In Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore(Milkweed Editions), Elizabeth Rush visits people and communities made immediately vulnerable by the rising sea levels that are brought on by climate change. She interviews people who have lost their homes, their loved ones, and the world they once knew to flooding and other disasters. Some just want to be able to afford to leave, while others are willing to withstand everything to stay.
Rush pushes through the rhetoric around climate change to look closely at the consequences. Not the ones that will happen at some point down the road, but the ones that are happening now. She travels from Louisiana to Florida to California and elsewhere to see and try her best to understand what it is like to lose the ground beneath your feet.
We talked by phone about what led her to this book, what carried her through this book, and what comes next for her and her subjects. Read more…
The ’90s Are Oldis a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.
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The most appropriate single epithet for MTV’s unscripted housemate drama The Real World is pioneering. Granted, given what the show and the oeuvre it birthed have since become — an indistinguishable procession of aggressively vapid ab models who take turns getting alcohol poisoning in a hot tub, no matter the show’s setting or purpose — the positive connotations of that word make it painful to use.
But alas, pioneering is accurate. Before producers Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray had the idea in 1992 to choose seven strangers at random, deposit them in a New York City loft, have their lives “taped” at a totally grungified 42-degree angle, and find out what happens, the very thought of someone going on television for no other reason than to live in an apartment with a bunch of randos was extremely novel.
What we so easily forget now, in an age where the country’s only housewives are Housewives, is that The Real World‘s early seasons were beloved by young adults precisely because they showed the largely-unremarkable exploits of largely-unremarkable (if mildly telegenic) young people. By “early seasons” I mean 1992-1996 — the 1997 season, shot in Boston, would mark the show’s transition from unscripted soap opera to unapologetic grotesque, a.k.a. what we now consider the reality-television standard. This transformation is one of the most notable — possibly most ignominious? — legacies of the ’90s, perhaps even more so than the mushroom cuts, black chokers, and off-kilter camera work.
In 1969, my father traveled alone from India to Boston so that he could enroll in the master’s program in geophysics at MIT.
I don’t know whether he flew or came by boat, so when I try to picture him setting foot in America for the first time, I don’t know what to imagine. I’ve tried to find the photographic evidence, but there aren’t any pictures of the fifteen years he spent in this country before he married my mother. Maybe he just threw out the tattered albums when we were moving between houses, but it’s more likely that he never took any photos at all. He’s never been a sentimental man.
I also don’t know why he chose to come in the first place. He has never had any great fascination with money; despite his making a good living, we lived in shabby rentals for most of my childhood, and my mother shopped for us from department store discount racks. I never felt that professional success was what he was after either. He never advanced past middle management, and except for one late-night discussion in which he made clear that he felt there was a glass ceiling for people with our skin color, I never heard one word of frustration from him about work. Maybe it was to help his family – along with his brother who came to Kansas State University earlier in the 1960s, he supported his parents in India for years with the money he earned. When trying to make us feel guilty about our second-generation lassitude, which is often, he tells us of how at MIT he had to work all hours of the night in the cafeteria and library while keeping up a full courseload, so maybe we need to be a little more appreciative that he helped with the room and board during our own time in college. Read more…
Sara Eckel | Longreads | June 2018 | 17 minutes (4,267 words)
Sometimes, while out with a friend I’ve known for 10 or 20 years, I’ll pivot on my barstool and ask, “Did I ever mention that I’m a born-again Christian?” The question rarely computes. My close friends know I grew up in an agnostic household, and they’re pretty sure the only Sunday morning activities I leave the house for are yoga and brunch.Some have even heard me casually describe myself as an atheist. Nevertheless, on a bookshelf in my parents’ house, there’s a Bible with an inscription in my loopy 10-year-old handwriting: “Today, I am a born-again Christian.” Below that, the words “Hallelujah!” in a woman’s elegant, slanted script.
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The ceremony took place at that woman’s house — in my memory, her name is Mrs. Hannah — in the suburb of Cincinnati where my family lived during my grade school years. For my parents, southern Ohio was a six-year tour of duty — just a place where my dad got a job. For my younger brother, it’s barely a memory. But for me, it was where I first encountered the world and where I was repeatedly told I lacked something essential.
“You have a black hole in your soul,” a little boy told me on the way out of kindergarten one day. I walked home and promptly burst into tears in front of my mother.
A 21st-century reader might pause at the idea that I walked home alone from kindergarten, but in 1970s Ohio, there was nothing strange about a free-range 5-year-old. However, our neighbors were appalled that my family didn’t go to church. On the playground one day, I tried to explain it to a group of baffled classmates gathered around me in a semicircle, but it was like saying that we didn’t brush our teeth or eat dinner each night. The kids weren’t mean; they simply didn’t know how to reconcile a classmate who spent her Sunday mornings lounging in her pajamas and reading the funnies.
Once, while walking to school with my two best friends, both named Debbie, the girls had a jokey debate about what would happen after I died. I had obviously not cleared the prerequisite for heaven. On the other hand, I was their friend — eternal hellfire didn’t seem quite right, either. They imagined a fight between God and the devil, with me floating up and down through the ether.
“She’s too good for hell,” the devil would say.
“She’s too bad for heaven,” God would reply.
I think they were trying to work out how God could be so cruel as to reject their friend. On the other hand, they had to go to church. They had clocked in hundreds of Sunday mornings wearing rayon dresses in the too-warm air while I was kicked back on the couch eating cinnamon doughnuts. There should be some consequences.
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am. — Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
The landscape of theaters must be terrifying for patients, but it’s becoming normal for me. It’s amazing what you can get used to. Life wasn’t always like this.
The first operation that I watch is a heart-lung transplant. I am nineteen years old and still a student nurse. The operation takes so long: over twelve hours. It requires a team of surgeons to behave like a relay team; but instead of a baton, they pass between them a human heart and lungs. I’ve been looking after the patient waiting for the new set of lungs that day: a fourteen-year-old boy named Aaron suffering from cystic fibrosis, who is confined to bed, oxygen tubes inserted into his nose, with a tired, wet cough and sallow gray skin. I help him get ready for the operation. I rub cocoa butter onto his dry knees, take away his Game Boy and swear to guard it with my life. I wet his lips with a small salmon-pink sponge that I dip in sterile water, not wanting to risk the tiniest possibility of him being exposed to any germs.
Aaron’s room glows with lights in the shape of stars and moons surrounding his hospital bed and a journal is hidden under his pillow. There is a small corkboard next to his bed that his stepdad has Blu-tacked to the wall, covered in a mosaic of photographs of him with his friends, every single one of them smiling. It is a common thing for a child’s hospital room to be personalized. Aside from the oxygen piped through the wall and the suction canister with its thick transparent tubing, it could be a typical teenage bedroom. Read more…
On April 19, 1943, the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann ingested a quarter milligram of LSD to confirm that it had caused the oddly fantastical journey he had experienced the day before. To his surprise and delight, he was not mistaken –– the drug opened up a new window of consciousness. The discovery caught the attention of other researchers, and by the 1950s, psychedelic testing was in full bloom, yielding promising results for people suffering from neurosis, schizophrenia, and psychopathy.
But as counter-cultural experimentation progressed and the drugs were taken out of the lab and into the wild –– think of Tim Leary, dubbed “the most dangerous man in America” by Nixon, and his controversial LSD experiments –– there was a backlash. According to the writer Michael Pollan, society “turned on a dime” against psychedelics. “You’d have to go back to the Inquisition and Galileo for a time when scientific inquiry was stigmatized quite the way this was,” he tells me. “And it’s a measure of how powerful that backlash was and how threatened powerful interests felt about what psychedelics were doing to society.” Read more…
May his head burn! Your words are rocks thrown at my forehead! I will peel her skin off! Threats and insults like these do not sound that bad in their native Punjabi. Even when they are directed at loved ones. Even when they come from your own mother. The pronouns are catalysts for combustion, a quick, irreversible reaction, with only ashes for proof. However, an English word like partition can sit in an Indian’s mouth for hours, or even for a lifetime, in motion toward something shapeless, and then melted, gone. Sometimes partition represents a noun (a broken door), sometimes it is a verb (to divide into parts), but it is never clear who is at fault. An Urdu poet once called partition a birthday party for anonymous and a funeral for unanimity. A mathematician saw it in his mind as a fractal, a Koch snowflake, a continuous curve without tangents. A political scientist speaks only of before-and-after maps, the thick red Radcliffe Line. Nobody ever truly understands one another. Translation is never simple.
