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PART ONE
For most residents of Holland, Michigan, there was nothing remarkable about March 11, 1989, a Saturday. Frost on the ladders of the city’s water towers thawed in the sun—spring was just over a week away. Mothers poured milk over cereal for kids watching back-to-back episodes of their favorite cartoons. Fathers who worked weekends drove pickup trucks to industrial jobs at local automotive and concrete companies.
But all was not well in the house on the corner of Lincoln Road and 52nd Street. It belonged to Dennis and Brenda Bowman, a married couple with two children. For the Bowmans, March 11 marked the last time they saw their 14-year-old daughter, Aundria, alive.
Dennis was the one who contacted the police. He told them that he’d come home from his job as a wood machinist to find Aundria missing, along with some of her belongings and $100 from his dresser. Dennis described Aundria—whom he and Brenda had adopted when she was an infant—as a troubled teenager who frequently fought with her mother and had run away to a friend’s house once before.
Dennis agreed to call around to the homes of kids Aundria knew to find out if anyone had seen her. But his wife soon took over as the family’s point of contact. It was Brenda who called the police regularly, and Brenda who corrected the amount of cash missing from her husband’s dresser to $150. That was enough for police to issue a warrant for Aundria’s arrest for larceny; the warrant listed Dennis as the victim of his daughter’s alleged crime.
With no foul play suspected, the police labeled Aundria a runaway and passed her case along to the Youth Services Bureau. Few people who knew the Bowmans questioned the official narrative. Over the years, there had been whispers about the family. Once, when Aundria was in middle school, she boarded the school bus bleeding from her wrist. Some kids gossiped about a suicide attempt, but others said Aundria had cut herself trying to get back into her house after her parents locked her out. There were rumors that Dennis, a former Navy reservist with reddish-brown hair, a goatee, and wire-rimmed glasses, and Brenda, a portly woman with curled bangs who’d once worked at the jewelry counter at Meijer department store, abused Aundria. But back then, what happened behind closed doors was considered family business.
Fifteen months before Aundria disappeared, Brenda gave birth to a daughter, Vanessa. Aundria went from being an only child to more than a big sister—she was a third parent to the chubby, redheaded baby. While other kids her age went to afterschool clubs and Friday night football games, Aundria stayed home changing diapers and cleaning bottles. She kept a photo of her sister in a school folder, where other teens might stash a magazine cutout or a polaroid of their crush. When she wasn’t with Vanessa, Aundria was anxious about the baby’s well-being.
Many people in Holland assumed that Aundria had gotten so fed up with her home life that she finally split. Maybe she’d gone looking for her birth mother. People heard that she’d hitched a ride at a local truck stop, had left town with an older boy, or was pregnant.
Brenda reported a series of tips in the weeks and months following her daughter’s disappearance, all of which seemed to confirm that Aundria had run away. At the end of March, Brenda claimed Aundria had been spotted at a 7-Eleven. In mid-April, Brenda said she received an anonymous call from someone claiming that police were looking for the teenager in the right area, but on the wrong street—whatever that meant. In June, she reported a sighting at a local property, where Aundria had supposedly been hanging out with a group of young men. And in October, Brenda said a friend had seen Aundria, pregnant and with dyed hair, in a line at Meijer. Police investigated but found nothing.
Aundria’s classmates went to prom and graduated, then got jobs or headed to college. Eventually they married and had children of their own. But Aundria remained forever 14. A single photograph formed most people’s memory of her. It was given to police when she first vanished. In it, Aundria is sitting against a blue studio backdrop and looking just off camera, with her green eyes cast hopefully upward and pieces of her dark, shaggy hair hanging over her forehead. Her smile is charmingly off-balanced. She looks suspended between adolescence and adulthood.
Photos of missing children were often printed on the sides of milk cartons or on flyers taped to the top of pizza delivery boxes. Aundria’s picture wound up somewhere else. In 1993, the band Soul Asylum debuted a music video for its song “Runaway Train,” featuring the images and names of missing kids across America. The video was a huge hit, with several versions airing on MTV and VH1. In the one that played in Michigan, Aundria’s photo appears just after the two-minute mark.
Reflecting on the video 20 years after its release, director Tony Kaye claimed that more than two dozen missing children were found because of the video. Aundria Bowman wasn’t one of them.
Back then, what happened behind closed doors was considered family business.
Carl Koppelman never expected to solve mysteries. He worked as an accountant until 2009, when his mother’s health began to decline. At 46, Koppelman became a full-time caregiver, and his days, once filled with reviews of spreadsheets and financial statements, now revolved around driving to doctor’s appointments and administering medications. When he wasn’t tending to his mother, Koppelman was online, exploring message boards, news sites, and social media. At the time, the story dominating headlines, and bordering on popular obsession, was the return of Jaycee Dugard.
In 1991, Dugard had been kidnapped while walking to a bus stop near her home south of Lake Tahoe, California. The blond, freckled 11-year-old was the subject of a nationwide search, but eventually the case went cold. Then, on August 26, 2009, Dugard reappeared. For 18 years, convicted sex offender Philip Garrido and his wife, Nancy, had held her captive at their home in the town of Antioch, more than 150 miles from where they’d kidnapped her. Dugard had given birth to two of Garrido’s daughters, who were now 11 and 15. To the embarrassment of local authorities, parole officers had visited the Garridos’ home several times during the years Dugard was missing. They’d failed to check the backyard, where the young woman was kept in a network of tents, lean-tos, and sheds.
Koppelman’s interest in the Dugard case led him to Websleuths, a forum where crime hobbyists and armchair detectives connect and collaborate on unsolved cases. Koppelman gravitated to posts about cold cases, the ones least likely to ever be solved. Until recently, Dugard’s had been one of them. How many more would benefit from fresh eyes and a little persistence?
Koppelman spent countless hours scrolling through the national database of missing persons and unidentified bodies, known as NamUs. There’s overlap between the two main parts of the database, the disappeared and the deceased—the trick is finding it. During late nights at his computer, in a dimly lit corner of his mother’s suburban home in El Segundo, California, Koppelman would try to match the characteristics of people who had gone missing with those of the unidentified dead. Finding a likeness could be enough to generate a tip for law enforcement.
When Koppelman noticed that the age and condition of some bodies might make it difficult for loved ones to recognize them, it sparked an idea: Koppelman liked to draw portraits for fun, and he was pretty good at it. He also had a CD-ROM of the image-editing software CorelDRAW, which someone had given to him as a gift. One day, with his mother napping in the next room, Koppelman installed the program on his computer. It was his first step toward becoming a forensic sketch artist.
He started creating lifelike renderings of Jane and John Does based on photos taken postmortem. He used CorelDRAW to open eyes, fill in sunken cheeks, and give faces more dynamic expressions. In complicated cases, where bodies had decomposed, he re-created facial structure. The goal was to make the dead more recognizable—to loved ones searching for them, and to police trying to identify them. Once he finished a rendering Koppelman sent it to NamUs, and the database would sometimes publish it. He also posted his work on Websleuths so other armchair detectives could use it in their identification efforts.
Eventually, Koppelman began working with police departments and the DNA Doe Project, which identifies human remains through genetic testing and genealogical research. Glad to help law enforcement generate leads and, in some instances, put a name to a face, Koppelman was almost always an unpaid volunteer. His renderings were instrumental in solving several cold cases, including the identification of the Caledonia “Cali” Jane Doe (Tammy Jo Alexander) in 2015.
But before all that, in 2009, when he was just starting out as an amateur sleuth, Koppelman got interested in the case of the Racine County Jane Doe. When she was found near the edge of a Wisconsin cornfield in 1999, the young woman had only been dead about 12 hours, but rain had washed away any evidence that might have been useful to investigators. It seemed likely that the young woman had been murdered elsewhere and dumped. An autopsy determined that she may have been cognitively disabled, and that she had suffered long-term abuse and neglect: She had broken bones and a cauliflower ear, and her body showed signs of sexual assault. More than 50 people from the farming community where she was found attended her funeral. But no one knew her name or what had happened to her. Her gravestone read “Gone, But Not Forgotten”—a hope more than a description.
Koppelman read everything he could find about the Racine County Jane Doe, combing through news articles and social media. He learned that she had hazel-green eyes, two piercings in each ear, and short reddish-brown hair. She was five-foot-eight and 120 pounds, and estimated to be between 18 and 30 years old. She was found wearing a men’s gray and silver western-style shirt embroidered with red flowers—a design, the manufacturer told police, from the mid-1980s.
On NamUs, Koppelman plugged in some general search criteria—gender, age, location—and clicked through the results for missing persons. With each one, Koppelman asked himself, Could this be her? In most cases, the answer was a clear no. The age didn’t match, or the location made no sense. But one entry gave Koppelman pause: Aundria Bowman.
Aundria and the Racine County Jane Doe shared physical characteristics, and their ages aligned: Aundria would have been 25 in 1999, when the Jane Doe was killed. Holland, where Aundria disappeared, sits directly across Lake Michigan from where the Jane Doe was found—it’s just four hours by car from one location to the other, tracing the lake’s southern shoreline and passing through Chicago. To test the possible identification, Koppelman created a composite image, superimposing Aundria’s photo with ones from the Jane Doe’s autopsy. He marked the similarities in red.
Koppelman took his theory to law enforcement, who found it compelling enough to investigate. To determine whether the Jane Doe was Aundria, police would need to compare DNA from the body with that of someone in Aundria’s family. Because Aundria was adopted, authorities had to track down her birth mother. Koppelman knew that could take a while, or that it might never happen, forcing investigators to find other avenues for identification.
As the police did their part, Koppelman kept poking around online, learning what he could about Aundria. One day at the end of 2012, he came across a Classmates.com page for Aundria—the premium kind you have to pay to keep active, in order to connect directly with former school acquaintances. Was this Aundria, alive and well, and trying to find old friends? And if it wasn’t her, who was it?
Adrian Daub | Longreads | September 2021 | 21 minutes (5,894 words)
When a new trailer for the Marvel film Black Widow dropped in April of this year — after the movie had been repeatedly moved back due to the pandemic — the producers seemed intent on reminding people about why they’d been excited about the movie before the lockdowns started. They did so by closing the promo with a new version of the theme from The Avengers, probably to call back viewers to a different, less socially distanced time. How could you know this was a new version of the motif? It was choral, but that was a well Marvel had gone to before. This time it had lyrics. As best I can tell, for the first time.
As fans welcomed the callback in online comments, I was brought back to a question that I’d had when Game of Thrones did something similar at the end of its fourth season and again at the very end of the show. It’s something of a trend these days to take a highly recognizable instrumental theme and make it choral. And I get why: The gesture is big and bold and epic. But my question concerned something comparatively pedestrian: Who decides what the lyrics are? What language are they even in? And who writes them? I decided to find out.
Those of us who listen to soundtracks obsessively do so knowing that that’s not how soundtracks are intended to work on us. Whoever mixed in a chorus for a few seconds of the Black Widow trailer was going for an emotional reaction, not some new layer of meaning to be disentangled. “When I do a film score,” the late James Horner said in a TED talk in 2005, “I am nothing more than a fancy pencil” executing the vision of a filmmaker. You’re not meant to listen to a soundtrack in isolation from the image. It is music in service of the moment.
You’re not meant to listen to a soundtrack in isolation from the image. It is music in service of the moment.
But one place where this fancy pencil has more autonomy is when it comes to the text that a chorus sings. Perhaps it’s better to say that the pencil is condemned to freedom. When the composer John Ottman was hired to score the 2008 Tom Cruise film Valkyrie, he realized that he needed a break in the texture of the soundtrack at the very end of the film. That’s because in the final scenes of the movie basically all of the even remotely redeemable characters get executed. After they had all died and the credits rolled, Ottman decided he wanted a “sense of release, because there had to be a different feeling as the audience walks out of the theater.” So he hit upon the idea of a self-contained choral piece. “The problem was though, what on earth would they be saying?”
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What on earth indeed? It’s a moment where blockbuster filmmaking — always so anxiously in control of its meanings — seems to be at a bit of a loss. And it’s a moment where we as an audience suddenly get a sense for how films make meaning, and how it isn’t always the meaning they intend to make.
So who decided what the lyrics to the theme from The Avengers were? The short answer is that I still don’t know. But the long answer to my pedestrian question leads into the high-pressure, highly collaborative world of film scoring. A world in which composers often have just a few weeks to write music that pleases the studio and the director, and potentially even test audiences. And in which they toil with assistants, orchestrators, sound editors, and many, many session musicians to find a sound for a film that is still in the process of evolving. I wanted to find out who among this massive group would be the one to say “hey, let’s add a chorus and have it sung in Sanskrit” or something along those lines.
The answer turns out to be: Pretty much any of them can and sometimes do. What film choruses offer us is a perfect synecdoche for the collective, frenzied, and deeply mercenary magic that creates movies in the first place. It’s as likely that a director had the screenwriter invent specific lyrics early in post-production as that a subcontractor, assistant composer, or orchestrator jotted down some words or went on a Wikipedia deep-dive eight weeks out from release in a desperate late-night quest for a non-copyrighted text to use with a cue that might please a bunch of suits half a world away.
What film choruses offer us is a perfect synecdoche for the collective, frenzied, and deeply mercenary magic that creates movies in the first place.
***
Choruses have been part of film scoring for over a century. People have been singing on screen since the earliest silent reels, and with increasing technical wizardry we could even hear them doing it. But something like the Black Widow trailer is what we call an non-diegetic chorus: These are voices that viewers aren’t supposed to somehow locate within the screen action. In early cinema you had to have musicians physically present, first in the cinema with a viewer, eventually in the scene with the actors. Both of which pretty much ruled out the use of a choir. And, as film music historian Mervyn Cooke points out, once technologies existed that allowed films to have at least a partial soundtrack, filmmakers initially avoided non-diegetic music — precisely because they needed to sell the illusion that the sound was coming “from” the scene.
