were alive to see it.
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