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Mother makes chapattis. They are perfectly round, a circumference entirely calculable by first measuring a tangent, thanks to the discovery of constants. The first one she makes is reserved for the Brahmin, who will come later in the day to pick it up. The last one she makes is for a crow or a dog, whoever comes first. The rest are for us, but there must always be one left over at the end of the day, reserved for nobody, for nothing. That is how Mother would define abundance if she knew the word in English. How she achieves it, on the other hand, is a mystery. I am already bathed, dressed in my salwar kameez, and outside, content to throw five nameless stones onto the cement floor. I grasp them in my fist in groups of one, two, three, and then four while tossing another straight up. That one will fall either where I want it to or where it will. I hope for intersection but do not worry too much about the outcome. The five of us are here now. Mother, father, sister, brother, and me. There will come a time when I will be the only one left of us. Still up in the air. Read more…
In the late fall of 1923, a young Nell Battle Lewis decided to spend an evening at the Superba Theater in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, watching Birth of a Nation for the fifth time. Reviewing the film in her Raleigh News and Observer column “Incidentally,” Lewis noted that each time D. W. Griffith’s movie came to town, she had to see it. This was her sort of “religious observance.” Birth of a Nation, she wrote, was “the best movie we’ve ever seen.” It made her weep and drove her to exclaim, “This is my native land.” She went on to claim that the first KKK was “a necessary tour de force effected by some of the leaders of a . . . civilization in danger of its very life.”
Her devotion to such a film at first seemed incongruous. Lewis had returned to her hometown after years as a southerner living outside the South. After a brief stint at Goucher College in Maryland, she attended and graduated from Smith College in North Hampton, Massachusetts. At Smith, she sat in integrated classes, heard black and white political leaders, debated woman suffrage, and studied a curriculum that challenged the conservatism, reactionary impulses, and, to some extent, segregated and sectarian currents of the South. After a year in Manhattan, she had gone to France as part of the YMCA’s “Y-Girl” program to support the American Expeditionary Force. In 1921 Lewis had returned to Raleigh and interviewed with the News and Observer editors while dressed in jodphurs, a blazer, boots, and a hat. Her androgynous presentation gave pause to the editor, but he hired her anyway, as an embodiment of the “New Woman” — single, independent-minded, and career-oriented with world experience. As the newspaper’s first female staff writer, she set out to challenge the hidebound traditionalism of white southerners, pedestal-residing white women, and greedy industrialists. In economics, she rejected the trappings of the New South creed and disdained the materialism and business practices of the textile industry. In her early politics, she seemed to identify more with white women of the working class than those like her former St. Mary’s School classmates. Instead of joining the Daughters of the American Revolution and preaching Americanization and anti-immigration, she made fun of their reactionary politics and condemned their red-baiting. Opposing evangelical Christians, she parodied creationists and defended the study of evolution. When H. L. Mencken pronounced the South “the Sahara of the Bozart,” Lewis expressed her intellectual alliance with him, noting that he was “a heady stimulant . . . and effective purgative for intellectual inertia and dry-rot complacency.” As her prominence grew, southern commentators called her an iconoclast and a radical. Her enemies called her a communist; her father and brothers characterized her as abnormal, eccentric, and perhaps even mentally unstable.
Considering the widespread influence of the second Klan, her relentless attacks on them might have merited such judgments. A national organization with professional fundraisers and advertising executives, the KKK proclaimed Anglo-Saxon superiority, recruited record numbers of members, sponsored candidates for southern legislatures, and intimidated their political opponents. More than a few southern leaders lacked the moxie to publicly condemn the Klan, yet Lewis castigated them for their contribution to mob justice and racial violence and told her readers that the KKK was ignorant of the very race science it claimed to follow. In her published poem, she ridiculed their cowardice and intolerance in her opening stanza: “The Kautious Klan Klandestinely. . . . Kwarrels Konstantly with those; Who Kannot Like their Kourse DesPotio.” When the Klan threatened to send one of its female members to take Lewis’s job, she gleefully wrote of her anticipation and then attacked them for their criticism of professional women and flappers. She deplored most of all that KKK activity put North Carolina in the company of its less progressive southern neighbors — Georgia and Alabama. Each time the KKK reared its ugly head, Lewis felt it testified to the failure of North Carolina’s white leaders who had promised a more humane, compassionate, and just state. Still, she wept through Birth of a Nation, a film that she knew the second KKK had exploited.
Lewis did not erase the black South or ignore black achievement…. In fact, the stories she wrote offered up both the black elite and the black folk, but such writing often served to educate white people about the appropriate ‘place’ of blacks and whites in a Jim Crow world.
Taken together, these seemingly dissonant reactions were in fact not anomalous but rather typical outcomes of Lewis’s work in the cultural production of white supremacist politics. As Lewis put pen to paper, she celebrated a world led by educated white progressives, white female reformers, and black elites and populated by oppressed white industrial workers and black southerners receptive to enlightened white leadership. In the News and Observer and other periodicals, she crafted public narratives that created a cultural landscape of a more “affectionate segregation.” Her fiction and non-fiction reinforced specific historical interpretations, invoked black stereotypes, and celebrated white liberals and exceptional black men and women. Her feature writing often highlighted white women who called on social reform for white and black North Carolinians, noting white women’s gendered affinity for cleaning up politics. She praised white and black progressives and condemned those who participated in racist violence and who justified the neglect systemic to racial segregation. Lewis did not erase the black South or ignore black achievement. For example, she celebrated the poetry of Harlem Renaissance writers, congratulated North Carolina’s black collegiate choral groups, and lobbied for state-run girls’ homes for wayward black youth. She also wrote a piece that attributed the impoverished state of the black neighborhood Haiti Alley to the suspect character of those who lived there and ignored structural poverty. When she returned from her travels, she celebrated seeing the first shacks of black sharecroppers because they told her that she was home, romanticizing economic outcomes of segregation. In fact, the stories she wrote offered up both the black elite and the black folk, but such writing often served to educate white people about the appropriate “place” of blacks and whites in a Jim Crow world. In crafting her narratives, she encouraged her readers to follow cultural practices that reinforced racial segregation. She was a storyteller for Jim Crow.
In telling these stories, Lewis did important political work for the segregated South. Culture was one of the central levels where everyday experience could be translated into support for the larger social system, joining social welfare policies, educational practices, and electoral politics as critical sites where the Jim Crow order was shaped and sustained. Her writings offered a template for segregation to be modern and long-lasting — a system grounded in new cultural and scientific arguments more than older biological ones. For Lewis, North Carolina’s segregated order would be a product of a progressive state that adopted national reforms. Educated, liberal white supremacists, not mean reactionaries, would control race relations and mitigate the worst abuses of the system. Relying on the “best” white people, Lewis was a female counterpart to Howard Odum, who, as historian Glenda Gilmore noted, served as one of the “hydraulic engineers at Jim Crow’s watershed” urging white liberals to be the engines of gradual incremental change. With so many stories of mean-spirited and violent segregationists abusing black women and men, rarely did Lewis or Odum or progressives nationwide have to confront how their liberal reforms reified racial inequities. A broad agreement on white supremacy among white social reformers meant that Lewis could easily balance her progressive ideas with her devotion to a society of white over black. To her readers, she delivered lessons on a racial etiquette that upheld racial segregation, gendered ideas about female citizenship, paternalism, and devotion to social reform. For all the stories she told celebrating North Carolina’s enlightened race relations, she served the Jim Crow order by suppressing those that challenged the authority of liberal-minded, middle-class, educated white men and women. Lewis knew that the segregated order was never as secure as it might seem. White people needed instruction in how to maintain white supremacy. White apathy and white misuse of racial authority threatened the very system that guaranteed their political, economic, and cultural authority. In the 1920s and 1930s, her stories criticized the way segregation as practiced departed from the way she wanted and believed it should be. Right up to 1954, Lewis kept calling on fellow white southerners to live up to separate but equal, not abandon it.