Non-diegetic music started to become the norm only in the early ’30s. And even then the limitations of recording technology meant that non-diegetic voices were not usually worth the trouble. By the late ’30s this had changed. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) had its choir chime in even when it wasn’t for the explicit musical numbers. (Snow White was also the first soundtrack issued as an album, so choruses were part of how film soundtracks traveled semi-independently from their films from the very beginning.)
Alfred Newman had begun relying on wordless “heavenly choirs” going ooo and aaa in the background, in films like Wuthering Heights (1939), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Song of Bernadette (1943). As the music historian Donald Greig, who is also an active session singer on many modern scores, has pointed out, in the beginning choruses had to be at least somewhat motivated by theme or screen action — they were there to speak for ghosts, to intimate religious dimensions to the screen action.
And then there was Dimitri Tiomkin’s score for Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937). The film concerns the discovery of Shangri-La in the Himalayas, and when we finally get to the fabled land the soundtrack accompanies the matte-painted wonderland with a chorus singing in … well, in a language that isn’t English and doesn’t seem to be Tibetan either. And thus another Hollywood tradition was born: film choruses belting out perfectly nonsensical prose with utter conviction.
And thus another Hollywood tradition was born: film choruses belting out perfectly nonsensical prose with utter conviction.
Both types of choral performance have never left the Hollywood lexicon. In thinking through how film choruses make meaning, I became obsessed with what the process of recording a soundtrack looks like today and at what point in that process someone actually writes lyrics in fake Tibetan. In the Golden Age, studios kept their own choirs — professional singers would show up at the lot and ooo and aaa for a Miklós Rósza score today and belt out a ferocious battle hymn for Erich Wolfgang Korngold the next. Studios also had their house orchestrators (usually several), and while laypeople remember the composers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, there are other figures that probably shaped the way films sound just as much if not more, all the while just quietly collecting their paychecks.
Speaking with modern singers about their experiences, I was struck by how little their day-to-day job description had changed since Tiomkin’s day. But the world in which they are performing is altogether different. As part of my research for this article I made a massive choir belt out the most menacing rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” ever, and all it cost me was $199 plus tax. The EastWest Symphonic Choirs software allows you to make a virtual choir sing in just about any style imaginable. Want your ooos and aaas to sound like a whisper? More Broadway or more classical? All of that’s in the package.
But there’s more: Due to a system called WordBuilder, you can have this choir sing pretty much anything — you can type in text in English, in phonetics, or a proprietary alphabet called Votox, and the software will assemble it out of a massive databank of vowels and consonants. This is a commercially available product, but there are even bigger sample libraries kept by individual composers: If you’re wondering who’s dropping by to supply a quick “agnus dei” for a Hans Zimmer score, well that’s almost certainly a proprietary sample owned by Zimmer’s film score workshop, Remote Control.
All the professional singers I spoke to were keenly aware of products like EastWest Symphonic Choirs and the sample libraries — because more likely than not they’re in them. If you’re in the business of singing on film, these days you won’t always be asked to sing for an actual score, but instead you might get booked to record samples. There’s a scary possibility that these artists are slowly eroding the industry’s need for their labor — that the fruits of their one day of paid work will perform for the studios in perpetuity and with no extra residuals. Their disembodied vowels are putting their vocal chords out of business. But that possibility hasn’t been fully realized: Often enough when they arrive in the recording studio, singers will find that there is a vocal track already, but it’s done by computer. And yet, the composer wants a live version. Almost all the singers I spoke to expressed some surprise that Hollywood still bothered.
Their disembodied vowels are putting their vocal chords out of business.
One possibility why they do: Composers simply like working with live humans and consider it part of their job to do so. As Jonathan Beard, who has been composing and orchestrating in Hollywood for over a decade, put it to me, choirs are an easy, effective way to give dimension to a scene — “because you have a human body as one of the instruments, and there’s a power the human voice [has] over us in general.”
Composers are highly trained musicians, and a lot of their training has involved singing. The composer brothers Harry and Rupert Gregson-Williams (Harry composed for films like Kingdom of Heaven, the Narnia-films, and most of Denzel Washington’s films of the last 15 years, while Rupert is best known for DC Universe films like Wonder Woman and Aquaman) were both choirboys at St. John’s College in Cambridge — it makes biographical sense that choral textures and their creation would be important to them. And that they might like to think through music with a live chorus rather than a computer. Another surprising preference that speaks to a kind of sweet traditionalism: While sometimes vocal tracks get doubled in recording (meaning what sounds like 16 singers is just eight overlaid onto each other), this seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Clearly someone in the process enjoys working with large groups of people and thinks they give you an aesthetic payoff that engineering wizardry would not.
But there’s a more cynical reason as well, and it’s the reason why automation hasn’t displaced human labor in other fields: The process of booking some freelancers through a fixer, having them record for a day, and then paying them no residuals isn’t actually much of an expense. That’s how London became a preferred place for Hollywood to record: a large population of well-trained musicians, whose union doesn’t insist on residuals. Several London-based singers I spoke with suggested that the reason Hollywood doesn’t record in, say, Germany as often is that singers in continental Europe have steadier income and are less dependent on session work. And once a producer decides that even London-based musicians are too demanding — well, then there’s always Prague or Budapest. The gorgeous voices you heard in a John Ford Western were the sound of unions and full-time employment; in a Hollywood score today they are monuments to the globalizing power of the gig economy.
***
So that is the world from which these vocals emerge. Imagine you are a classically trained singer in, say, London who has done some previous work on soundtracks. You get a call from a fixer, who is assembling a chorus, or soloists, for a production company. You book the gig, and you show up for the recording session knowing which film you’re singing for, probably knowing the composer you’re recording for, but nothing else. Most recording sessions take place in the famous Abbey Road Studios, which are expensive, so you’re usually booked for no more than a certain number of union-approved hours.
Importantly, by the time you show up for the recording session, the film is pretty much “in post post production,” as one session singer put it to me. The film is basically finished, the wrangling over what the score is supposed to sound like is over. By the time you record, whatever orchestral parts you are supposed to accompany are fully assembled — you usually have them in your headphones as you sing. When you get there, you are handed a large stack of notes to sing and, according to all the singers I spoke with, you get through some portion of them in the next few hours — never through all of them. Some cues you sing will never be in the finished film, some cues you might do 10 versions of. And then the studio time the composer booked is over, you hand over your stack of notes, sign statements agreeing not to divulge anything about what you just sang, and you are on your way.
As the soprano Catherine Bott said: “You enter a studio and you open the score and off you go. You sing what you’re told, and it’s all about versatility, just being able to adapt to the right approach, whatever that may be for that conductor or that composer.” And part of that, singers told me, was singing the words — whatever they may be. As Donald Greig pointed out to me, a lot of these singers have training in classics; they certainly know their way around a Requiem or a Stabat Mater. And yet often enough when they step into Abbey Road they’re being asked to sing perfectly nonsensical phrases in pseudo-Latin — but the studio is booked, the clock is ticking, and as Bott put it, “that’s not the time to put up your hand and, you know, correct the Latin.”
Or the English: Bott sang on the soundtrack for the 1986 animated feature An American Tail. For a cue where the little immigrant mouse Fievel first lays eyes on New York harbor, composer James Horner had the choir intone the famous Emma Lazarus poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. As she was singing through the cue — “Give me your tired, your poor” — Bott realized that whoever had put together the score had written down “your huddled masses yearning to be free” rather than “breathe free.” She was pretty sure she knew better, as did some colleagues, but out of English reserve, deference to the Americans, or professionalism, no one felt it was their place to say anything. The misquote stayed in the picture and you can buy it on CD today.
Perhaps part of what made me look for the meaning behind the lyrics on some of my favorite soundtracks was exactly this professionalism. A good singer sells the emotion and the conviction, to the point that a listener sort of has to believe that it all means something. Interestingly enough, early in this long tradition of made-up languages, Hollywood felt the need to pretend that it did mean something. When Lost Horizon was released in 1937, Columbia Pictures claimed in its publicity material that Dimitri Tiomkin’s score “includes authentic folk songs of Tibet.” The same press sheet noted that the Hall Johnson Choir, a popular gospel choir, “will sing the folk song arrangements in the native Tibetan language.”
Film music historians agree that this is hogwash. There is no evidence Tiomkin researched Tibetan folk songs for his score — what the ad men were selling as “authentic folk songs” were almost certainly newly written pieces in a made-up language. Tiomkin had started out as a concert pianist and relied on a small army of orchestrators to turn his melodies into actual playable scores. Someone in that group put a pen to paper and wrote these pieces, and either that same person or someone else seems to have made up some fake Tibetan text to distribute to the singers.
But for whatever reason Columbia Pictures’ publicity department didn’t want to frame the vocals in this manner. Perhaps extradiegetic voices were still sufficiently new that they wanted to tell an audience what these voices were doing on the soundtrack. Or it had nothing to do with the soundtrack itself, and was just another way of selling the broader spectacle of filmmaking: Look at the lengths we went to.
At the same time, lyrics have a pesky way of clarifying the intended audience. After all, it is not altogether difficult to imagine why Tiomkin and company wouldn’t have bothered with actual folk songs and actual language. Lost Horizon is one of those movies that stars noted non-Asian persons H.B. Warner as “Chang” and Sam Jaffe as “the High Lama of Shangri-La.” The broad and bogus claims to authenticity are also making a point of who the movie is for. The fact that the Hall Johnson Choir was an African American group best known for singing spirituals, amplifies the sense that Lost Horizon turns non-white people’s authenticity into charming window-dressing for white audiences. Like Shangri-La for its white visitors, even when its lyrics were incomprehensible film music was still “for” white English speakers.
At other times when Hollywood filmmaking relied on choruses, the point was the opposite of exoticism: hyper-comprehensibility. Decades later Tiomkin wrote a rousing score for John Wayne’s jingoistic epic The Alamo (1960). At the end of the movie, with the siege over and one lone survivor and her little daughter leaving the ruined fort, a chorus drifts faintly onto the soundtrack, almost as though the singers were standing somewhere far away in the field of battle. Over the movie’s final shots, the choir takes over the soundtrack, singing a version of what would eventually spend some weeks on the pop charts as “The Ballad of the Alamo.” The first lines a viewer is able to clearly hear are: “Let the old men tell the story / let the legend grow and grow. / Of the thirteen days of glory / at the siege of Alamo.”
This music explicitly tells us why it needs to turn human voices singing in a language the viewer is supposed to understand. The “Ballad” tells us what to do with the story we have just heard: Pass it on, let the legend “grow and grow.” Also — since this was made by John Wayne in the ’60s — the message is probably also don’t be a communist. But note how the movie has to treat three things as essentially the same: the singing has to be audible for the casual moviegoer, over people getting out of their seats early or finishing off their popcorn; the words have to be comprehensible on a purely linguistic level to an audience that has been taught to tune out the music on some level for the last two hours; and the reason why these words were included in the movie has to be clear.
Also — since this was made by John Wayne in the ’60s — the message is probably also don’t be a communist.
The fact that these three factors are separate can be easy to forget for an English-speaking audience reared on American pop culture. I grew up on Hollywood films in dubbed versions — though those didn’t typically dub the music. Meaning, as a kid who didn’t speak English, I became pretty used to following a plot in German, then the music would swell and I’d sort of tune out for a few minutes as the soundtrack, and the English language, washed over me. I’d get the basic idea of course — the characters were happy, or sad, or patriotic — but I had no idea what they were saying, and I was okay with that.
That’s sort of how most of us feel when we listen to the theme to the 21st-century version of Battlestar Galactica — unless we happen to be familiar with the mantras of the Rig Veda. Still, it’s a culturally specific experience. These days we can’t watch fantasy or science fiction without being sung at in Sanskrit, Old Norse, Dwarvish, Elvish, Uruk-hai, Klingon, and so on. When composer John Williams returned to the Star Wars universe for 1999’s The Phantom Menace, he composed an amped-up piece for the final duel — and over its churning ostinatos he overlaid a chorus belting out a … Sanskrit translation of a Welsh poem.And apparently the syllables of the Sanskrit text were rearranged to the point of incomprehensibility. Clearly, these shows and movies are not addressing us as potential speakers of Klingon or Sanskrit or even Welsh — they’re interested in the feel and a sound of a language rather than its meaning. At one recording session, Donald Greig told me, “they spent ages telling us how to pronounce the Russian and then we realized, ‘well this doesn’t actually mean anything.’” This turns out to be both a pretty new and pretty old way of listening to music.
When composer John Williams returned to the Star Wars-universe for 1999’s The Phantom Menace, he composed an amped-up piece for the final duel — and over its churning ostinatos he overlaid a chorus belting out a … Sanskrit translation of a Welsh poem.
***
Hollywood scores come in waves. The film industry isn’t known for being particularly fond of risk taking, and film scores in particular often build on previous scores. The director will often cut the film to a temp track consisting of existing pieces, and it’s easy to imagine that the filmmakers would eventually want something that sounds like their temp track to accompany the finished film. Choirs have never really left Hollywood, but there are certainly moments when producers and directors seem to have almost reflexively sought them out and others when they have avoided them. The Omen (1976) with its massive latinate choral opener, “Ave Satani,” kicked off one such wave. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy kicked off another.
This new chapter in the way films sounded started in the Town Hall, a storied concert venue in Wellington, New Zealand. That’s where composer Howard Shore recorded the earliest parts of his soundtrack for The Fellowship of the Ring (the rest would be recorded in London). The recording involved a full orchestra on ground level and rotating choirs in the balcony. It wasn’t lost on the composer that the scene was weirdly traditional: “The orchestra,” Shore explained, “was set up very much the way a pit orchestra was set up in an opera.” The collaborative process around the composition, too, felt like something Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte might have recognized. The screenwriters wrote the text the choir would be expected to sing, an on-site translator would translate them into Tolkien’s languages, and Shore would then set the Dwarven or Elvish text.