Lewis’s brand of white supremacist politics clearly took root in the particular conditions of her home state where she could bring her beliefs in progressive era reform, modern science, eugenics, and women’s civic participation to bear on her work for racial segregation. North Carolina’s champions held the state apart from the racial violence of the Deep South, advertised its black educational institutions, embraced voices that challenged the material greed that undergirded the New South creed, and condemned the rawness and rage that characterized other southern demagogues. Politically, a relatively active state government had earned North Carolina its progressive reputation. Throughout the 1920s, rising public expenditures for state services inspired broad political discussions on economic development, social welfare, and education. Some white political and religious leaders even talked about improving black facilities, held interracial conferences, and welcomed black participation in a community of Christian humanitarianism. For the state’s leaders, North Carolina’s black population of nearly 30 percent figured in their vision of the state, where black moderates like James Shepard, president of North Carolina College for Negroes, could urge black North Carolinians to challenge inequality gradually and cautiously, exemplifying the “politics of respectability.” Josephus Daniels, once an architect of the 1898 white supremacy campaigns, owned the News and Observer, which served as a voice of moderation and modernization. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recruited to its faculty such luminaries as sociologists Howard Odum and Guy Johnson and moved to national prominence under the leadership of Harry Chase and Frank Porter Graham. Progressive reformer Kate Burr Johnson headed the state’s Bureau of Social Welfare. In the interwar period, Bertrand Russell, Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Frances Perkins, and Eleanor Roosevelt spoke at the University of North Carolina or Duke University, bringing some of the cosmopolitan energy Lewis had experienced in Manhattan and France.
At the News and Observer, Lewis first contributed feature pieces, edited the Society Page, and wrote a children’s page. Despairing at the limitations of these forums, she nevertheless made her first mark in “Kiddies Corner.” In this full-page feature, Lewis encouraged literacy and imagination, reinforced the social order with black dialect stories and caricatures, and promoted the study of North Carolina history. An early story entitled “Patrick, the Rollin’ Possum,” was written in dialect and included a Nell Battle Lewis original cartoon with the caption: “then the n****r held Patrick up by his long skinny tail and said: Ef dis heah’ possum ain’t sho’ nuff fat, den I dunno fat w’en I sees hit.” The next week, she encouraged young people to have their mothers read to them about their home state so they would “not only . . . feel that North Carolina is the best State, but to know why it is.”
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Soon she introduced her weekly column “Incidentally,” which would run almost uninterrupted for the next forty-five years. Prophetically, her column began with a scene in a park, depicting two black men and one black woman whose “contented laughter broke forth frequently, and the red meat of the melon disappeared rapidly.” Later her caricatures acknowledged the calming comfort offered by “deferential Negroes who wave to you even when they don’t know you.” Contented black North Carolinians joined Lewis’s frequent romanticized depictions of black-white relationships embodied in her print tributes to “mammy.” She noted that the ties between mammy and her white children were “more than imaginative gossamer,” as she lamented a system based on paternalism that was “now passing with the changing times.” In return for their loyalty and love, Lewis said that mammies would receive no earthly reward but the same spiritual reward “as the white folks they worked for.” In fact, the mammy of her childhood, she claimed, “came as near being a Christian as anyone who ever lived.” For Lewis, “Mammies” embodied the epitome of black leadership — serving in a position of deference, devotion, and dependency to white middle-class women. While she attacked her state’s social ills, she had established her column by trotting out minstrel-like black characters that assured herself and others of the satisfaction of the state’s black population. Under the helpful hands of the state’s white progressives, Lewis believed, black North Carolinians would take childlike steps forward.
Her writings offered a template for segregation to be modern and long-lasting — a system grounded in new cultural and scientific arguments more than older biological ones. For Lewis, North Carolina’s segregated order would be a product of a progressive state that adopted national reforms.
But as Lewis paid homage to the Mammy in print, she was participating in a larger cultural production of white supremacy in which the iconic black domestic took center stage. In the immediate aftermath of the 1922 dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, the UDC’s Washington, DC, branch gained congressional support for a granite tribute to black mammies. Mississippi’s Senator John Sharp Williams proposed and received appropriations of $200,000 for it, and North Carolina’s Charles Stedman introduced the funding bill to the House of Representatives. At the peak of its membership, the UDC seemed poised to build a monument that imposed its historical interpretation on the national cultural landscape. Some black newspapers responded with outrage. Newspaper owner, editor, and art historian Freeman Henry Morris Murray argued that “public sculpture was not merely reflective . . . but also productive of new publics and power relationships.” Encouraging his readers to be more critical in interpreting the meaning of sculptures, he asked them to evaluate “its obvious and also . . . its insidious teachings.” Black newspapers published their own renditions of a mammy statue that spoke to sexual aggression and assault coupled with long hours and no wages. For the UDC, the Mammy monument offered a racialized household that put white women in positions of authority, allowing them “to recast their own citizenship” and create a more “affectionate segregation.” While the monument never materialized, “mammy” did not need to be cast in bronze to function as an important symbol of segregation. Inked in Lewis’s columns, she remained both important and politically flexible in propagating the cultural infrastructure of segregation.
Lewis did not just deliver black characters of white mythology in her storytelling but also offered up black literary luminaries and black educational leaders. Lewis had long noted that she read the NAACP paper, The Crisis, and celebrated the artistic achievement of “Negro poets” like Claude McKay and James Weldon Johnson. Her favorite Harlem Renaissance novelist was Jessie Fauset, whose upper-class African American characters condemned passing as white and interracial marriage, themes that would have fit well with Lewis’s belief in eugenics and white supremacy. Lewis’s book reviews also upheld a racial hierarchy. In 1924, Lewis wrote a joint review of Walter White’s A Fire in the Flint and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, declaring that Forster’s work was art and superior in form and tone to White’s A Fire, “a more melodramatic piece along the lines of propaganda.” With omissions and exaggerations, White’s book, she claimed, made for a biased treatment of the “Southern White” and the “Southern Negro.” Like Forster’s work, there were similarities in the ruling people of each area who did not understand the colonized — blacks or Indians. She also saw parallels in that the rulers were ruling for “their own good,” not the common good. What bothered her most, however, was that “the Negro mind,” which she assumed to be distinct, appeared in White’s book as “not one whit different from that of the white man.” White’s black man acted just like a white one would under similar circumstances. “Can the Negro author who speaks for his race in this novel give us something more distinctive than that? . . . With all the mystery of Africa and all the darkness of slavery behind him, is there nothing unique in the Negro, after all?” she asked.
Lewis’s question exposed the cultural and geographic underpinnings of her racial ideology. Proud of her association with social reform, informed by scientific data, and assured of white women’s authority because of their particular racial and gendered identity, Nell Lewis rejected the pedestal and the pulpit but believed in Anglo-Saxon superiority. She rooted her hierarchical beliefs in “race science,” a position superior to those southerners whose racism rose from raw emotion. To educate her readers, she ran a crossword puzzle about eugenics, celebrating modern scientific thought. But as her review of White suggested, her racial liberalism left no space for discussions of an equality born of commonalities. Modernism had educated her, and there were differences — biological, cultural, historical differences — she believed, that should shape public policy and culture. It was not anti-modernism or economic gain that drove her racial politics, but a Progressive Era devotion to social reform, women’s gendered contributions to society, and modernity itself.
While Lewis’s attention to black accomplishments reflected a kind of racial moderation to both her white readers and her black readers, it simultaneously stung some black readers. In the winter of 1925, she attended a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night put on by the Shaw University Players. Despite the technical perfection, Lewis noted that “the general effect of the performance was strikingly artificial.” Instead of Shakespeare, which black students must perform, she claimed, in their “adopted language,” she advised them to focus on folk drama. While the KKK had carried “racial consciousness and racial pride . . . to excess,” she conceded, “I am a great believer in trying to be what you are.” Lewis advocated an emphasis on “their own distinct racial character.” Lamenting that the “advancement of the Negro has been largely imitative,” she was anxious to witness “a genuine drama of their own.”
Willing to engage with her critics, Lewis published the objections of two black North Carolinians who lamented how white supremacist ideology infiltrated her public narratives. Shaw University dean William Turner appreciated her “to some degree complimentary criticism” but disagreed with her assessment of English as an adopted language for African Americans. He instructed Lewis that black and white babies learn language in the same way and that there was no “racial predilection for any particular language.” Black social heritage in the United States, he continued, was the English language. At the State Department of Public Instruction, W. A. Robinson also noted that her comments solicited much discussion among those who “admire your usually broad attitude toward thought in general and concerning the Negro in particular.” He also disagreed with her suggestion that black Americans just imitated white Americans, noting that black Americans had long legacies of their own American traditions.
Two years later, Lewis again sparred with her critics after she reviewed black musical performances at the governor’s mansion. When black performers sang “Negro-folk songs,” Lewis praised them because they “sang like Negroes.” In the middle of “Cotton need a-pickin so bad,” the Fayetteville singers even “did a little shuffle . . . exactly right,” she wrote. This time a University of North Carolina professor reminded her that the “cultured Negro . . . is not the freedman of 1867.” Eavesdropping on a conversation about her review among black college girls, he heard them comment that “the white audience had a taste for music that was satisfied in direct proportion as the program descended toward more clownish setting.” For Lewis, the Jim Crow South meant black southerners occupied a particular cultural place, and this meant deference, dialect, and slave spirituals, not Shakespeare, “correct” English, or political participation. Her reviews and accompanying criticism reminded her readers — both black and white — that white supremacy reigned even among white southern liberals.