Somewhat counterintuitively it’s not actually choral music with incomprehensible lyrics that is novel and needs explaining, it is choral music with comprehensible ones. For a long time, and for far longer than instrumental music, choral music in the West belonged to the church, to the mass, and that meant to Latin. A language as native to Christian religious life as it was foreign to most Christians. The Lutheran Reformation did a lot to hand church services over to language the congregants could actually understand, but throughout Europe the experience of being talked, and in particular sung, at in Latin persisted. That’s of course not to say that people didn’t sing in their vernacular languages — just that the experience of singing words you don’t, or don’t fully, understand would have been very normal to these people.
For a long time, and for far longer than instrumental music, choral music in the West belonged to the church, to the mass, and that meant to Latin. A language as native to Christian religious life as it was foreign to most Christians.
For the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer choral music was meaningful only insofar as the words were not the point. In his The World as Will and Representation, which appeared first in 1819, was republished in 1844, and strongly influenced composers like Richard Wagner, Schopenhauer claimed that music was the purest expression of reality because it didn’t linger with “representations” — words and the things they represent — but tapped automatically into something deeper. Choral music would seem to fall short of that standard — being pretty centrally concerned with words and the things they denote — but Schopenhauer didn’t think so. After all, you shouldn’t listen to sung music primarily for the words, and often you may not even know the words. And Schopenhauer thought this was for the better.
Latin still works that way for most modern audiences: You might argue that there isn’t much of an expectation on the part of an American film composer circa 1989 (or on the part of the filmmakers who hired him) that the audience should be able to follow along with the Latin lyrics — in fact, it might well be distracting if they did. What text is included, both singers and composers confirmed to me, has far more to do with the flow of phonemes and how it interacts with the raw sound of the vocals. The words are simply yet another instrument in the repertoire the composer has at their disposal. But it’s an instrument that comes freighted with all the complications that inevitably arise when our loquacious species uses language.
The words are simply yet another instrument in the repertoire the composer has at their disposal. But it’s an instrument that comes freighted with all the complications that inevitably arise when our loquacious species uses language.
After all, unlike a humming chorus, a Latin chorus does create extra levels of meaning for those who want to listen more carefully. Composer Jerry Goldsmith wrote “Ave Satani” for The Omen as a deliberate transposition of various Catholic masses. While the individual Latin may have been hard to pick up on (and wasn’t entirely correct to boot), listeners who were Catholic likely would have recognized what was being inverted here, given that they’d spent most Sundays around the actual Latin texts. It’s not clear how seriously Goldsmith (or the choirmaster who jotted down the Latin lyrics for the composer) grappled with that dimension of the score — for one thing, the very title of the piece messes up the declension of Satan. But that dimension was there nonetheless —The Omen was part of a kind of religious revival in Hollywood, and though it plays as camp today it was taken far more seriously then.
James Horner’s score for the 1989 film Glory relies heavily on a Latin chorus, and in the film’s climactic moment that chorus sings recognizably in Latin. Glory tells the story of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry regiment, an all-Black unit during the American Civil War, and the film ends with most of the unit being mowed down by Confederate soldiers while assaulting Fort Wagner in South Carolina. The piece in question relies on a text drawn from a Latin mass, frequently incorporated into the classical canon in various requiems from Mozart to Verdi. But, as so often, Horner (or his orchestrator) doesn’t stick to the actual text, but rather seems to create a mashup of snippets from the traditional requiem mass.
So is Horner just using the text of the requiem mass the way layout professionals use the phrase “Lorem ipsum?” Hard to imagine. After all, it makes a lot of sense to have a requiem text being sung as your characters are dying one by one. But more importantly, precisely because the text is so garbled, certain words stick out all the more: “Recordare,” Latin for “recall,” “stricte” (severely), and “judex” (judge). These pieces are largely taken from the Dies Irae, the part of the requiem mass that tells of the end of the world and God’s judgment, albeit with admixtures from just about every other part. The text, though hard to parse, is remarkably consonant-heavy for a Hollywood soundtrack, and a lot of it seems to be due (and I hope I’m hearing that right, as no actual text exists for this piece that I was able to track down) to the text’s overreliance of the future active participle, which ends in “-urus”: just in terms of pure grammar, the threatening hissing in the text is literally about what is to come.
So is Horner just using the text of the requiem mass the way layout professionals use the phrase “Lorem ipsum?” Hard to imagine.
So maybe the text, and the fact that it’s in Latin, isn’t about pretentiousness on the part of the filmmakers at all. It’s a mass for the dead and a tale of divine wrath, and it seems to make — over the heads of most of the film’s audience, admittedly — a point about retribution. It is remarkable how sophistic (white) Americans, who are frequently so proud to deal in moral absolutes, get when it comes to their Civil War. Horner’s grammatically challenged remix of the “Dies Irae,” I think, makes a point that is stark and simple and remarkably rare in American depictions of the country’s most bloody conflict: The Confederacy is evil, those who kill on its behalf are committing a sin, and they are bringing God’s wrath (and future judgment) upon themselves. There is, then, in this particular instance something to be gleaned from a text that otherwise we’re not meant to pick up on.
Which gets at an interesting disconnect — namely, that different constituencies will experience the same song differently. The choir members know what they’re saying, even if they have no clue as to what any of it means. And the composer, director, sound designer, etc., although they live with a soundtrack far longer than either the performers or even the most devoted audience, don’t tend to get to the words that go with the music until fairly late in the game. They often have to rely on orchestrators and assistants, or a helpful choirmaster who claims he really knows Latin. Their budget, and thus their time, is not tailored to their needs, but to the dictates of the director and the studio. The prose simply appears, like a ghost in this immense machine. And — in spite of the fact that most parties involved seem to be content to have it not mean very much — it winds up signifying something.
One example: An “exotic” text can only be understood by very specific listeners. But, very much to the point, they are not therefore the intended listeners. Lost Horizon wasn’t banking on a particular reception in the Tibetan community — rather the opposite: Dimitri Tiomkin and his collaborators seem to have counted on not having any actual speakers of Tibetan in the audience.
This gets a lot more troubling in the case of the phrase “Nants ingonyama bagithi baba,” likely one of the most repeated, parodied, and bowdlerized lines of text in any soundtrack. It’s clear that it isn’t addressing the average viewer with the intention of being understood. The very fact that it is in Zulu, but the story of The Lion King appears to take place in the Serengeti, thousands of miles to the north, suggests that the language is here to signal one thing and one thing only: African-ness.
For contrast, look at the way composer Michael Abels’ score for Jordan Peele’s Get Out features Swahili voices: Outside of the considerable number of Swahili speakers in the world, most people watching Get Out won’t know what the singers are saying. But what they’re saying does matter, in a way: Literally “listen to your ancestors,” but as a saying meaning something kind of like “you’re about to be in danger.” The viewer who doesn’t understand this line is missing an important warning about what is to come in the film. As is, of course, the film’s African American protagonist who cannot listen (or at least understand) his ancestors. Peele and Abels manage to wring from this small decision a whole range of subtle points.
***
But as with all exoticism, there’s a strange tug of war between condescension and appreciation in these kinds of borrowings. When Ottman decided to use a choral piece at the end of the 2008 film Valkyrie, he clearly needed a German text, and I suspect any German text would have sufficed. But he didn’t pick any German text. The film stars Tom Cruise as Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, a historic figure who led the only attempt by members of the Nazi state to get rid of Adolf Hitler. The text is “Wandrers Nachtlied,” one of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s most memorable, well-known texts, and if it’s a little bit treacly by the great poet’s standards, it’s hard to deny it’s a deeply appropriate choice for this moment. Not overtly about politics, it is nevertheless about history, about reflection, about resignation. And about a different use of the German language than one is used to in Hollywood films.
For any German person it’s weird to hear bad guys so consistently speak (and butcher) your language. I’m not complaining, mind you, it makes perfect sense. But what’s remarkable about Valkyrie is that it seems unusually careful for a Hollywood-film in how it deals with the German language. Earlier in the film, Cruise’s character says that “people need to know we were not all like him,” and this final poem seems to do something similar for the German language — the filmmakers close their movie by pointing out that this language is capable of beauty and deep humanity. The poet Paul Celan — himself a Holocaust-survivor — pointed to the strangeness of writing in a language that was both “my mother’s tongue” (Muttersprache) and “the murderer’s tongue” (Mördersprache). Ottman seems to want to recover the former after showing plenty of the murderers.
The strange thing is: I am pretty sure Goethe’s “Nachtlied” is the first utterance in actual German in this film about Germany. Cruise sort of tries a German accent every other scene, the largely British supporting cast doesn’t even bother. And no one speaks any German, the way Sean Connery does with Russian at certain moments in The Hunt for Red October, or Alan Rickman in Die Hard. The film’s supporting cast is stacked with Germans who belt out accented English throughout. It almost feels like the film wants to bend over backwards a little too much: remind us what beauty and thoughtfulness this language is capable of — even though it never shows us the barbarity, which the film renders in English.
I suppose it’s moments like that one that made me obsess over what choirs sing in movies, and who decides what they sing. Because it’s a moment when blockbuster film or TV, which increasingly is created for the greatest possible global audience, which has been focus-grouped and test-audienced within an inch of its life, manages to speak far more directly, more improvisationally to a much smaller audience. All of us are sometimes in that smaller audience, sometimes not. But we’re aware it’s there. When cinema is literally speaking in tongues, how could we not? And to be the person who hears a call the object of fascination never knew it was putting out there — what better definition could there be of what a fan really is?
* * *
Adrian Daub is professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of four books on German thought and culture in the nineteenth century, as well as (with Charles Kronengold) “The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism” (related story here). He tweets @adriandaub.
I don’t often get to use the term gobsmacked, but that is how I was rendered when I saw the film Jurassic Park. I remember the 1993 cinema trip vividly: clutching my popcorn, wide-eyed, as the first dinosaur, a brachiosaurus, ambled across the screen. Walking out with my parents, I jabbered with excitement: “Could we really make dinosaurs real again, Dad? Could we? Could we?”
These memories came flooding back as I read Natasha Bernal’s piece in Wired UK, exploring the world of biobanking animal cells. Bernal answers the question of whether extinct animals could be brought back with a tentative yes — science has long proved that “frozen cells from extinct animals could potentially be used to revive species” — but that is not what biobanking is about. The intention is to increase the diversity of living species, cloning to prevent further loss, rather than to bring back what is already gone. As a species dwindles, so does its genetic pool, and frozen cells from extinct animals could potentially be used to help prevent extreme inbreeding.
Bernal’s case study is Tullis Mason, a chap who sports “three-quarter length shorts” even in a lab coat. Matson runs an artificial insemination company for racehorses from his family’s farm in Shropshire, England. However, on the side, he is also planning to save the animal kingdom by building the biggest biobank of animal cells in Europe. It’s not always a dignified business, with Bernal describing Mason hooking an elephant penis into a device that looks like “a huge condom,” but the science and the ethics her article explores are fascinating. We may not be about to bring dinosaurs back to life, but with help from biobanking, life already on this planet might still find a way.
This is why, back at Matson’s farm, there is a tiny, black, felt-like ear and two bat testicles the size of olive pits on a lab bench. The Seba’s short-tailed bats at Chester Zoo are usually housed in the Fruit Bat Forest, where visitors can feed them as part of a £56 “experience”. Though not currently listed as endangered, with global biodiversity at a tipping point, it’s likely that no species is entirely safe. This bat died of natural causes, but its genetic material will live on.
The first thing that Lucy Morgan, a scientific advisor at Nature’s SAFE, does is shave the ear. “Ears grow to a certain extent throughout our lifetime, so they’re a cell type that’s already wanting to grow and regenerate itself,” she says. “So when choosing a sample that you’re trying to pick to culture in the future, it’s a good one.”
She puts the ear to soak in chlorhexidine to clean it from bacteria and switches on a timer. After two minutes, she transfers it to a petri dish, and starts cutting it into small pieces the size of chocolate chips. Using tweezers, she puts them in cryovials filled with cryopreservant. The tiny testicles will be preserved whole. They couldn’t get any semen out of them – a common problem for animals that are too small to preserve in the traditional manner.
Safely pipetted into a cryovial or straw, an animal’s tissue, semen or ova are deposited into the cryogenic tank, ready to be unfrozen when they may be needed for repopulation programmes in zoos or, if feasible, the wild. In the case of some creatures, whose anatomical challenges do not currently permit artificial insemination using sperm or ova, the samples may stay there for decades. For now, all of Nature’s SAFE’s samples are in one location, but the charity aims to build a backup so that tissue can be split into different places and safeguarded for the future.
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.
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.
This piece by Sarah Everts will make you pause before you next shake hands (whenever this becomes the social norm again). Writing for The Walrus, Everts discusses the importance of smell — and quotes an experiment by Idan Frumin showing that a few seconds after a handshake “subjects would inevitably sniff their own hands to gain some odorous information about the new person.”
Often dismissed as the bottom of the pack when it comes to our senses — the one you would choose to do without — humans, in fact, have an excellent sense of smell, and are subconsciously using it all the time to collect information and recognize loved ones. Evert cleverly intertwines this fascinating science with taking part in a social experiment — a smell-dating event in Russia. The general concept of this event is for people to work up a sweat, wipe said sweat on a cotton pad, and put it in a jar. You then sniff anonymous BO jars and pick your favorite. For Evert, the jars ranged from “the odor of a hormonal teenager in the full throes of puberty—plus exercise,” to the holy grail — jar number fifteen — which smelt of “sex epitomized.” This article is both interesting and humorous … and you’ll come away much more aware of what you are sniffing.
Sniffing the odours of our loved ones—whether consciously or unconsciously—continues throughout our lives. Siblings and married couples are able to correctly identify the smell of people with whom they cohabitate. Even adult siblings who haven’t seen (or smelled) each other for more than two years can still correctly recognize their brother’s or sister’s unique odour print, the signature mixture of chemicals floating off their bodies.