Lewis knew that the segregated order was never as secure as it might seem. White people needed instruction in how to maintain white supremacy…. In the 1920s and 1930s, her stories criticized the way segregation as practiced departed from the way she wanted and believed it should be.
Lewis’s views on social reform, however, held some real possibility for positive changes to the justice and prison systems. She worked together with Howard Odum and the Journal of Social Forces to publicize reform proposals for mental health and penal facilities. This work connected her to nationwide efforts that rooted reform in social science research and simultaneously reified an American racial hierarchy. Condemning capital punishment for those suffering mental disabilities, Lewis wrote about “a lone man behind the grim gray walls of the State’s prison, with a pitifully jangled brain [who] will pass swiftly and mercilessly and forever into death’s dark silence.” In 1925, she told her readers how prison guards murdered a “mentally defective Negro prisoner.” Lewis blamed this state-sanctioned killing on politicians who cared more for the bottom line than prisoner well-being, an impulse that also shaped an unwillingness to fund a segregated institution for the “feebleminded.” Thirsty for revenge, state officials would rather have a rape trial and lynching of a black man “with a mind of a 10 year old,” Lewis wrote, than “provide adequately for the mentally ill.” Lewis was incensed that “mental defectives” — particularly those who were black — were often left in society to commit crimes and then put to death without ever receiving treatment. Lewis argued that without the “exercise of disinterested public spirit and intelligence” that might consult sociological rather than economic studies in the pursuit of a fair and just legal and penal system, the state’s political leaders would fail to uphold North Carolina’s progressive image. Subsequently, Lewis feared that North Carolina would never rise above the South’s reputation of “savagery” and “backwardness.”
Her outrage about capital cases of mentally ill prisoners in 1921 and 1925 coalesced in her study entitled “Capital Punishment in North Carolina.” Full of data about age, region, race, economic standing, and crimes of those put to death by the state, her research connected her to the American League for the Abolition of Capital Punishment (ALACP) and the work of its secretary Vivian Pierce and lawyer Clarence Darrow. Pierce praised Lewis’s report on capital punishment as unmatched and asked her for permission to publish parts of the report. While Lewis worked with the League and other reform organizations, she did not join the ALACP, the southern-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation, or the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL). In 1930, when a black man was lynched for the alleged rape of a white girl in Edgecombe County, Lewis did not sign the petition circulated by the North Carolina ASWPL. She did write a blistering article that blamed South Carolina’s former senator Coleman Blease, known for inciting racist violence among the white working class, for the particular brand of vitriolic racism now circulating in her home state. She criticized the barbarity of a mob that took no account of either the evidence or the mental condition of the accused. Lewis worked closely with white female reformers, public health officials, and the League of Women Voters to upgrade mental health facilities, youth reformatories, and prisons, and to make the state’s judicial system administer justice that met the spirit of separate but equal. From this liberal political platform, Lewis managed to continue to craft North Carolina’s position as a progressive southern state even in its commitment to racial segregation.
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In 1931, the editors of the Chapel Hill magazine, Contempo, Lewis’s friend Paul Green, and social scientist Guy Johnson invited Langston Hughes to the University of North Carolina for a reading of his scathing poem “Christ in Alabama,” about the false accusations and shoddy trial of the nine Scottsboro boys. Hughes came to town, read poetry, and charmed many Chapel Hill residents, simultaneously earning the ire of industrial and political leaders across the state. While Nell Lewis applauded academic freedom, her brother, Kemp Lewis, led a campaign to punish those who sponsored Hughes. He wrote to UNC president Frank Porter Graham claiming that Hughes’s poetry, particularly the poem he referred to as “Black Christ,” was “enough to make the blood of every Southerner boil to have a man like this . . . given any attention or consideration whatever by decent white people.” Kemp Lewis asked “if this Negro was allowed to use the buildings” or if he had “any recognition whatever by the faculty?” He then questioned Graham about the students who authored Contempo and accused them of “striking at the very foundations of our civilization and our social relationships.” Not satisfied with alerting only Graham, Kemp Lewis proceeded to notify Governor O. Max Gardner and included clippings of Hughes’s poetry in his letter. He then asked the governor to speak to Graham about this attack on white supremacy.
The turmoil over Hughes alerted the state’s white elite to “subversive” activity at their university. By early 1932, more than 300 people had signed the Tatum Petition that called on Graham to curb “the alleged evil influences of the University of North Carolina upon the youth of the State.” Though convalescing from oral surgery and bouts with mental illness at Tucker’s Sanatorium in Richmond, Nell Lewis did not let this attack on academic freedom pass silently. She wrote her brother Kemp that she hoped “all is well at the University” and asked “Is ‘Contempo’ still uncensored?” “I wish you would run David Clark out of that State,” she continued, as he was “behind that petition . . . as sure as the world, and is nothing but a public nuisance.” Kemp Lewis did not sign the Tatum Petition, but he continued his protest and broadened his attack to include the university’s leniency on socialism. In her weekly column, Lewis ridiculed the Tatum Petition, describing it as “foolishness, just plain foolishness — I don’t care how many mayors, ministers, and manufacturers have signed it.” She defended the presence of both Russell and Hughes and claimed sarcastically that “although that [the Hughes visit] was in the ticklish realm of race relations in the South, lynching still seems to me out of order.” While Kemp continually referred to the “nausea that came to me over the Langston Hughes incident,” Nell Lewis wrote, “Black or white . . . Hughes is a poet and like it or not, his works are part of current American literature.”
When Lewis returned to health and to North Carolina, she became less vitriolic in her calls for reform and more indebted financially to the very brothers she had excoriated. The cultural landscape of white supremacy that she continued to shape from her columns, however, was not decidedly different than before, even with the New Deal. She still condemned racist violence and an unresponsive judicial system, and she upheld what she believed could be a sanctified and responsible system of white over black. Far from challenging this position, architects and leaders of the New Deal helped her cultivate this space for social reform in the hands of an enlightened white elite. Thus, Lewis’s friend Frank Porter Graham could belong to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and deny Pauli Murray, an NAACP member and civil rights activist, admission to University of North Carolina’s graduate program in social work. Even as African Americans realized the subversive potential of the New Deal, liberal white supremacists, like Lewis, saw few national challenges to southern race relations from the federal government, the Democratic Party, or black southerners.
While many North Carolinians and students of the 1920s would remember Lewis’s radicalism, advocacy for industrial reform, and opposition to the region’s most reactionary moments, her most long-lasting work had been in the cultural production of white supremacy.
She still worked to expose her state’s failures to meet the equal part of separate-but-equal and attacked reactionaries who condoned exploitative and cruel public policies. Lewis’s commitment to prison reform and her public commentary on the deplorable conditions faced by the state’s black and white incarcerated demonstrated that she still had room to critique the implementation of white supremacy without threatening its foundation. She exploded with characteristic fury and sarcasm when two black prisoners, Woodrow Wilson Shropshire and Robert Barnes, lost their feet to gangrene. Sentenced to “serve short terms” on the state highways for larceny and drunk and disorderly conduct, respectively, Shropshire and Barnes suffered frostbite after being “hung up” in marginally heated cells during twenty-degree nights. After nine days of such treatment, they worked eighteen days in the prison camp until they received medical treatment for “the flesh of their gangrenous feet rotting and dropping off the bones.” At ages nineteen and twenty, the two black men had their feet amputated and were left crippled. When the case reached the courts, the unfairness of the judicial system compounded the tragedy, reinforcing how Jim Crow courts equaled injustice. The jurors failed to find the guards and the prison physician guilty of cruel and unusual punishment. Lewis claimed that this case revealed how African Americans were often denied the right to ask for justice in the state’s courts. Lewis noted that the state-appointed attorney presented a lackluster case for the prosecution. Even though an indictment could not help the prisoners, she noted that it could have shown them that justice was available to African Americans in North Carolina. Instead, she claimed, the trial “actively says to them — and to an admiring world . . . Just a couple o’ n****rs — so we should worry.” Taking an even sterner stand, Lewis proclaimed that black North Carolinians had not “a ghost of a chance in its [the state’s] white man’s courts . . . because they were poor Negroes without influence.”