The importance of odour for social cohesion is perhaps best exemplified by the challenges of those who cannot smell. People with anosmia—the inability to smell—often face relationship challenges: men without a sense of smell have fewer sexual partners while nonsmelling women are insecure in their relationships. Both are more prone to getting depressed. Meanwhile, some research suggests that empathetic people are more likely to remember the odour of another person.
Our sniffing abilities and their role in establishing and maintaining social structures can be surprising to some, likely because the human sense of smell has long been belittled by scholars: the father of transcendental idealism, Immanuel Kant, thought life would be better if we all just held our noses so that they were shut off from the outside world. “Which organic sense is the most ungrateful and also seems the most dispensable? The sense of smell. It does not pay to cultivate it or refine it . . . for there are more disgusting objects than pleasant ones (especially in crowded places), and even when we come across something fragrant, the pleasure coming from the sense of smell is fleeting and transient.”
Throughout history, many thinkers have argued that vision is a much more civilized way of experiencing the world; using our noses seemed animalistic, vulgar, backward. If humans sniffed one another as dogs do, how could we consider ourselves above them? How could we consider ourselves enlightened?Instead of swiping, the strategy is wiping: namely, one’s perspiration onto a cotton pad. Instead of swiping, the strategy is wiping: namely, one’s perspiration onto a cotton pad.
The Book of Mormon on display by young LDS members attempting to persuade members of the audience at The Hill Cumorah Pageant to become believers and followers of the faith, prior to the dress rehearsal of the pageant in Manchester, NY, July 10, 2019. All photos by Heather Ainsworth.)
Andrew Kay | Longreads | July 2021 | 35 minutes (9,917) words)
On a July evening in upstate New York, in a field long ago nicknamed “the Bowl,” a dozen men of divergent builds and ages line up in a row. They are wearing street clothes, and they stare — some at the ground, others at the sky — with the studied demureness of people who know they are being watched. Some 10 yards away a huddle of people acting in an official-seeming capacity size them up with laserlike intentness, shielding their mouths as they mutter impressions to one another. And all around them a hundred hushed onlookers have gathered, sharing whispered speculations about the outcome of something plainly momentous.
This is the culmination of casting day for the 2019 Hill Cumorah Pageant, a production put on by Mormons each summer and likely the largest outdoor theater event in America. It’s a spectacle that from the vantage of 2021 seems doubly alien: first because it is among the most bonkers, if least-known, of all pieces of Americana; second because it is an immense gathering of bodies, so my mental pictures of it, when I conjure them amid the pandemic’s late stages, appear like negatives of a vanished world.
The pageant is best described as cosmic cosplay: a volunteer cast of 770 Mormons from across the continent — electricians and nurses and adjunct professors, selected from an applicant pool of thousands — acts out key scenes from the Book of Mormon, the faith’s foundational text, before an international audience. (In 2019 that audience will total 43,000.) It has been happening since 1937, but in late 2018 the Mormon prophet, Russell Nelson, decreed that it must end; the last show, pageant organizers decided, would happen in 2020. Because of COVID-19, though, the finale will get postponed to 2021, and in time that too will be canceled — meaning this, the 2019 pageant, is the actual finale. That no one knows this now gives the events of this week a strange retrospective poignancy.
Since morning they have cast all 770 souls — all but one, that is — assigning parts both major and minor for a mythic drama that sprints through the panicked flight, from Jerusalem, of a party of fugitives in 600 BC, repulsed by that city’s godless decadence; their journey by ship to the Americas; their multiplying in time, then fissuring into two rival tribes; the appearance, hundreds of years later, of the just-resurrected Jesus before them — here, in the Americas, where Mormons believe Jesus walked and preached; the killing-off of the more virtuous tribe by the wickeder one, but not before the good tribe has buried a history of its doings through the centuries, inscribed on gold plates, for posterity; and finally, the unearthing of those plates 1400 years later by a young Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founder, at the urging of a being named Moroni, on the very hillside (the Hill Cumorah) where the pageant is performed.
All this they will reenact just six days from now, when the pageant’s directors will elevate this ragtag army to theatrical competence. Then, on opening night, in costumes ranging from 19th century Yankee garb to whatever fugitive Israelites living in the pre-Columbian Americas might have worn, they will dramatize these scenes on a 10-level stage overlooking the Bowl. Striding about, they will trace memorized movements and lip-synch dialogue to a soundtrack from the ‘80s featuring an epic, John Williams-esque score. Many will dance, embodying that double helix of the sacred yet campy that Mormons have mastered. And when the show is over, per tradition, they will go forth to meet the crowd, and the actor playing Joseph Smith, a perennial fan favorite — this year, a cherubic grocery-store consultant with an MBA — will get mobbed as if he were Freddie Mercury or Kesha.
All of that, though, is yet to come. Now they must cast Jesus — or rather, the Jesuses, for though there is only one Jesus in Mormonism, he is played in the pageant by two men. The first role, by far the less prominent, is the Jesus who appears early in the show, in a vision to the prophet Lehi in Jerusalem, foretelling his birth centuries later; he is called “Vision Savior.” The second is the Jesus who, at the pageant’s pinnacle, visits the Americas: “New World Multitude Savior.”
The men in the row mill about now, striking sheepish smiles or mumbling quips. Then they take turns stepping forward and pacing back and forth, waving magnanimously and exclaiming, “Bring me your children!” while the directors assess their resemblance to the Son of God. One is a friendly-faced man with auburn hair and a dad bod, perhaps 42; another, 23 or so, has a thick middle-parted mane and looks like a young Eddie Vedder. Still another, about the same age, looks to be a disciple too of CrossFit — and when it is his turn to stride to and fro he teeters backward in his cross trainers, as if burdened by his own pecs. It is unclear whether Jesus can be jacked, but the answer would appear to be no: he and the Vedder look-alike are politely waved away by the directors.
Evening advances, and the sky turns a providential pink. The directors confer, engaging in an act that they understand, by their own account, in miraculous terms. They cast everyone based on spiritual hunches: as Mormons see it, every human is a kind of telegraph that clicks, at intervals, into clarity and articulacy, alive with vibrations from beyond. (Mormons call these intervals “personal revelation.”) They await this clarity together now — and I have the sense, viewing them and the anxious would-be Jesuses, that I am seeing something I am not supposed to see: that the powers that be in Salt Lake City, who know of my trip to the pageant — who have stipulated that I must be accompanied by an escort at all times and have, I keep imagining, reviewed my criminal record and even my browser history — would not want me witnessing this unchoreographed scene.
At last the pageant’s artistic director, a Brigham Young University theater instructor named Shawnda Moss, hastens alone toward the remaining men, dismissing all but two — one the man with the dad bod, the other a slender kid in his early 20s with blond hair and dark eyebrows. The crowd coos. Moss looks up at both and, on the verge of tears, declares, “I would like to cast the two of you as our saviors.” Then she turns to the younger of the two and says, “I would like to cast you as our New World Multitude Savior”; to the middle-aged man: “I would like you to be our Vision Savior.”
Interlude; or, What the Hell Am I Doing Here
All that summer I had been sleepwalking. Mornings I woke, and with a glazed-over slowness, a boredom, slouched through my workaday round. Long after work I slouched down streets, familiar streets, which in darkness came to seem projections of my own neural pathways — a circuitry I was sick of. “I feel like I’ve lost the ability to be surprised,” I told a therapist. I tried edibles — chocolates — and when the first did nothing ate a second, then a third, and then all three arrived at once, a stampede that left me rocking back and forth, repentant, ready to moonlight as a D.A.R.E. speaker.
It wasn’t “depression,” exactly; it was spiritual, a staleness that, as an irreligious person, I’d fought with all my life. Except this time was different: I was glimpsing it all around me — in my students especially, college kids to whom I taught writing. The boy with the 142 IQ who went full Brian Wilson and stopped getting out of bed one day. The girl who confessed to me, in chillingly dispassionate tones, that she saw no point in living out the rest of her days. Something was afoot: some gathering despondency, strongest in the young, that had no shortage of worldly causes — planetary, economic — and yet exceeded these. It was a ghostly deficiency. All the Christian faiths in America were hemorrhaging members — and panicking. Fewer than half of millennials now identified as Christian, while Zoomers had just been declared “the Least Religious Generation.” “Nones” outnumbered Catholics and equaled evangelicals.
Meanwhile, a host of weird pseudo-religions like QAnon had sprung up to fill the void, which terrified me. One morning I drove out to the country and, cresting a summit, saw a giant Q mowed into a hillside.
One day I saw a headline that woke me up: the penultimate Hill Cumorah Pageant was approaching. I knew about the pageant because, though I live in Wisconsin, I grew up half an hour from where it takes place. I’d never attended, but knew that once a year a wormhole materialized down the road, something akin to J.K. Rowling’s Platform 9 ¾ that bore you not to Hogwarts but a parallel universe of mature make-believe. The headline kindled my curiosity. I pictured Mormons — a pair of missionaries clacking their way down the street in those white short-sleeved shirts, black pants, and dress shoes, facsimiles of Gallant from Highlights — and it struck me that they were the antithesis of what afflicted me and those I knew. Something in their door-to-door deportment, their earnestness and brio, seemed a soft rebuke to my own disenchantment.
I would go and walk among them, discover what they were plugged into and even absorb something of their radiance. In the process I would return to where I was from — and where, I should explain, I first knew the jolt of something higher.
I would go and walk among them, discover what they were plugged into and even absorb something of their radiance. In the process I would return to where I was from — and where, I should explain, I first knew the jolt of something higher. I’m an older millennial, one of the legions of “nones”; my upbringing was an experiment in godlessness — secular and scientific, shorn of euphemism. My mom was an ex-flower child, my dad an alumnus of the original Woodstock who made kombucha and jogged on our home treadmill in just tighty-whities and blue Pumas. To teach my brothers and me about origins, they read aloud from that candid seventies picture book, Where Did I Come From? In it were illustrations of a plump, ruddy-cheeked couple with thicket-like pubes who, in one image, were in bed together, locked in a coital embrace. “It’s a little like a sneeze,” the caption read, “but much better.”
What happens when you raise a child in a vacuum of religion, untroubled by sin, bereft of any metaphysical framework? I spent Sundays watching MTV and playing outside; I discovered masturbation at around age 8 (privately dubbing orgasm “the super feeling”), then, convinced anything so delightful must be injurious, renounced it. At night I lay awake, brooding on eternity. The worldview of Where Did I Come From, however clear-sighted, reduced human life to biology alone; there were no sequels entitledWhy Am I Here? or Where Am I Going? What dogged me most was the endlessness of death: an electric shock coursed through my body when I tried to grasp the infinitude of it, how all the eons I could think of were, joined together, the briefest prologue to whatever lay beyond the grave. How was everyone I knew just going about their affairs — talking on the phone, dawdling at the mall — when it was obvious they were hurtling toward that blankness? Shouldn’t they be screaming?
At some point, to divert my brain, I took to reading late into the night. The books were science fiction and fantasy — and because I shared a room with my younger brother who fell asleep easily, I read them by the glow of a Nintendo Game Boy accessory called a Light Boy. I sat up reading, at first, Orson Scott Card’s Ender saga, Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet and the requisite Tolkien novels, then weirder stuff: David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.
The books drilled a hole through my world of Saved by the Bell reruns, and through that hole I could peer at a widened reality where good and evil lay as clearly demarcated as oil from water. Supernaturalism abounded: people died and rose again, often many times over. It was possible to believe that the sensible world was a fraction of what was — that a numinous realm hovered behind it where other life forms dwelled, watching and invisibly swaying us.
I now know that nearly all these writers — and with them heavyweights like Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe, and C. S. Lewis, plus recent voices like Stephenie Meyer — were, or are, ardent theists. I think I leapt at them because they were smuggling in religion under the guise of science fiction. Or was there a difference? I see myself sitting up in bed like a miner in darkness, equipped with the Light Boy and holding it, lamp-like, over books that together formed a vein of something — some ore of strangeness, of wonder, that I hadn’t known I’d needed but couldn’t now ignore.
Tuesday morning
It was a luminous July morning. I was being driven about the grounds in a golf cart by Neil Pitts, the pageant president, a man of 68 with the benignant and fatherly air of an elementary-school principal, who was indeed wearing a white short-sleeved button-down and black pants. We drove past the 10-level stage, an enormous Chichen Itza-like structure with a steel frame and façade of gray fiberglass sheeting, built into the lower half of the Hill. Pitts explained that the pageant began in the ‘30s, when Mormon missionaries living on the Joseph Smith Family Farm, down the road, put on impromptu skits from the Book of Mormonto amuse themselves. In 1937 it became standard and they moved it to the Hill Cumorah.
I see myself sitting up in bed like a miner in darkness, equipped with the Light Boy and holding it, lamp-like, over books that together formed a vein of something — some ore of strangeness, of wonder, that I hadn’t known I’d needed but couldn’t now ignore.
We entered Zion’s Camp, crammed with RVs and tents, deserted just now. We passed one tent with a huge banner-like photo draped across the front; pictured was a family of eight, arms around one another — good-looking, Rockwellian people who sparkled. Then we cut back across the Bowl, and Pitts described the seismic power of the sound system, complete with speakers below the stage that rumbled during the show’s most action-packed sequence — a scene called “Destruction,” when earthquakes and flooding rock the Americas as Christ is crucified. Though I knew this from my reading, I turned to Pitts and, with the artless fascination of a child, said, “So the consequences of the Crucifixion were felt here?” He nodded: “Big-time.”
We passed a pavilion called the Study Shelter, where meals and hymns happened, then skirted the cast area, full of tents where youths hung out when not rehearsing. At last we made our way back to the stage, where some 200 cast members had gathered for morning rehearsal. Pitts dished me off to my next chaperone, associate director Shelby Gist, a straight-talking woman in a streaming floral blouse and jorts. Gist stood at the center of a throng of players, telling them with the exasperation of a JV hoops coach when to depart the stage after a scene: “The exact line is, ‘Then he will pour out his spirit abundantly upon you.’ Then you can move!”