Read as a defense of black civil rights, Lewis’s condemnation of prison abuse would earn her a place among some of the most liberal activists of the 1930s. The all-white court system — a product of segregation — was partially to blame, contended Lewis. This was a bold assertion in 1935; it was not a damning one. For Lewis, whites failed to uphold a legal system that guaranteed their superiority, not their infallibility. Segregation laws did not prohibit a just conviction of white criminals. The white prison guards and physicians deserved jail time for their crimes and for compromising the myth of white superiority. Whites had failed to uphold the law and in doing so had threatened the entire rationale of white supremacy. In failing to carry out its legal responsibility, the courts of North Carolina, not Lewis’s critique, jeopardized the system of racial segregation. In fact, she was all too aware that incidents such as these earned her beloved state the condemnation and condescension of outsiders and perhaps threatened to incite the spirits of the state’s black citizens.
Her blistering attacks fell short of condemning racial segregation. Neither did she support the Southern Committee for People’s Rights, a Chapel Hill group led by her friend Paul Green and other white radicals who called for the dismantling of racial segregation. Lewis’s commitment to social reform did not apparently push her this far. The committee rebuked the system and also defended the rights of the prisoners as individuals. In advance of a national discussion, they spoke of human rights and tied their efforts to those working for African American civil rights. Lewis did not adopt the human rights discourse but maintained a tone of parental remorse and paternalistic regret when she affirmed that even in the face of injustice, “it seems to me that the Negroes of this State, as a whole, are remarkably well-behaved, remarkably patient.” In her open statement to North Carolina’s black population, she reassured them that “many other white people in North Carolina are shamed by this verdict . . . [and] we consider it a disgrace to the State.” She admitted, however, that her “many” was really more like a few.
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While many North Carolinians and students of the 1920s would remember Lewis’s radicalism, advocacy for industrial reform, and opposition to the region’s most reactionary moments, her most long-lasting work had been in the cultural production of white supremacy. Carefully balancing her political radicalism in other areas with a relatively liberal position on segregation, Lewis had emerged as an incisive storyteller for segregation and the political project that undergirded it. Her reputation as a “truth-teller” only reinforced the lessons she offered about white over black in the Jim Crow South. Her racial politics also offered educated, progressive white southerners a politically palatable way to digest the politics of white supremacy. Lewis was not out of step with more progressive views of women’s political activism. Her efforts connected her to reform projects across the nation — prison reform and social science-based policies hatched in universities across the nation and published in academic journals. Rooted in this modern political context, she offered white southerners stories to take them forward in terms of the white supremacist political project.
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Elizabeth Gillespie McRae is an associate professor of history and director of graduate social science education programs at Western Carolina University.
Anne Thériault | Longreads | May 2018 | 23 minutes (5,949 words)
From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on badass world-historical women of centuries past.
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Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.
Some people believe that the Myers-Briggs questionnaire is the ultimate way to classify personality types. Others think that the Enneagram is the way to go. Even more people set their stock in astrology, hoping that the fixed position of the stars at the time of a person’s birth will explain everything about them. I, however, think that you can tell everything you need to know about someone based on which wife of Henry VIII’s is their favorite. Do you prefer Catherine (or Catherine, or Catherine)? Do either of the Annes do it for you? Or, god forbid, are you a fan of the insufferable Jane Fucking Seymour?
Personally, I’m Team Anne Boleyn. My reasons for this are multifold. As an Anne, I am naturally sympathetic to others of my name. I also can’t help rooting for an underdog, and if being beheaded because your crusty husband wants to marry Jane Fucking Seymour doesn’t make you an underdog, I don’t know what does. Finally, I respect a good hustle, and Anne’s hustle was iconic — my god, how she hustled! Even if you think Anne Boleyn was a king-seducing homewrecker extraordinaire, it’s impossible not to appreciate the sheer audacity of it all.
But who was Anne Boleyn, exactly? The mythology surrounding her improbable rise and sensational fall is pretty well-known, yet most of the information we have access to was either written by haters or produced decades after her death (or both). It’s hard to know much about Anne as a person (as opposed to Anne, Destroyer of Marriages and Churches). We’re not even sure what year she was born — 1501 and 1507 are the two most likely candidates, with arguments hinging on a letter Anne wrote to her father in 1514. Historians have endlessly debated what age Anne was when she composed that neat, measured handwriting (in her second language, no less), and while I am absolutely not an expert, I will say that as the mother of a 7-year-old, I feel 97.5% sure that a child of that age did not write that letter. Then again, maybe my low penmanship expectations are the product of my plebeian public-school education.
Anne was writing to her father because her educational circumstances were about to change drastically. Initially, Thomas Boleyn had managed to secure a spot for his young daughter in the Burgundian court in the Netherlands. There, she was educated alongside several royal children, including Charles of Castile, the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. It’s unknown how Thomas, a diplomat whose closest personal tie to royalty was his wife, a descendant of Edward I, managed to winkle this incredible opportunity for his daughter; some historians speculate that it may have had to do with a gambling debt owed to him by Margaret of Austria, regent of the court where Anne was staying. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that the gift for aggressive upward social mobility was strong in the Boleyn blood.
Even if you think Anne Boleyn was a king-seducing homewrecker extraordinaire, it’s impossible not to appreciate the sheer audacity of it all.
Just a year after Anne’s arrival in the Netherlands, shifting international alliances caused her abrupt departure. Henry VIII’s 18-year-old sister, Mary, had initially been promised to Charles of Castile, forging strong ties between the Holy Roman Empire and the Tudors. Then, in August of 1514, Mary wed the aging French king, Louis XII, by proxy. This sudden and stunning rejection of the teenaged Charles in favor of the visibly infirm, 52-year-old Louis likely made Anne’s position in the Burgundian court very uncomfortable. Luckily, Thomas Boleyn was able to place his daughter as a maid of honor in Mary’s household (my god, how these Boleyns hustled).
The Burgundians certainly weren’t the only ones who were upset about Mary’s wedding. Mary herself was less than enthused about the whole situation — understandably so, since she was a) three and a half decades younger than her new husband and b) deeply in love with her brother’s BFF, Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk. Apparently she only agreed to marry Louis on the condition that after he died she would be allowed to marry whomever she wanted; the stars seem to have aligned in Mary’s favor, because Louis dropped dead just three months after they married. Henry sent Charles Brandon to France to collect his widowed sister, but with strict instructions:
HENRY VIII: Bro, whatever you do, DON’T propose to Mary when you get to France
Charles Brandon: LOL bro, I won’t!!
HENRY VIII: I’m serious, bro. Louis just died, like, five minutes ago
HENRY VIII: so be chill, ok?
Charles Brandon: Bro!! I promise I’ll be chill!!!
FIVE MINUTES LATER
Mary: We should secretly get married while we’re still in France
Charles Brandon: YOLO
To say that Henry was pissed would be an understatement. Not only had Charles Brandon directly disobeyed him, it’s also unlikely that Henry had ever intended to let his friend marry his sister. After all, the only value royal sisters and daughters had was to cement alliances through marriage; it’s unlikely Henry would have wasted the opportunity to marry his sister off to a foreign power (again) just because she was in love with a trifling Duke. Henry’s privy council wanted to imprison and/or execute Charles Brandon for treason, but in the end the king realized that would probably make family reunions super awkward, so Brandon just had to pay a stiff fine.
What was Anne Boleyn up to while this whole Charles Brandon foofaraw was happening in England? Still in France, she was now a maid of honor in the service of the new queen, Claude. At the French court, Anne learned all the skills necessary for being a good courtier — including (allegedly) the art of the blow job which was (again, allegedly) unknown in England at the time. While this last part is entirely apocryphal, it is my favorite rumor about Anne Boleyn. I have so many questions! What did it feel like to introduce la beej to an entire nation? Do you think she later demonstrated it to her own ladies-in-waiting so that they, too, could spread the gospel of buccal onanism? What were they even doing in England before Anne taught them the joys of fellatio? The mind boggles.
In 1521, Anne’s father recalled her from France with the hope that she would marry her Irish cousin James Butler and resolve a dispute over the Earldom of Ormond. It was one of those very boring succession situations that were always popping up among the gentry: Anne’s grandmother Margaret Boleyn was the daughter of the 7th Earl of Ormond and had been co-heiress to his estates, but now James, who was a descendant of the 3rd Earl of Ormond, was claiming the title for himself. Several of the parties invested in the outcome of this situation — including Henry VIII himself — thought that a union between Anne and James would settle the Ormond question. This probably wasn’t the marriage Anne was hoping for; at the very least, she would have known that she could do better than a discount wanna-be earl.
As you’ve no doubt already sussed out, the marriage between Anne and James never happened, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.
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At this point it behooves me to mention Anne’s sister, Mary Boleyn; she figures importantly in this story not only as Anne’s sibling, but also as one of Anne’s predecessors in Henry’s bed. As with Anne, Mary’s birthdate is unknown — actually, it’s not even clear which sister was born first. On the one hand, the fact that Thomas Boleyn chose Anne to be the daughter brought up in the Burgundian court indicates that she was older (it would have been extremely strange to pass over an eldest daughter in favor of a younger one when offered such an opportunity). On the other hand, Mary was wed before Anne, and it would also have been uncommon for a younger sister to be married first. There’s also some boring stuff about which of their descendants inherited which titles under which circumstances, but there’s evidence to support both birth orders, so basically: who even knows at this point?
Like Anne, Mary Boleyn accompanied Henry VIII’s sister Mary to France for her wedding. (As a side note: if you’re starting to think there are too many Marys and Catherines and Annes in this story, you’re right — Tudor England was desperately uncreative when it came to names.) Like Anne, Mary Boleyn also stayed in France after the widowed Queen Mary returned to England for some Hot Charles Brandon Action. Unlike Anne, Mary Boleyn allegedly had an affair with the new King of France, Francis, who apparently referred to her as “my English mare” and “a very great whore, the most infamous of all.” I’m sure he totally meant these things as compliments!
Mary Boleyn returned to England in 1519 to become one of Catherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting, at which point she almost definitely started sleeping with the English king. We know this because later, when he was trying to get with Anne, Henry requested a special dispensation that allowed him to marry the sister of his former mistress. During the period when she and Henry were Doing It, Mary Boleyn got married to a courtier named William Carey. Mary and William had two children together, but it’s speculated that Henry fathered one or even both of them. On the one hand: maybe not. On the other hand: just look at Mary’s granddaughter Lettice Knollys and tell me she doesn’t have Tudor blood. Lettice Knollys would later go on to wed noted Tudor fuckboy Robert Dudley, a favorite of Elizabeth I’s, and their marriage would earn them a banishment from court thanks to Elizabeth’s jealousy (of Lettice) and intolerance (of fuckboys).
Some people might regard Mary Boleyn as a classic example of “why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?” — after all, if she’d played her cards right, she could, in theory, have wound up as the king’s wife instead of his mistress. On the one hand, it’s likely that Anne viewed Mary as something of a cautionary tale, and that’s partly why she was so intent on keeping the king at arm’s length (literally, with hand jobs) until he finally put a ring on it. On the other hand, Mary was the only Boleyn sibling to come out of that whole situation with her head still attached to her body. It’s possible that Mary survived through sheer luck, but it’s also possible that she understood more keenly than Anne just how fickle the king was and how harshly this world punishes clever, ambitious women.
If Anne had been subdued by her banishment, it certainly didn’t show; if anything, she came back smarter, stronger, and even more committed to marrying up.
While Mary Boleyn and Henry VIII were making googly eyes (and other googly body parts) at each other, Anne had her own blossoming court romance. She and Lord Henry Percy, who belonged to one of the richest and noblest families in England, fell in love and became secretly engaged. Actually, they went even further than just an engagement — they were alleged to have entered into a “pre-contract,” which involved saying wedding vows in front of a witness. This distinction is important, because the church considered these de futuro vows to be binding if they were followed by sexual consummation of the union. Percy was a page in the service Henry VIII’s favorite cardinal, Thomas Wolsey, and when Wolsey found out about the betrothal, he was absolutely furious. It wasn’t so much that Anne wasn’t wealthy or titled enough for the Percys (although she wasn’t), or that Percy was already engaged to someone else (although he sort of was), or that Henry VIII was wildly jealous (Anne wasn’t even on his radar yet); the main problem was that Percy and Anne had taken something that was supposed to be a public business contract between two families and turned it into a private love-fest. Percy and Anne brought shame on their families by violating one of the most deep-seated rules in their culture: marriage between nobles wasn’t supposed to be based on love, and it certainly wasn’t supposed to happen in secret. They had to be punished.
Percy was immediately and unhappily married off to Lady Mary Talbot, the woman to whom he had been betrothed when he was a teenager. Anne was “rusticated,” which meant that she was removed from court and sent to live in her family’s country estate. The experience must have been not just heartbreaking, but also humiliating for both of them — in trying to behave like adults, they’d ended up being treated like naughty children. At any rate, Percy seems to have loved Anne for the rest of his life; several years later, when Thomas Cromwell wanted to use the pre-contract as a way to annul Anne’s marriage to the king, Percy repeatedly denied its existence. It’s possible that Percy did this because he was (rightfully) afraid that admitting to having a past sexual relationship with Anne would get him into hot water with the king, but it’s also likely that he was doing his best to save Anne’s life.
A few years after Anne was dishonorably discharged from the court, she was given the chance to return and join her sister as one of Catherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting. If Anne had been subdued by her banishment, it certainly didn’t show; if anything, she came back smarter, stronger, and even more committed to marrying up. This time, she would aim high — real high. And, for a while, it would seem as if she’d succeeded in her ambitions.
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By the time Henry VIII began to pursue Anne Boleyn in 1526, he’d been married to Catherine of Aragon for nearly two decades. In that time, they’d only managed to produce one living heir, Mary Tudor, the future Mary I of England. By the late 1520s, the subject of succession caused Henry a great deal of anxiety. As his father’s only surviving son, the burden of continuing the Tudor line was riding entirely on the king. A series of English civil wars, now commonly known as the Wars of the Roses, had ended only with the marriage of Henry’s parents; he knew that a succession crisis could plunge the country back into conflict. On top of all that, England had historically bucked under women’s rule, so even if Mary — by all accounts a sickly child — survived to adulthood, that was no guarantee of peace.
The big question is, of course, whether Anne was the cause or a symptom of Henry’s decision to dump Catherine. Was she a wily enchantress, luring the King away from his beloved Queen by casting dark spells on his dick? Or did she arrive back at court and catch Henry’s attention after he’d already started looking for a new wife? Catherine’s sympathizers preferred the dick-spells theory, with Catholic propagandist Nicholas Sanders writing half a century after Anne’s death that she had six fingers on one hand and a cyst under her chin, both of which were thought to be the markings of a witch. I guess it’s possible that, while in France, Anne learned not just blow-job skills but also black-magic skills. Who even knows what goes on in France? That being said, it’s absolutely no coincidence that Henry’s realization that Catherine would probably never bear him a son happened at roughly the same time as his burgeoning obsession with Anne. While it might be tempting to analyze their eventual marriage as the result of six years of cock-blocking, Henry was probably already looking for a new wife when his eye happened to wander in Anne’s direction. The fact that Henry began asking the Pope about annulling his first marriage less than a year after Anne’s return to court is evidence of this.
I guess it’s possible that, while in France, Anne learned not just blow-job skills but also black-magic skills. Who even knows what goes on in France?
That’s not to say that Anne never encouraged Henry’s pursuit of her. Did she flirt with him? Sure! Did she tell him she wanted to marry him? Totally! Did she promise him a billion legitimate sons once he finally ditched his pious snooze of a wife? Almost definitely! But there are two things we have to keep in mind when considering Anne’s role in the annulment of Henry and Catherine’s marriage. The first thing is that it’s very, very dangerous to refuse to give a king what he wants, especially if that king is a man who is only too happy to snuff out the lives of those who have disappointed him. The second thing to remember is that Anne literally had one job in life: to marry a rich, powerful man. This job was the only end-game of all her fancy education, all the years spent learning multiple languages, studying religious texts, and perfecting her dancing skills. Every opportunity Thomas Boleyn had secured for her was to serve the goal of her marrying well; to marry beneath her station or not marry at all would mean that Anne had failed to make good on her family’s extensive investment in her.
Some of you might be wondering: why Anne? Why, out of all the women available to him, did Henry fixate on her? Was she incredibly beautiful? No, not exactly; even the most flattering contemporary accounts describe her as being just average in the looks department (though the king did refer to her breasts as “pritty duckys,” thus confirming my suspicion that he was a boob man). But she was charming, witty, and apparently a lot of fun to be around. And she was patient. Boy, was she patient. Having watched her sister Mary be picked up and then later discarded by the king, Anne knew that sleeping with Henry during their long courtship would only undermine her chances of marrying him, so she dug in and played the long game — one that involved keeping her chastity technically intact while at the same time maintaining his sexual interest (which probably involved a lot of what is euphemistically referred to as “heavy petting”). It was a fine line, but one she managed to walk for six years as Henry tried to negotiate his annulment with Pope Clement VII.