The cast dispersed to their stations about the stage. Many were clad in BYU merch, others in a popular T-shirt that read AIR MORMON, featuring a silhouette spread-eagled in space — but instead of Michael Jordan dunking it was an angel blowing into an apocalyptic trumpet. They ran through a “boat scene” depicting the fugitives’ voyage from Jerusalem to the Americas, in which they reared up a mast nested in the stage while spray geysered up. As the brassy space-opera soundtrack blared, I watched an attempted mutiny as Nephi — the Book of Mormon’s extremely sincere protagonist, its Frodo — got ambushed, only to shriek, “Touch me not!” in tones that would’ve made Elijah Wood blush; and, magically, the mutineers flew backward and collapsed.
I started laughing at this, adult live action role-playing that it was, yet found it captivating: it was the strangest cocktail of old and new, ancient yet American. The pageant was conceived as America’s answer to Oberammergau, a passion play performed in Bavaria since 1634 — it continues to this day — in which local people reenact Jesus’s last days. With this in mind I began to see this spectacle for what it was: the last vestige of a centuries-old tradition of outdoor religious theater, the heir to the medieval morality plays in which an “Everyman” faced some great temptation, undergoing a trial in which his soul hung in the balance — the creaky entertainments of the English countryside that Shakespeare watched as a child.
Yet there was something undeniably contemporary about this play and the religion it celebrated. I found it impossible to forget that this story had been written less than two centuries ago: the whole religion was as recent an invention as the lawn mower. And in its modernity it kept reminding me of that genre in which I’d taken refuge as an insomniac kid. It wasn’t just the soundtrack or the apparitions being staged; it was the terms I heard people casually using, like “spirit prison”and “Melchizedek Priesthood.” It was the fact that the Jesus statue at the Salt Lake Temple visitors’ center is backed by a huge mural of the Milky Way — an outer-space Jesus.
A scene during the opening night of Hill Cumorah Pageant in Manchester, NY, July 11, 2019.
So when I learned the pageant’s script had been written by Orson Scott Card, the controversial sci-fi novelist I’d read by the glow of the Light Boy, it rather put me over the edge. Card told me, when I tracked him down: “I’m on the record many times over, calling Mormonism a ‘science-fiction religion.’” He meant Mormon cosmology, an interstellar system graced with a lore to rival Dune, which crystallized in the 1820s — the decade that brought Mary Shelley’s best-known novels — and continued to be built out in the decades that followed, which saw luminaries like Jules Verne and, later, H. G. Wells.
What was the point of this sci-fi faith? All around me were clues: the fact that the cast saw themselves as creators of a celestial city on earth, here in this field. They called that city Zion, an ancient name for Jerusalem that Mormons have revived; they believe themselves charged with forging New Jerusalems now, modern microcosms of the ancient one that take shape wherever people gather, commit to the greater good, and thereby grow godlike. Mormonism is filled with such cobwebby concepts — and rites — dredged up from antiquity and given strange new life in contemporary America: they believe the Garden of Eden is in Jackson County, Missouri. The earliest Mormons performed exorcisms in the age of the first fax machines. And this was key, to faith and pageant both. They depended on a furious effort to resuscitate what was buried in a premodern past — ritual energies, characters, symbols — in the midst of modernity: a landscape of decaying interstates and shuttered malls, where these antique constructs sat as awkwardly as mastodons. Keep going, those around me seemed to say, arms outstretched like so many Gatsbys toward a dream of divinely charted existence. It can persist even here.
Morning bled into afternoon. I followed my next handler, an ebullient Filipino-American woman named Cherlyn, toward the outer edge of the Bowl. There, by the road, I watched a group of teens practice a scene called the Harvest Dance. The soundtrack featured a jaunty Disneyish waltz, which the directors played on a boom box while the teens cavorted. Here I noticed something I would go on observing during youth rehearsals: the directors called out, “This actually happened.”
An outsider might have perceived all this as akin to, I don’t know, the Middle Earth Festival, but to the cast, of course, it was tantamount to a Gettysburg reenactment: not fiction but received truth, a kernel of vision they had internalized and that, acorn-like, ramified into all they said and did. They were meant to emerge from this with the pivotal episodes of the Book of Mormonlodged in their muscle memory. (Surely no attendee at the Middle Earth Festival marvels afterward, “I finally get what Gandalf went through at Moria.”) What did it mean to sacralize a science fiction, ramping up its imaginative plot points to the status of historical fact?
An outsider might have perceived all this as akin to, I don’t know, the Middle Earth Festival, but to the cast, of course, it was tantamount to a Gettysburg reenactment: not fiction but received truth, a kernel of vision they had internalized and that, acorn-like, ramified into all they said and did.
Standing at the roadside, I saw a line of 18-wheelers parked beside the Bowl, their cargo spaces open. They held chairs. A coordinated army of cast members approached the trucks, took hold of the chairs, and carried them to the Bowl, wave after wave, trundling them by the thousands and fixing them in rows on the grass. A small city was taking shape here in a matter of days. It was a huge extrusion in the physical world of one guy’s imagination, of a wild saga inscribed in the brains and bodies of his followers. The kingdom, I saw, was here. Whether the vision that had birthed it was fact or fiction, historical record or fever-brained concoction, hardly seemed to matter.
Interlude: The Vision
Two hundred years ago, in a wood three miles from this field known as the Sacred Grove, a teenager arrived on an early-morning walk. He was shy and apparently unremarkable — poor, uneducated, the fifth of 11 kids. Joe Smith. He’d grown quieter of late, tormented by his sinfulness and the hypocrisy of those around him.
Across the region people were starved for the supernatural, for more than the standard church service could provide. Unlettered hicks spoke in tongues; farmers saw stuff in cornfields, preached the Second Coming of Christ in the flesh — and soon. The Smiths were steeped in that enthusiasm, practitioners of a backwoods occultism that led them to scour the land for buried treasure. He had a divining rod — a forked hazel branch he carried through the countryside, which he believed pointed toward riches in the earth — and with it a seer stone he held to his eye for the same purpose. Ludicrous and Tom Sawyerish, maybe — but then, the Western world was in a cusp-moment, caught between premodern magical thinking and an Enlightenment rationalism whose conquest was far from complete.
So: a teenager awash in magic, on an early-morning walk. He came to a clearing in the woods, knelt down to pray but couldn’t speak. Suddenly he heard footsteps behind him, shot up, and spun around, only to find no one. He stood there unable to shake the thought that he was being stalked, tracked down “by some actual being from the unseen world.” He would die. Just then, a pillar of light tunneled through the trees and staggered him. You’re forgiven, said a voice. All the churches have grown putrid. Go off and live virtuously.
What happened next is either unutterably enchanting or unsuitable for adult discussion. He went up to bed one night and began to pray, and as he did so his room flared with light and a paranormal being in a white robe hovered before him. He stated his name as Moroni; he had come to tell Smith of a new gospel buried in a hillside nearby — he specified where — inscribed on gold plates and bearing “an account of the former inhabitants of this continent and the source from whence they sprang.” Buried with the plates was a pair of seer stones like those he’d used to hunt after gold, which he would need to translate them. Go and find them, the thing urged him, dig them up, and translate them for the world. Then he vanished and the room grew dark.
That was how it started: as a poor boy’s dream of treasure, transmuted into divine longing. Gold gave way to God. He bided his time — got married — then set out one night with his new wife, Emma Hale, toward the hill. He found the appointed spot and began to dig — and while he toiled the being materialized again, watching over him. Hours later Smith descended the hillside with the plates swaddled in his coat like a live thing. Hale never saw them directly, but rather caressed them under cloth, feeling their metallic hardness, the grooves of their inscription.
The characters on the plates, he said, were written in something called reformed Egyptian. They needed translating. So he retired to a room with an assistant and, placing the covered plates on a table and one of the seer stones in a top hat, gazed into the hat and did something oracular. In the darkness of the hat the seer stone glowed, and above it a parchment materialized, upon which the characters appeared, and below them their English translation. Smith spoke what he saw while the assistant, rapt, transcribed. He unspooled a saga of ancient American tribes from Jerusalem — their feudings, visit from Christ, the better tribe’s extinction. The work was finished by June 1829, hitting the shelves at a local bookstore as theBook of Mormonthe following year. It was a feat of magic: Smith pulled a world religion out of a hat.
Whether you find the product unreadable (Mark Twain called it “chloroform in print”) or discover in it a mystical document on par with the Bhagavad Gita is a matter of personal temperament. If you are like me, you are apt to see in Smith an early writer of speculative fiction. It’s not just the supernaturalism of his saga; it’s that it has a strong element of the seriality that typifies the genre: whatever Smith’s plates really consisted of — and no one outside his innermost circle ever saw them — he used them as the basis for a sprawling piece of Bible fanfic. The Book of Mormon is a superfan’s paean to the King James Bible: there’s a reworking of Exodus, but instead of Moses there is Lehi, leading his people not to Canaan but to America. An ark of sorts bears them there. There are ancient submarines worthy of Jules Verne. Above all there are Jesus’s dealings in the Americas post-resurrection — The Further Adventures of Jesus Christ.
There’s a term known to lovers of science fiction — namely, retroactive continuity (“retcon” for short). It describes how writers take an existing series and reinterpret its details to make possible the series’ continuance. At its best, retconning can breathe new life into a stagnant franchise; at its worst it’s a cringey affront to the audience’s memory and intelligence, the author scarcely acknowledging some preposterous contradiction with what came before. Think of Star Wars: in The Return of the Jedi Palpatine dies decisively, hurled down a reactor shaft by Darth Vader. But in The Rise of Skywalker, in a WTF-caliber retcon, he’s simply…back. (“Somehow,” a character remarks airily, “Palpatine returned.”) Mormonism constantly retcons the Bible: in John 10:16 Jesus tells his disciples cryptically, “Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring.” Does he mean the Israelites in the next county over? No, Smith revealed; he means he has to go materialize amid chocolate, maize, ocelots, preaching before Native Americans. For that matter, Adam and Eve lived in the Greater Kansas City Metropolitan Area.
Transposed to the religious realm, retroactive continuity becomes a gesture of defiance, a refusal to let the series — the Judeo-Christian franchise, nearly two millennia old — come to an end. The U.S. into which Smith was born was undergoing a spiritual stagnation not unlike our own: in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, religious participation was shockingly low. Just 17 percent of Americans in 1776 belonged to a church. In his “Divinity School Address” a few decades later, Ralph Waldo Emerson bemoaned “the universal decay and now almost death of faith in society.” “Half parishes,” he noted, “are signing off.”
How do you thwart a large-scale decay of faith? It is as a response to this question that Smith and Mormonism speak pressingly to us now. Smith’s answer was to insist that revelation was ongoing, that ancient scripture could be opened up and revised — continued — with new visions that drew on the old but retreaded them for a nascent U.S. “Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead,” Emerson complained. So Smith revived it, retconning the Bible into a new myth, a sequel with America at its center: America was the site of Eden, of a Christ visit; in the end, it would be where humanity gathered to await the Second Coming.
“He waged a resistance movement against disenchantment,” Richard Bushman, Smith’s 90-year-old biographer, born into the church, told me. That was the conceptual engine at the heart of this sci-fi faith and the pageant that celebrated it. They were modern re-enchantment projects, huge sweaty efforts to counteract disbelief with the jumper cables of a resuscitated myth. Here, in the middle of contemporary life — on a hill in upstate New York — God was fully, thrillingly alive.
Tuesday late-afternoon
The cast Wi-Fi password was “ComeUntoChrist.” It was 4:30 now and hot, and I was tired and irritable. There was no coffee to be had on pageant grounds, I was beyond the reach of my 4G LTE service and, worse, weary of the constant supervision. They were so damned nice, the escorts — but their niceness couldn’t conceal the fact that I was being surveilled. It was odd: there’s a thriving subreddit called r/exmormon, where apostate Mormons vent and defiantly proclaim their indulgence in masturbation, Jim Beam, lattés. Had I been after dirt on the church, did Salt Lake City really think I needed to travel halfway across the country to get it?
But there was a Hill Cumorah Wi-Fi network, and it was cool if I used it (I imagined 90 percent of the internet being blocked) — and I was walking now with a handler named Kristin a stone’s throw from a restroom hut. I decided to stage a mini-rebellion: I would go into the hut and camp out, getting my internet fix and some alone time. What if Kristin gave up and left before I came out?
She walked me to the hut and I went inside, entering a stall where I stayed forever — answering texts, checking all the things. At last I washed up, drew a breath and left the hut, glancing about. The coast was clear. I felt an influx of giddiness that was choked off when, some 25 yards away, I spotted Kristin beaming at me and waving. I plodded my way to her like a guilty spaniel, but when I reached her she showed no sign of annoyance. “Hey!” she cried. I half-expected her to add, “How’d it go?!”
She handed me off to my next chaperone, Scott, the middle-aged ex-CEO of a street hockey league. Scott’s kindness was more than skin-deep, a preternatural goodwill that made me briefly forget my annoyance at being monitored. His affect was fully Fred Rogers, his eye contact unswerving as a Mack Truck. What was my background? he inquired. Former academic, I said. Scott gazed mutely into my eyes and thence my soul for some five seconds. “That’s why you’re so thoughtful,” he said at last.
We headed toward the stage. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the greatest organization in all the world,” Scott said, “because it can pull people together to get great things done like this, in such short periods of time.” He cited the church’s readiness to aid communities stricken by natural disaster: when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, droves of Mormon volunteers rushed to the scene, bringing food and manpower well before the U.S. government had lifted a finger.
He cited the church’s readiness to aid communities stricken by natural disaster: when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, droves of Mormon volunteers rushed to the scene, bringing food and manpower well before the U.S. government had lifted a finger.