HENRY VIII: Heyyyyyy bro
CLEMENT VII: Oh. Hey. It’s you again.
HENRY VIII: Remember how I’m the best Catholic?
CLEMENT VII: Not really
HENRY VIII: Sure you do! I wrote that book? About the sacraments?
CLEMENT VII: Doesn’t ring a bell, sorry
HENRY VIII: I’m officially a Defender Of The Faith!!
CLEMENT VII: I’ll take your word for it
HENRY VIII: Anyway. Since I’m really amazing at figuring out this God shit now, I’ve been thinking about my life
CLEMENT VII: Oh good
HENRY VIII: I’ve decided that I don’t have any surviving sons because I’m a horrible sinner
CLEMENT VII: So you’re going to stop having affairs? Give up drinking? Quit gambling?
HENRY VIII: Lol no, I’m going to leave my wife for a much younger woman
CLEMENT VII: …
HENRY VIII: Yeah, because in Leviticus? It says that if you marry your brother’s wife? You’ll be childless? And Catherine was totally my brother Arthur’s wife first
CLEMENT VII: That’s … ok, you’re completely misinterpreting that law
CLEMENT VII: And anyway, you were granted a papal dispensation to marry your brother’s wife
CLEMENT VII: This is a problem that has literally already been solved
HENRY VIII: Ok well I’m going to need you to cancel that dispensation lol
HENRY VIII: And also annul my marriage
HENRY VIII: Thanks in advance!!!
The Pope was not, in fact, interested in annulling Henry and Catherine’s marriage. This was at least in part because Catherine’s nephew, Charles V, had just sacked Rome in 1527 and was basically holding Clement VII hostage. Henry, never one to be deterred easily, followed up his request for an annulment with an inquiry into getting a papal dispensation for bigamy which, unsurprisingly, the Pope was not super enthused about either. There was a trial, and a lot of it involved some cold-case sleuthing over whether Arthur and Catherine had consummated their brief marriage. Catherine swore up and down that they hadn’t, but some of Arthur’s pals from back in the day said he’d emerged from his bedroom the morning after his wedding declaring that he’d “been to Spain” (because Catherine’s vagina was apparently a Spanish territory). Sadly, this A++ dick joke did not persuade the papal legate who was overseeing the trial and Henry was not granted his annulment.
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In late 1532, three very exciting things happened. Anne accompanied Henry to France, a move that legitimized her position as his partner. Then, when bad weather forced them to dawdle in Calais for two weeks while their Channel crossing was delayed, Anne and Henry took a Fornication Vacation and finally consummated their love. It was also around this time that Thomas Cromwell drafted the Act of Appeals, which, when passed in 1533, would make Henry the final legal authority on all English matters, meaning that he could finally get his annulment over and done with and also take his first official step away from the authority of Rome.
Henry and Anne (who was almost certainly already pregnant) were secretly married on January 25, 1533. On May 23rd, the Archbishop of Canterbury declared Henry’s marriage to Catherine to be invalid (which meant that he’d technically been bigamous for four months, but since he was calling all the shots now that didn’t really matter); on May 28, the Archbishop declared Anne’s marriage to Henry to be good and valid. On June 1, Anne was crowned queen in an elaborate ceremony at Westminster Abbey. Six years of various jobs (hand, blow, and otherwise) had finally paid off!
Henry cancelled the jousting tournament he’d been planning to celebrate the birth of his son, because apparently men only pretend to murder each other on horseback for fun if a baby is a boy.
The three months that followed would later be seen as the apex of Anne’s upward trajectory. She chose “The Most Happy” as her royal motto, and certainly it must have been a very happy time for her: not only had she finally hustled her way into the highest office an English woman could occupy, but she was also pregnant with the king’s child, whose birth would hopefully secure Anne’s future. That is, if the child was a boy, of course — and everyone, including Henry, assumed that this would be the case. After all, now that he was no longer breaking Levitican law, surely God would see fit to shower him with all the sons he wanted?
On September 7, 1533, Anne gave birth to a healthy baby girl, whom she and Henry named Elizabeth. They had been so sure the child was going to be a boy that they had already commissioned letters announcing the birth of a prince; these had to be hastily corrected before being sent out. Henry cancelled the jousting tournament he’d been planning to celebrate the birth of his son, because apparently men only pretend to murder each other on horseback for fun if a baby is a boy. Still, it must have given both Anne and Henry some comfort that both mother and baby were healthy. The fact that Anne had survived giving birth was proof that God favored her, and although she wasn’t a boy, Elizabeth was still an heir — something Henry very much needed, since he was about to declare his daughter Mary illegitimate.
There’s a myth that the king’s interest in Anne began waning almost immediately after Elizabeth’s birth. Even today, Anne is often represented in popular media as a shrewish schemer who made Henry’s life miserable from the moment he put a crown on her head. Certainly she had her own ideas about how things should be done, and occasionally she and Henry were seen arguing over the course of their marriage. But her inability to produce a male heir notwithstanding, the two and a half years following Elizabeth’s birth were generally happy ones for Anne. She was finally able to put her fancy education to use and was instrumental in helping Henry reform the church in England, advocating for the availability of religious texts in vernacular instead of Latin. When her downfall came, it was swift, unexpected, and hinged on a series of life-changing events that occurred in January 1536.
In 1533, Henry had been certain that he’d solved his succession crisis by marrying Anne. Now, the old panic set in.
Anne became pregnant at least twice more after Elizabeth was born, but none of these pregnancies made it to term. She suffered from either a miscarriage or a stillbirth in late 1534 or early 1535; by late 1535 she was definitely pregnant again. This, along with the death of Catherine of Aragon on January 7, 1536, gave Anne and the king a good deal to celebrate, since now the persistent question of whether Henry was still legally married to Catherine was finally resolved. The day after her death, Henry and Anne dressed in yellow silk — a color of mourning in Catherine’s native Spain, but widely regarded as a symbol of joy and vitality in England. Henry, of course, could never resist the chance to be a tacky asshole.
Shortly after Catherine’s demise, on January 24, 1536, Henry fell from his horse. This accident caused the leg wound that would plague him for the rest of his life; he also suffered a head injury so severe that he spent two hours in a coma. Less than a week later — perhaps as a result of the stress from Henry’s near-death experience — Anne miscarried what appeared to be a male fetus. Around the same time, Henry began courting Jane Fucking Seymour, who was one of Anne’s maids of honor and also happened to be her second cousin. If romancing your wife’s employee-relative while she is either pregnant or has just suffered a miscarriage isn’t the definition of Tacky Asshole, I don’t know what is.
The fallout of this rapid succession of events was complex. According to some accounts, Henry was increasingly paranoid, moody, and volatile after his fall; coupled with the fact that he was unconscious for so long, these symptoms could point to a possible traumatic brain injury, which might explain the heightened violence and unpredictability he displayed for the rest of his life. The fact that Anne had miscarried his longed-for son only made things worse. As someone who believed that God rewarded the righteous, he would have seen this event as proof that he was still not in God’s favor (and that it was almost certainly Anne’s fault). In 1533, Henry had been certain that he’d solved his succession crisis by marrying Anne. Now, the old panic set in. It must have seemed to Henry that the only way forward was to marry someone new; into that void stepped Jane Fucking Seymour.
Here’s the thing about Jane Fucking Seymour: I actually have a grudging admiration for her. In many ways, she played the game just as skillfully as Anne. The things that had initially drawn Henry to Anne — her lively wit, her intelligence, her strong-willed nature — were the same things that made him tire of her. The fact that she tried to blame her miscarriage on Henry’s fall (as well as possibly implicating his nascent romance with Jane) only added to his fury towards Anne; everyone knew that reproductive issues were the woman’s fault, and were almost certainly a punishment from God. How dare she say that Henry was to blame instead of repenting whatever sin of hers had led to this? While Henry was trying to grapple with the idea of having lost a potential male heir, Jane cleverly presented herself as the anti-Anne: quiet, pious, and submissive to the king’s every whim. Although it’s tempting to view Jane as a bland, milk-fed virgin who just happened to trip and fall into Henry’s lap, the truth is that she had a few power moves up her (huge) sleeves.