When we got to the stage I saw that dress rehearsals were underway. Here I had my first glimpse of the costumed ancient Americans. The latter, I should pause to explain, are the reason the pageant and the Book of Mormon can make for distressing experiences. The book posits that two tribes, the Nephites and Lamanites, lived in the pre-Columbian Americas, and that the Lamanites, having killed off the Nephites, became the peoples now known as Native Americans. What makes this origin story especially painful is its timing: the Book of Mormonwas published in March 1830, two months before President Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the U.S. government to force Native peoples off their ancestral lands and relocate them west of the Mississippi. And it was marketed as a history of the Native Americans, who came, it revealed, from Jerusalem. While Indigenous people were being shunted westward in death marches like the Trail of Tears, their history was being quietly overlaid by the visions of a white kid from upstate New York. It was its own Indian Removal.
I should clarify that however gruesome these origins, the LDS church is now a multiethnic phenomenon with more members outside the U.S. than in it — and plenty of these members balance clear-eyed critique with a regard for what they find redemptive in the faith: often, its contention that revelation is continuous and anyone can have it. Still, this much is clear: Mormonism is a modern re-enchantment project that took shape on a continent populated, to begin with, by people who never saw themselves as bereft of wonder. “We as Indigenous people never were kicked out of our Garden of Eden,” Elise Boxer, both a practicing Mormon and an enrolled citizen of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, told me. “That’s where we live.”
Gazing at the stage now, I saw that on either side, two groups of about 20 teens — white as Wonder Bread, clad in skirts rather like Navajo quilts — practiced a battle dance while the soundtrack blared. They brandished spears. One group played the Nephites, the other the Lamanites; it was a call-and-response. At its close the two groups chanted, “Hah!”
A couple take a selfie in the golden, end of day light, just prior to the start of the Hill Cumorah Pageant in Manchester, NY, July 10, 2019.
Closer at hand I saw other players decked out as ancient Americans. Some wore headdresses containing feathers, plus beaded necklaces and shirts decorated with pelts; another wore a kilt studded with turquoise. Still others were clad in a different sort of outfit that looked not Native but vaguely biblical: gem-filled headdresses, purple and emerald robes that undulated in the breeze. These were the fugitives who flee Jerusalem toward the start of the pageant. At one point I saw the (partially costumed) man playing Joseph Smith stroll by in a khaki nineteenth-century tailcoat and wig, plus cargo shorts; he paused to share a joke with a Nephite man in a feathered headdress and kilt. Watching them chortle together I wondered if I might be on whippits.
The redface, though. It was in such cartoonishly bad taste, it was hard to balance with the extreme kindliness, the charity, that the cast radiated. (Later I asked one of the escorts, “Is it okay for a nearly all-white cast to dress up as Native Americans?” She replied, “Please don’t ruin anyone’s day by asking them that.”) I thought of the Boston Tea Party, whose dissidents dressed up as Mohawk Indians. Writing now, I think of the storming of the Capitol — of the Q Shaman, whose aesthetic was less Viking than Native. Why, in precisely those moments when they wanted to trumpet their identity to the world, did Americans play Indian dress-up?
The redface, though. It was in such cartoonishly bad taste, it was hard to balance with the extreme kindliness, the charity, that the cast radiated. (Later I asked one of the escorts, “Is it okay for a nearly all-white cast to dress up as Native Americans?” She replied, “Please don’t ruin anyone’s day by asking them that.”)
Scott turned to me: “How would you like to be in a scene?” Over his shoulder I saw two teens in Native gear, at ease during a lull in rehearsal, doing the “Raise the Roof” dance. “We’re going to do a run-through of the New World Multitude scene. You can be a Nephite.” Processing this, I felt my visage crumple into a constipated expression. This was the climax of the pageant, when the risen Christ appears among the Natives. For an instant I pictured myself — tired, angry, emanating B.O. — unwillingly donning a headdress, then being embraced and kissed by Jesus. That image, in turn, being uploaded to the pageant’s Instagram, then picked up by the Salt Lake Tribune and going low-key viral. My alarmed friends blowing up my phone: “Yo, call me as soon as you get this.”
But it was to be a street-clothes rehearsal (aside from Jesus), which seemed less risky. Soon cast members, hundreds, began congregating at the foot of the stage. They arrived in waves. It was early evening and the atmosphere had grown expectant, alive with the ambient power that can only come from a concentration of bodies outside. And, of course, Jesus was coming.
Together we trekked up the hill, taking our places at stations on either side of the stage. I was a knot of anxiety: Was this okay? The Nephites were a made-up people; wasn’t it impossible to appropriate a culture that hadn’t existed? But then I recalled the faux-Native getup I’d just seen, the chants. I couldn’t possibly go through with it. Also, wasn’t I partaking in a sacred myth I didn’t believe in — and didn’t that mean I was appropriating Mormon culture? I felt mired in layers of wrongdoing; I was losing my shit.
Suddenly they flipped on the soundtrack and the scene started. All around me cast members were looking toward the top of the stage as if entranced, and I followed their gaze and stopped cold. It was him: it was Jesus Christ. Shoulder-length auburn wig with middle part. Synthetic beard. White robe, brown sandals. He looked like the Jesus from the gaudy religious pictures I’d seen in older relatives’ homes — except he was standing atop Chichen Itza.
He had a beam of light trained on him, and stood motionless with arms outspread and palms turned upward, a radiant wisp against the New York sky. He could have been a superhero. “I am the light and the life of the world,” he lip-synched. Joyous choral music ensued; the voice of God sounded through the speakers: “Behold my beloved son, in whom I am well-pleased.” As the carol continued, the hundreds of cast members filtered onto the stage, a massed and carefully patterned congregation. Scott, beside me, nodded: it was our turn.
We found our places and stood still. Jesus, still at the top of the edifice, dropped his hands. There was a central staircase leading down the stage, and he began to descend it, the beam of light staying with him. “Arise, and come forth unto me,” he mouthed. I scarcely recognized him from the casting ceremony. His name was Austin Reid, and he had gone from an early 20-something who ran an online outdoor-gear company to a sort of ghost, lordly and wraithlike and totally self-assured. “Thrust your hand into my side,” he pronounced — and a lone player walked up the steps and did just that. “Now you know that I am the God of Israel,” he said. “The God of the whole earth.”
Players rushed to greet him, in keeping with the script, but it seemed they were hardly acting — just viewing him as the thing he represented, genuinely magnetized. Some he touched, healingly; others he embraced. The chorus swelled to a refrain of “Hallelujah.” Near me a young mom held a toddler who cried, “We have to go! Take me to Jesus!”
I looked out across the landscape to the road below, where an SUV drove by, and imagined the driver sipping a coffee and glancing up at us innocently and then spraying the coffee. The road was Route 21, which I’d lived off of growing up. Then I glanced back at Jesus, encircled by players who, by tomorrow, would be dressed in the Native costumes I’d seen earlier. I felt full-force the scene’s terrible ambiguity. You could have called it, rightly, a disturbing symbolic drama in which a white Jesus literally descended to dispense wisdom and salvation to Indigenous people. In that sense it was the epitome of a colonial mindset that had produced the Indian Removal Act.
At the same time, it was a stunning piece of outdoor religious theater: ordinary people were acting out ultimate things amid gnats, birds, trees — and doing so despite a wider culture that had mostly abandoned outdoor theater and, increasingly, ultimate things. They were ushering in a new reality: the scene’s title meant not just the premodern Americas but life now, made annually novel, alive with ghostly energy, by this hillside ritual. It was a defibrillator to the heart of an old and disenchanted world.
Wednesday pre-dawn
I woke at 5:00 a.m. the next morning in my Airbnb, a rural guesthouse, peeled back the sheets and found a large white spider beside me. I barked, shot out of bed and, unthinkingly, dressed and set out driving.
It was still dark. It is strange to drive the roads of the region where one is from when one’s family is gone from there; stranger still if the region is western New York. If you are from this place, you can understand how a religion started here. There’s a feral rawness to its woods, and the roads that lead through them are lonely and trance-inducing. The fields are limitless: you ramble through them, and when you get to the end, seemingly, there is only more field, as in a dream or a prefiguration of eternity.
A woman recalls her story of deciding to join the LDS faith (being saved) during ‘Devotional’ at the days end, but just prior to the dress rehearsal performance of The Hill Cumorah Pageant in Manchester, NY, July 10, 2019.
I was thinking about Joe Smith. On a morning like this he’d had his first vision. What got me, though, was what came after: how he spent his life expanding this Bible fanfic into a cosmology that millions lived in. The way he disclosed that cosmology — it reminded me of nothing so much as the pulp science-fiction magazines that, a century later, marked that genre’s golden age: Amazing Stories. Other Worlds. (Scientology, itself a sci-fi faith, began in one of these.) Smith revealed his cosmos one mind-blowing installment at a time. His visions were serialized in a sense, separated by months sometimes; converts awaited each with the bated breath of cult fandoms biding their time till a new issue, volume or episode drops. Only the stakes were everything: their destinies, the nature of the universe, and of their souls.
Here is what he revealed: God was an embodied extraterrestrial who lived near a distant star called Kolob — and if by some marvel we could see him, “if the veil were rent today,” we would find ourselves eerily mirrored. It was the 1840s and telescopes had grown more sophisticated. People peered through them expecting to see God, and when they didn’t, they merely concluded he lay beyond the reach even of these new instruments. Smith’s story was of its time in that sense, but added a crucial wrinkle: God had been one of us but upgraded himself into a superior being. The purpose of our own lives was to replicate his ascent, becoming ourselves gods who would populate our own planets after death, parents of new creation. “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens!” Smith thundered to his followers just before his death. “That is the great secret.”
Smith’s was an extremely American drama — bootstraps individualism given mythic form by a man who’d spent his youth in poverty, hunting treasure. How could you get more upwardly mobile than to become a god? There was a catch, though: no one could attain godhood singly; we got there as units — by marrying and having children — which sounds like a championing of the nuclear family, and is, to an extent. Beneath this, though, lay something more poignant: an insistence that we need each other, that we’re interlocked by spokes of dependency, our souls’ progress conjoined. The Mormon heaven is social: in death we find ourselves surrounded, in thriving celestial hubs, by the people we loved in life. To the extent we perfect our bonds with them here, now, we are already there.
I went on driving, watching woods give way to drumlins, remote roads to residential ones. I made my way by instinct down one such road, scudding by silos and houses just lighting up, and veering at last onto a steep street I climbed and then pulled over. I looked at the silhouette of the house I’d grown up in, warm now with other lives. I’d not seen it in 15 years. In the stillness I heard our voices as they’d sounded when we were gathered in this place: children’s screaming laughter, my dad belting out Grateful Dead songs, my mom in her bathrobe laughingly chiding him. It occurred to me that in the Mormon heaven I would never lose these people. I saw my bedroom and me in it at night, already dogged by the insomnia that would rack me as an adult and driven, for distraction, to books. The reading was a kind of prayer, as all fiction-reading is. Hands close together, I lay summoning what was invisible, miraculous: aliens, unfathomed planets, unseen forces that governed all we did.
The memory of these stories blended in my head now with Mormon myth, and I had the sense that they had sprung from the same impulse. Mormonism and science fiction were modern inventions that responded to a new reality, one increasingly dominated by scientific thinking and the technology it bred. People found themselves in a Copernican universe far vaster and more impersonal than the biblical heavens, and one way to react to this new normal was to discover in space itself — its stars and planets and imagined denizens — the stuff of religious awe. So in science fiction, the wonder and terror long inspired by the Judeo-Christian God, and by angels and devils, gets remapped onto aliens; visitations become visitors. In Mormonism, God is an alien; we are all incipient aliens, bound up in a project of collective deification.
In the stillness I heard our voices as they’d sounded when we were gathered in this place: children’s screaming laughter, my dad belting out Grateful Dead songs, my mom in her bathrobe laughingly chiding him. It occurred to me that in the Mormon heaven I would never lose these people.
Why did it matter, this drive to enchant? I thought again of that spiritual desiccation I had glimpsed in myself and my students. And of what I’d seen on the ground that week: people supercharged by a modern myth that insisted on the sociality of salvation, a retconning finally of redemption itself, which held that we are delivered as collectives or not at all. It was a mythos for the era of disasters. It lay behind the Mormon response to Katrina, and lately COVID-19, which saw bishop’s storehouses, positioned around the globe, bring nearly one hundred million pounds of food to beleaguered populations in 2020.
Was the culture I belonged to — a culture of unbelief that wanted, nonetheless, to confront the catastrophes ahead, which threatened to tilt reality toward science fiction — capable of such feats of social strength? My time here had made me skeptical. Because belief was the crux of it, the impetus behind the directors’ calling out to the young cast: this actually happened. That was what elevated their story from sci-fi to scripture, from Dune to an architecture of revealed truths in whose image they remade the world. What did I or my friends — secular, overeducated, climate-terrified yet basically inert — have to rival that?
In order for people to abandon their self-interest and commit to a grand cause, writes Jane Bennett in The Enchantment of Modern Life, something has to happen to their aesthetic being — that part of them that is sensory and emotional. They have to fall in love. “One must be enamored with existence,” she writes, “to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others.” Put baldly, “You have to love life before you can care about anything.” Enchantment turns out to be the precondition for committed political life together — a way of charming people toward self-transcendence with a vision of existence that pulses with animacy and purpose. Ethical codes are stillborn without such visions; they can’t catch unless people are inflamed by some story of their lives capable of drawing from them, again and again, virtuous performances.
Thursday
Opening day. Morning.
Across the grounds people bustled. Some drove golf carts. On the Bowl, cast members did last-minute run-throughs while directors, clutching at walkie-talkies, fine-tuned and fretted. The air crackled with promise.
I had arrived late. There had been a dry run of the New World Multitude scene and I had played hooky, having decided against the part. Now I strode with Scott through the cast area, where a mood of serenity had set in. People were finding each other. They sat in clusters outside the tents, playing guitars and singing, touching each other reassuringly and laughing. I had never witnessed a pilgrimage. I saw people divorced from their workaday lives who — bathless, deviceless — had been deprived into clarity.
“Everything else is stripped away,” said a girl named Emily.
“It’s a very similar feeling, I would imagine, to when people converge on disasters, and they’ll sacrifice of their own to give to some cause,” added another kid, Jonathan. “Everyone’s made some sacrifice to be here. And love is at the center of that.”
I went on walking, surveying all I saw with the attention one bestows on something about to vanish. No one knew, of course, that this was the last pageant — that the pandemic would obliterate the planned finale — but there was something valedictory about it all. The show needed revision — the redface had to go — yet it seemed a pity that this huge, weird piece of Americana, which had survived into the age of TikTok, was ending because a 94-year-old man in Salt Lake City had demanded it should. The church’s official line was that it wanted people focusing on their home lives — scripture-reading, prayer — not theater. This sounded like a cover for wanting to save money, issued by an institution that as of 2020 had $100 billion in assets.
Morning blurred into afternoon, afternoon into evening. Somehow, the premiere was close at hand; the cast left to change.
For once unchaperoned, I followed a party of players toward a costume house at the hill’s southwest end. Here, as players disappeared behind curtains, I took in a scene that included an entire wall stocked with boxes containing beards, each labeled. There was NEW WORLD MULTITUDE SAVIOR and, beside it, UNBELIEVER #1. “They’re all made of human hair,” said a voice beside me. It belonged to a spectacled seamstress named Jackie. “A beard can take a year to make.” There were hundreds. She plucked a box off the wall — VISION SAVIOR, the lesser Jesus — and opened it. “Church members donate their hair for these,” she murmured, dangling a reddish pelt before my face. I gaped at what was at once the beard of God’s son and the Norelco trimmings of some ginger guy in Utah, then turned away.
All emerged from the costume house dressed and I followed, watching as they rambled down the hill. There they were joined by the clad players from the other houses, several streams of people made suddenly mythic, who came together in one teeming body aimed, I saw, for the devotional pavilion. Beyond them I glimpsed the Bowl, swarming now with spectators — thousands—staking out chairs. With a giddy solemnity the cast crowded into the pavilion, ranging in rows — characters from a Mesoamerican past brushing shoulders with those from Jacksonian America. A director led them in a last prayer, after which they sang a hymn called “God Speed the Right,” then marched out to meet the crowd.
I walked with them. The premiere was slated for 9:00 p.m., and it was 7:30; this time had been allotted for the players to mingle with the audience. I watched the graying cherub playing Joseph Smith — Willy Wonka-ish in top hat, tailcoat, and breeches — get swiftly engulfed by stans seeking selfies. Vision Savior, who worked in Big Oil and lived year-round in Saudi Arabia, flashed me a beatific smile, then turned to greet a family of eight.
I surveyed the acreage of people before me and, in the gathering darkness, ventured in. It was the most international of crowds. I met a family that had flown in from Honduras that day, and when the show was over would return by red-eye flight. I met a party of women from the Sichuan province of China who’d been born into Buddhism but converted as adults to Mormonism, enticed by the emphasis on family.
At this point I became aware that the weary cynicism that had steered me to this place was being dislodged by something else. A doubt about my doubt? The energy, the immense shared electricity coursing through this outdoor cathedral, unmoored me. A man in the missionary getup — mid-50s, indefatigable as a jackrabbit — pulled me aside, training laserlike gray eyes on mine. “I teach economics and finance at Columbia. These are not individuals lacking in intelligence,” he said, gesturing across the crowd. “They’re brilliant.” He had fused his spiritual and logical intelligence, he needed me to know, into “an incredible technicolor understanding.”
Whatever unsteadiness I was feeling, it seemed a consequence of being inundated by thousands of worshippers. I suppose I would’ve felt the same approaching the Kaaba at Hajj. I met two women from Massachusetts who spoke to me of the afterlife with such passionate certitude, such detail, they could’ve been returning tourists. “The amazing love that exists on the other side of the veil is outstanding,” one said. They spoke of becoming kings and queens in death — of deification — and with gentle firmness stressed how I needed to pray to receive personal revelation. When I asked how — was there a wikiHow? — they laughed: “Just talk to God. Just ask Him.” (Earlier, in private, the pageant president had told me the same, more forcefully: “You have to kneel down and ask!”)
At this point I became aware that the weary cynicism that had steered me to this place was being dislodged by something else. A doubt about my doubt?
All at once the cast vanished, full night came on and the show started. I found a seat. In the dark, a cluster of robed women appeared atop the stage, flourishing apocalyptic trumpets they pretended to play while an epic fanfare sounded through the speakers. The cast marched onstage, an army, some bearing flags — and as they assumed their places in an opening tableau there were whoops and whistles in the crowd.
All went semi-dark. A group of players danced and jumped while the narrator, an omniscient father-figure who sounded like Charlton Heston, set the scene: Jerusalem, 600 BC. Depravity reigns. Lehi, the Mormon Moses, and his son Nephi have visions foretelling Jerusalem’s destruction and Jesus’s coming. They need to flee. The visions took the form of “water curtains,” big cumulus mists plumed up from understage, through which apparitions shone: a manger, a tree, a middle-aged angel high above the stage who for years dangled from a cable but in 2019 stood on a hidden platform. The production quality lay between full-on professional and DIY.
It started raining; babies cried. Someone farted. I watched the fugitives cross the Atlantic in that wooden boat, limousines-long; their arrival in the Americas and campy harvest dance; the fracturing of the party into rival tribes.
The show’s climactic sequence kicked into motion. “Far away, on a hill outside Jerusalem, three crosses rose,” the narrator announced. At the upper-right corner of the stage a trio of crucifixes swung into view, thronged by flames, then vanished. A stage-wide inferno followed — the cataclysm that killing Jesus triggered here. I watched as firebombs burst, geysers shot up, and waterfalls plummeted; I saw the silhouettes of a few hundred cast running about screaming while, below us, the earth convulsed with subterranean sound.
Total darkness and silence ensued. Then the risen Jesus appeared, this little refulgent being clad in white and perched at the pinnacle of the stage. It had always borne the seeds of sci-fi, the Christian story — an otherworldly emissary, the logos incarnate, sent here on an errand to save us — and here Jesus looked like nothing so much as a lone visitor. His person was mediated by streaks of rain. It was so quiet across the Bowl, a deep and babyless silence. Lights slowly came on, and I watched the scene I’d acted in two days before: Jesus descending the staircase, the cast filtering onto the stage, all surrounding and venerating him. Around me, people started crying.
The scene ended and they told of the two tribes going to war afterward, of the Nephites’ dying off — but not before one of them, Moroni, had buried their history in this hill. It’s hard to convey the all-out weirdness of the next, final episode. “Centuries later, in the spring of 1820,” the narrator declared, “the Lord heard the earnest prayer of a young man named Joseph Smith.” There was Smith excavating the hillside while Moroni supervised; there he was sharing the good news with a bunch of New Yorkers in bonnets, corsets, suit jackets. It was impossible to ignore how meta — how postmodern, really — it was: the abrupt fast-forwarding 14 centuries, the found text which is the very text you’re watching, the author inserting himself into the story. It was at once deeply moving and reminiscent of a senior thesis by a screenwriting major.
The show concluded and the Bowl resounded with cheering. Anxious to beat the crush, I got up and hastened away. Rain fell more heavily. When I reached the roadside I turned and took in the scene a last time: the multitudes gathered on the grass like groundlings, as they’d gathered here nearly a century; the cast advancing to meet them; the whole thing an international city, the shadow-image of the ones they hoped to form in death. And the driven rain deluging it, in effect, out of existence.
The character of Jesus Christ rises above horn players at the end of the The Hill Cumorah Pageant in Manchester, NY, July 10, 2019.
I found my car and drove off, making my way back to the guesthouse, where I peeled off my wet clothes and stood a moment savoring the silence. Then, warily, I approached the bed. What I wanted to do I had never once tried, despite being almost 37 — and couldn’t at first. What brought intelligent people, brilliant people, to kneel?
Nevertheless, I lowered myself, placing my knees on the tile and feeling the soreness in my nearly middle-aged body, no longer that of the boy who’d arrived to bed each night seeking communion with the spirit world. To whom or what was I even kneeling? Jesus Christ? The phrase embarrassed me. The embodied God who’d preceded us in space?
A line from Wallace Stevens came to me: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” I couldn’t decide whether this was sublime or Orwellian. Still, I brought my hands together and asked — to be more inspired, surprised, tuned to a godly frequency that as yet I hardly heard — and felt something unfamiliar: a peace that was either grace itself or the relief of giving up control. This I let linger, studying it, till it got really late — till the imprint of the day, of the whole mad pilgrimage, began to weaken, eroded by the sound of rain hitting the guesthouse, great percussive drops that drew me by degrees to sleep.
***
Andrew Kay is a writer, editor, and teacher who lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Photo by Jan De Meuleneir/BELGA MAG/AFP via Getty Images
In this beautiful and emotional piece for Outside, Ian Dille manages to narrate the drama of the 2020 Tour de France, while also detailing the death of his father. The 2020 Tour was the last the pair watched together, after years of bonding through their love of the race. Dille deftly weaves the legs of the race with anecdotes about the ailing parent watching alongside him, demonstrating his love and appreciation for the man who gave him the freedom to pursue his own passion for biking as a career. When Dille is left to watch the final stages of the Tour without his father his devastation is palpable. This piece is expertly done, showing the shared interest that brought a whole family together, and the importance of taking time just to be together, even if it is while also watching a six-hour Tour stage.
Life’s metaphors, its various struggles and successes, seem to play out in a more dramatic fashion in a bike race. At least they did for me and my dad. Riders conquer mountains and succumb to crashes on the way back down. They surge ahead of the group with a violent effort called an attack, form temporary allegiances to share the draft and break the wind, and then try to dispatch each other in the closing kilometers. A rider will lead the race alone for a hundred-some-odd kilometers and then get gobbled up by the charging peloton just meters from the finish.
For my dad and me, watching the Tour became akin to an annual fishing trip or a multi-day hike. Growing up, I spent countless hours pedaling behind him on a shiny aluminum tandem, exploring rural North Texas roads, where we lived in the nineties, and tackling the rocky singletrack overlooking Lake Grapevine. When my dad moved to D.C. in the 2000s, he lost his tight-knit group of bike-club friends, and also his impetus to ride. I was too strong, or too cool, to get out with him then. We didn’t bond on our bikes anymore, but watching the Tour, we came to know each other as adults.
My dad gave me his hearty laugh and his boyish eyes, but he could also be stoic, gruff, and comically reserved with his emotions. He’d ask how my car was running, and I understood that he loved me. Watching the Tour together, I cherished that, though my dad had never competed, he understood the sport, and through it, he seemed to understand me. Despite its impracticality, he supported my decision to pursue bike racing professionally. He was good at asking questions, and he didn’t fully fall for Lance’s fairy tale. Over the years, we watched heroic performances with a healthy amount of skepticism but also shared an appreciation for underdogs. An unlikely hero would emerge, and we’d root for him to beat the odds.
The showers had been steady for days. Even when the rain broke, the weather app on my phone showed another coming storm. At night, lightning scarred the sky, jagged answers to the crack of thunderous questions. A relentless deluge, like so much else last year.
***
In the spring of 2020, the bottom corner of TV screens broadcasting news channels recorded the rising numbers of deaths and cases, along with Dow numbers shifting, sometimes in seconds, from green to red.
During the spring break of my daughter Indie’s senior year, her school district announced they would close schools the week following the break, with plans to reopen on March 23. On March 19, the governor of Texas temporarily closed schools until April 3, then later extended the order to May 4, and on April 17, he closed all private and public schools for the remainder of the year, while initiating steps to re-open the state for business. Indie would finish her senior year in her bedroom. She would not step back through the front doors of her high school, and she would not place her hands in purple ink and press them to a wall or write her name and 2020 beneath her handprints. There would be no Bronco Walk, when seniors paraded the school halls behind the drum corps in their caps and gowns as teachers and students came out of classrooms to cheer, while parents lined the main lobby boasting signs of celebration and congratulations. I would have cried, I am sure, standing there, holding a sign for Indie.
During those first weeks at home, Indie told me more than once how she wished she had known that the last day she left school was the last time. She grew up with so many goodbyes, so she knows the importance of looking back in those moments before leaving.
Up until that week in March, as Indie left for school each morning, I’d stand beneath the canopy of an oak tree outside to watch her go. She’d always look back as she pulled away, and I’d blow kisses and wave my arms wildly. I mourned those mornings. They ended before I knew they were gone.
I raised Indie on my own.
After her father left, disappearing one July morning when she was 4 months old, I understood the most important thing I would do in my life was raise Indie. When she was 2, I promised myself not to date until she was grown. I worried about men coming and going through her life, but more importantly, I recognized my responsibility, and while I have a history of being irresponsible in my life, I wanted to get this one right. The promise kept.
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Through the years, I went to every parent-teacher conference alone. I taught Indie how to ride her bike. How to drive a car. How to dive into a pool. I watched her write her first word, apple. Heard her first word, juice. I decided punishments, and I chose rewards. For every birthday, I woke her by walking into her room with a lit candle in a pastry and singing, “Happy Birthday.” On the days when daycare was closed or I couldn’t afford it, I took her to my office or into my classrooms. I explained to every pediatrician and one ER doctor that no, I don’t know the father’s medical history. I shook hands with the boys who picked her up for dates, set her curfew at 11:30, the same one I had had in high school. Then that morning three years ago, when I had to tell her that her grandfather was suddenly gone, and two months later, when I waited for her to get home to say the words, “Gramma has cancer. Stage IV.” I taught my daughter how important it is to apologize, and I told her, “I’m sorry,” every time I made a mistake or yelled or we had to move, again, because for 11 years, the academic job market awarded me only visiting positions. The first time we moved, from Colorado to Utah, Indie was 16 months old, and by the time she entered eighth grade in Texas, we had lived in nine states.
And because of that, we are most who we are when we’re on the road.
As the weeks went by, I worked at our kitchen table teaching my creative writing workshops on my laptop, while Indie studied on her bed in her room. Around six each night, we’d meet on the couch to watch our shows and visit, often agreeing how lucky we were that we get along so well, that we enjoy each other’s company. Because that’s what we were for months, each other’s company.
And because of that, we are most who we are when we’re on the road.
We stayed up late, and we slept late. For the five years we’d lived in this apartment, I’d hear the wail of trains in the middle of the night, and in the mornings, the roar of planes in their descent to the DFW airport, 25 miles south. That spring, no train whistles called out in the night, and the morning skies were empty.
After a while I could sense a looming sadness and restlessness in both of us, so one night I asked Indie if she wanted to go the next day to see what the World’s Largest Casino looked like closed. Her face lit up. The next morning, we drove 45 miles north, crossed the Oklahoma border, and took Exit 1 to WinStar. We drove slowly around the sprawling property the size of a community college campus, if one were to have a three-tower hotel and 600,000 square feet of gaming centers. No cars or people in sight, except for a security guard patrolling on a bike. I rolled down my window and snapped a few photos of the desolation, an eerie site. On the way back, we saw an abandoned one-story motel and pulled over to wander among the empty, exposed rooms, the diamond-shaped windows, most of them broken. That out-and-back drive would turn out to be our first half-tank trip.
After that, every two weeks I’d pick a place for us to go, somewhere a half-tank of gas away. Far enough to get away, but close enough not to have to use a gas station restroom. Only after we were in the car would I tell Indie where we were heading — a hotel on a corner square where Frank Sinatra once stayed and Bonnie and Clyde had been spotted, a vacant Futuro house (orange, shaped like a spaceship), a drive-in theater, an empty hotel featured on Ghost Adventures, and once, an abandoned post office with a collapsing porch. Along the way, we’d reminisce about all the places we’d lived, as if touring unknown towns reminded us of all the towns we’d known. Or maybe it was facing the ending to the 18 years we shared, so we wanted to remember those places and houses and rooms, to honor them as we passed mile markers and took exits along with Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits.
***
The forecast for that Friday read like all the other days before that week. Rain chances at 100% for 7:00 p.m., the hour of Indie’s graduation. Instead of the traditional ceremony inside the coliseum of the university where I teach, graduation would be held at the Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, where parents and families would park on the infield to watch graduates cross the checkered finish line on a big screen. The world’s largest at 218 feet wide and 94.6 feet tall — 21 stories.
Indie wanted a white dress for graduation, and even though Texas reopened on May 1, I told her I preferred she order a few online. We’d return the ones she didn’t choose. I think I’ll always see it in my memory, the afternoon she stepped out of her room in a dress rehearsal. A sleeveless, above-the-knee dress, falling in folds between the panels of her purple gown. Cap on. And because the instructions for the ceremony advised against heels because of the long procession around the track, she decided on her white platform Vans.
Over the previous few months, Indie and her friends had had to accept everything that was gone — classes and crowded hallways, prom, playoffs, end-of-the-year concerts, award ceremonies and banquets, yearbook signings, the senior walk, the senior breakfast. The senior walk was the only one that didn’t hold any meaning for Indie, a day when DHS seniors put on their caps and gowns to walk the block to the elementary school to thank their first teachers. If Indie were to walk to the elementary schools she attended, she’d have to head north to Oklahoma, on to New York, and back south to Ray Elementary in Chicago. 3,412 miles. Miles she and I drove together over the years, one road after another.
While Indie got ready that Friday, I ironed her dress. I took my time, and every now and again secretly checked the rain chances on my phone. At 4:00, 80%. Students were to arrive at the Speedway by 5:30 to have their temperature checked, to answer questions, and to turn in their signed health waiver. If it rained, graduation would not be rescheduled. It would be canceled. I stood there ironing, wanting to ask, “What if it rains?,” but I held the question in my throat, knowing Indie already carried it and that she was pushing it to the far back of a drawer of the year’s losses.
The first school event of Indie’s I attended was when she was in first grade at Will Rogers Elementary. It was a morning assembly, each class from K-3rd performing. When I got out of my car and started walking to the school’s office to sign in, I remember whispering, “I’m coming, Indie. I’m here. I’m coming.” Inside, I joined other parents leaning against the walls of the gymnasium/auditorium. The students, cross-legged and squirming, sat in rows on the tile floor. When Indie got to her spot on the stage, her blonde hair a bob, wearing a sweet dress my mother had mailed, she began searching for me. I raised my right arm and held my hand as high as it would go. I stretched out my fingers and held them still. I thought my motionless hand might be easier to see among all the waving ones. “It was,” she told me when I picked her up from school that afternoon. I told her it was also a secret message — you are strong, you are steady, I am here.
Through the years, in the stands of volleyball and basketball games, the auditoriums of plays and choir concerts, the stadiums of band half-time shows and contests, I have sat alone and raised my hand high for Indie, still and steady, even when I knew she couldn’t see me because the auditorium lights had already lowered, or I was too far away in the stands.
A few days before graduation, Indie picked up her car passes in a drive-through procession at school, the same way she had returned her textbooks, picked up her yearbook, and turned in her drum major uniform. Each senior was given only two passes — a Student Pass and a Parent Pass. One car for each student, one car for each family.
By 6:00 that night, a reprieve. Blue sky. I got in the car I had been driving for 11 years, one my parents had given me. I headed toward I-35 West for the 20-mile drive, my Parent Pass on the passenger seat:
VILLAGE OF CHAMPIONS at Texas Motor Speedway Parent Pass Class of 2020 Graduation Ceremony Present this pass for entry into the infield of TEXAS MOTOR SPEEDWAY
As I joined the line of cars into the Speedway’s massive parking lot, I whispered, “I’m coming, Indie. I’m here. I’m coming.” I know she can’t hear me when I do this, but it always feels like she does. I showed my pass to an attendant, drove through the south tunnel, and followed the directions from orange vests to turn into a gravel space between two pylons.
As the massive screen directed, I tuned my FM radio to 97.7. All around me, the families of 459 graduates. As we waited for the ceremony to begin, the screen featured the graduation photos and activities of each senior. Suddenly, there was Indie, her long blonde hair, her smile, and her accomplishments, including the name of the university in New York she had chosen. I clicked a photo with my phone.
The following Monday, NBC’s TODAY show would feature the Speedway graduation, showing a long line of seniors in purple DHS masks as “Pomp and Circumstance” played, the rows of white chairs on the track placed six feet apart, and a parking lot of vehicles on the infield facing the 22,000-square-foot screen, honking in celebration.
Imagine the largest drive-in theater in the world — that’s what the Speedway became that Friday night, the temperature 90 degrees — a 1,500-acre facility, hundreds of trucks, SUVs, and cars lined up inside an oval track of 1.5 miles ending in a checkered finish line.
What a fitting end — to watch Indie cross a finish line on a road after all the roads we’ve known. Sitting in my car by myself, ever at the wheel, felt like an honor I had earned by raising her alone.
The students were allowed to remove their masks only as they crossed the checkered line where the superintendent, wearing a mask and gloves, shook their hands and gave them their diplomas. As each graduate crossed, some bowed, some gave a thumbs up, some did a funny dance. I wondered what Indie might do.
As the T names approached, I shifted in my seat, looking for blonde hair, a pink stole, a white dress, Vans. When I heard Indie’s name, the first time I had ever heard her full name announced in public, I pressed on my horn and held it, shouting, “Indie! Indie!” She accepted her diploma with a nod, then turned to the camera with a big smile and a wave. Full of joy.
If memory proves anything, it’s that we always miss something. Either we can’t call up a detail or someone tells us what we didn’t see. I suspect there are times when we take in the meaning of the moment more than the details of the moment itself.
Because later that night, when Indie rushed through the front door, still in her gown, she asked, “Did you see it?” She plopped down next to me on the couch, scrolling through her phone. “I figured out a few days ago what I wanted to do. Hold on, someone took a picture of me and got it.”
I stared at the photo of my daughter crossing the finish line, beaming, mid-stride.
“I couldn’t see you,” she explained, “but I knew you could see me.”
And then I saw it.
Her right hand held high.
Still and steady.
***
Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together, and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her writing has been named Notable in Best American Essays for the past four years in a row and has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, LitMag, The Normal School, The Paris Review Daily, and The Rumpus. She teaches in the creative writing program at University of North Texas.
Photo by Vyacheslav ProkofyevTASS via Getty Images
Yvonne and George Kludsky grew up as part of circus royalty – fourth- and sixth-generation circus performers respectively. In the big top heyday of the ’50s and ’60s, circus animals were viewed as exciting and glamorous. Things are now very different. Reduced to one elephant named Dumba, keeping her has meant that animal rights activists have been “making the family’s life hell.” So much so that in September 2020 they packed up Dumba, and disappeared.
In this article for The Guardian, Laura Spinney follows the Kludskys to Spain, where they ended up with their elephant. Spinney shows compassion for both the Kludskys, as they navigate a world where they are no longer welcome, and for Dumba, who has spent most of her life living in a pen the size of two tennis courts. Spinney finds no easy answers as she delves into the complicated issue of whether an animal the Kludskys consider “a daughter” needs, in fact, to be rescued.
While Arnal considers people who make their living from performing animals unfit to look after them, William Kerwich, president of the French union representing animal trainers, insists no one is better qualified to care for an animal than the trainer who has known it all its life. He is deeply suspicious of the do-gooders who set up animal retirement homes paid for by donations from a public who, he suggests, have been duped into thinking that all circus folk are animal torturers. “If there were to be a ban – and we’re not there yet – it is out of the question that our animals should go to a sanctuary where there is no one competent to look after them,” he said. The union, Kerwich told me, was standing squarely behind Yvonne Kruse.
What ageing elephants need, says Scott Blais, is space, autonomy and the company of other elephants. Blais, who set up a sanctuary in Tennessee in 1995 and another in Brazil in 2016, keeps elephants in a setting as close as possible to conditions in the wild, and says previous owners who have returned to visit their old elephants often marvel at their transformation. It was at the Tennessee sanctuary that workers witnessed the extraordinary reunion of two former circus elephants, Shirley and Jenny, in 1999. The two had spent one season together at a circus when Jenny was a calf. After a separation of more than 20 years, they recognised each other and bent the steel bars of an elephant fence in their eagerness to get close to each other. They became inseparable, and for seven years, until Jenny died in 2006, their relationship was like that of mother and daughter.
Elephants have shown they can retain a bond with humans, too. Joyce Poole recalled her reunion with a wild African elephant after 12 years. When she called out to him, he recognised her voice, walked up to her car window, and “allowed her to touch him”, she said. Elephants also kill humans, in captivity and in their ever-shrinking natural habitat, but these numbers are tiny compared to the numbers of elephants killed by humans each year.
This Memorial Day marks the centennial of one of the worst instances of racist violence in U.S. history. On May 31, 1921, white mobs in Tulsa, Oklahoma, launched a campaign of terror in Greenwood, a prosperous African-American neighborhood nicknamed “Black Wall Street.” The spark of the violence was ugly, and all too familiar: the lie that a white woman had been assaulted by a Black man. It was perpetuated by a local paper, the Tulsa Tribune, which published a story with the headline — or, really, the instruction — “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator.”
When the dust settled, hundreds of Black residents had been killed. White rioters had looted Black businesses and destroyed Black homes. More than 30 blocks of Tulsa had been reduced to smoldering ruins. As is so often the case in a country where white power structures determine official history, the event soon slid into obscurity. For many decades, when it was recalled at all, it was referred to as a “race riot.” In truth, what happened was a massacre.
The centennial has occasioned widespread coverage of the massacre, much of it excellent. In The New Yorker, writer Victor Luckerson profiles two women who were committed to telling the full story of the violence when it seemed like no one else was:
As the centennial of the race massacre approaches, a raft of documentaries, along with a new thirty-million-dollar museum, are poised to make the story of Greenwood more widely known—and financially lucrative—than it has ever been. But the Black Tulsans who preserved the community’s history risk being forgotten, particularly the women who did the foundational heavy lifting. It’s not just Parrish—Eddie Faye Gates, an Oklahoma native and longtime Tulsa educator, continued Parrish’s work by interviewing massacre survivors more than seventy years later, recording their perspectives in books and video testimonials.
History lessons draw power from their perceived objective authority, but if you drill to the core of almost any narrative you will find a conversation between an interviewer and a subject. In Greenwood, Black women such as Parrish and Gates were the ones having those conversations. Now descendants of both women are working to insure that their legacies are recognized. “She was a Black woman in a patriarchal, racist society, and I think bringing all those elements together tells you exactly how she’s been erased,” Anneliese Bruner, a great-granddaughter of Parrish, said. “It’s convenient to use her work, but not to magnify and amplify her person.”
Luckerson himself is a dedicated chronicler of overlooked Black history: He is working on a book about Greenwood, and he publishes a newsletter, “Run It Back,” that documents his research findings.
In The New York Times Magazine, author Caleb Gayle, a Black Tulsa native, connects past to present, describing how the struggle for racial justice in his city continues. Recently, the last survivors of the 1921 massacre testified before a House subcommittee alongside Tiffany Crutcher, whose twin brother, Terence, was shot and killed in 2016 by Tulsa police:
She had started with hopes that justice would follow her brother’s killing. But it was in the dashing of those hopes that, Crutcher says, her “journey to justice” began. “We in Tulsa, Okla., aren’t going to sit by and say, ‘It is what it is,’” she said at one of the news conferences. The very narrative Crutcher has committed herself to undoing — one that says Black people are inherently bad people — is one that goes back a hundred years in her hometown, when one part of the community destroyed another part of the community, a place whose prosperity and potential belonged to, but was taken from, her ancestors.
Gayle’s article is part of a larger package about the Tulsa massacre, produced by TheNew York Times. Other components include an infographic revealing the extent of physical damage done during the event, and a visual feature about the excavation of victims’ gravesites.
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