* * *
Not long after Anne’s miscarriage, the king began to say that he had been tricked into marrying Anne by her use of “sortilege,” a French word for sorcery. It’s possible that he honestly believed this, or else his desire for Jane Fucking Seymour (and a male heir) meant he was beginning to build a false case against Anne. Whatever the truth is, Thomas Cromwell — who had earlier been a sometime-ally of Anne’s — now fully turned against the queen. At least part of this about-face can be traced to their disagreement over the redistribution of the church’s wealth; Anne wanted the money to go to charitable causes, and Cromwell preferred to use the money to line the royal coffers (while taking a cut for himself, naturally). Cromwell did not relish the idea of having someone undermining his authority in the king’s presence, especially if that someone was a combative and opinionated woman. It’s completely within the realm of possibility that he was the one who orchestrated Anne’s downfall, then helped pull the strings to get meek old Jane set up in her place.
HENRY VIII: Do you ever feel like Anne is, um …
CROMWELL: A total slut who’s sleeping with her own brother?
HENRY VIII: I was going to say “sometimes kind of a bitch,” but now that you mention it, yeah
CROMWELL: You should kill her
HENRY VIII: Isn’t that kind of drastic?
CROMWELL: Nah, you’re the king, you can kill whoever you want.
CROMWELL: And you need to get her out of the way if you want to shack up with Jane
CROMWELL: You don’t want a repeat of the Catherine situation where she’s still alive and people feel sorry for her
CROMWELL: So let’s just make some shit up and execute her for high treason
CROMWELL: Nice and clean, no loose ends
HENRY VIII: I do hate loose ends. Almost as much as I hate not having sons
The arrests began at the end of April: first Mark Smeaton, a musician in Anne’s employment, then a handful of noblemen and a poet named Sir Thomas Wyatt, and finally her brother George. Each was accused of having a sexual relationship with the queen; each of them denied this accusation, although Smeaton later confessed after being tortured on the rack. On May 2, Anne was arrested and brought to the Tower of London. Her charges were adultery, incest, and high treason. On May 14, the Archbishop of Canterbury — the same man who had annulled Henry’s first marriage and then validated his second one — declared Henry and Anne’s marriage to be null and void. On May 15, Anne was put on trial at the Tower of London. A jury of 27 peers found her unanimously guilty.
Because Henry was such a nice guy, he gave Anne the fanciest execution possible. She was the first English queen to be publicly executed, and Henry didn’t want to look like a thoughtless jerk on this special occasion.
When the verdict was announced, Henry Percy, now the Earl of Northumberland, collapsed and had to be carried out of the courtroom. He died eight months later, apparently having loved Anne until the end of his life.
Because Henry was such a nice guy, he gave Anne the fanciest execution possible. She was the first English queen to be publicly executed, and Henry didn’t want to look like a thoughtless jerk on this special occasion. He even brought in a swordsman from France who was skilled enough to kill a person kneeling upright with just one blow (as opposed to the traditional English executioner, a comparatively clumsier axeman — apparently France has a long-standing tradition of killing royalty with style). Historical writer Leanda de Lisle speculates that Henry preferred a sword because it was both more romantic (think King Arthur and Excalibur) and also more phallic; on the one hand, this might be a reach, but on the other hand, “killing my wife with a penis” seems extremely Henry. A true gentleman among princes!
HENRY VIII: Babe
HENRY VIII: I know things aren’t great right now, but I’m really trying
HENRY VIII: I got you the best executioner money can buy
HENRY VIII: Babe, look at me
HENRY VIII: Babe
HENRY VIII: You don’t like it, do you?
HENRY VIII: Just tell me if you don’t like it
HENRY VIII: We’ll get you whatever kind of execution you want
HENRY VIII: Do you want a swordsman from Italy instead? Is that it?
HENRY VIII: Because I can get you an Italian if you want
HENRY VIII: Lol, I mean, you still have to die
HENRY VIII: But you’ll die like a queen!
William Kingston, the Constable of the Tower, reported that Anne was facing death in the most Anne-like fashion: with (almost literal) gallows humor. “And then she said, ‘I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck,’ and then put her hands about it, laughing heartily,” Kingston wrote. On some level, Anne might have seen death as an escape from the shame and misery of Henry’s wrath. At any rate, she would have known that her execution was inevitable, and, according to Kingston, wished to get it over with as soon as possible. One poem, widely attributed to Anne, begins with the lines:
O death! rock me asleep,
Bring me on quiet rest;
Yet pass my guiltless ghost
Out of my careful breast
On May 19, Anne climbed the steps to a scaffold that had been built especially for the occasion and made a short speech to the crowd. In it, she maintained her innocence and described Henry as a gentle and merciful ruler; although she knew that she could not spare her own life, it’s likely that praising Henry was an attempt to make things easier for Elizabeth. She took off her headdress and tucked her hair up, then knelt on the scaffold. After asking the crowd to pray for her, she repeated “Jesu receive my soul; O Lord God have pity on my soul” over and over until death came. When it did, it happened in a single stroke of the sword, just as she had hoped.
The next day, Henry announced his betrothal to Jane Fucking Seymour, because these two couldn’t even wait until Anne’s half of the bed was cold before making it official. Jane would go on to give Henry the son he wanted, although she would give up her life in the process. The fact that she had died producing Henry’s only surviving male heir gave her a mythic near-martyr status in his eyes, and he would do creepy things like having her appear in a family portrait eight years after her death (and not even as a zombie or vampire, much to my dismay). She was the only one of his wives to be buried next to him.
I know I’ve made lots of jokes about how terrible Jane Seymour was, and while I do think she’s literally the worst, I want to say a brief word in defense of all of Henry VIII’s wives. It can be tempting to think of them as a succession of catty bitches, all intent on tearing down the reigning queen in hopes of taking her place — certainly that’s how they’re often portrayed in pop culture. But really, they were all Henry’s victims, each of them placed on a pedestal by him and then toppled by his violent, capricious will. If they competed with each other, it was because they lived in a culture where women were often forced to turn on other women in order to survive. That’s not to say that any of them were completely blameless in their behavior (other than Catherine of Aragon, of course, whose picture you would probably find in the dictionary if you looked up “blameless”), but they all deserve a certain amount of sympathy. Even Jane Seymour, as much as it pains me to say that.
Anne had the last laugh, of course. Jane’s son Edward was at best a useless boy-king, and at worst a divisive religious extremist who disinherited his sisters. It was Anne’s daughter Elizabeth who would go on to become one of the savviest and most popular rulers England has ever had, leading the country into a social and political golden age. From sparking a radical religious reform to giving birth to one of England’s most beloved monarchs, it’s possible that Anne shaped her country more than any queen before or since.
Anne Thériault is a Toronto-based feminist killjoy. She is currently raising one child and three unruly cats. If she has a looming deadline, you can find her procrastinating on Twitter @anne_theriault.
You must be aware of the intimidation factor inherent in anyone’s writing to you, but I wonder if maybe the paradigm is similar to what happens when a stunning woman walks into a room: no one approaches her, she’s simply too beautiful; everyone assumes they have no shot. Maybe you don’t get many letters. Maybe you haven’t received a truly balls-out, bare-assed communiqué since 1959.
You once signed a book for me. That’s the extent of our connection thus far, but it’s something, isn’t it? The book was The Counterlife, but I had yet to read it when I presented it to you for signature. You were unsure of the spelling of my name, and so there’s an endearing awkwardness, a lack of flow, to the inscription. For E, you wrote, and the pen held still too long on the page, leaving a mark at the point of the lowest horizontal’s completion while you waited for me to continue spelling. L, you continued on, and then, again, a spot of bleeding, hesitant ink before the i and the s and the a, which proceed as they should before your slanted, rote, wonderful autograph. I remember being all too aware of the impatient line behind me, people clutching their copies of Portnoy’s Complaint, Goodbye, Columbus, The Human Stain, the odd Zuckerman Unbound. I tried to meet your eye, I tried to communicate something meaningful. The others, of course, didn’t get it. I wanted you to know: I got it. Later, when I found my way to reading the book, I actually purchased a whole new copy so I wouldn’t sully my signed paperback. I cherish our moment of eye contact, your pen hovering over the title page, my name circulating in that colossal mind of yours.
But wait. This is no mere fan letter; no mere exercise in soft-core intellectual erotica constructed for your amusement. I have an objective. How old are you now, Philip? Early seventies, is it? You are, of course, notoriously private. I have the books, sure, like everyone else. And the reviews of the books, each of which mentions the notorious privacy. And there’s the Claire Bloom debacle, which I hesitate even to mention, given its complete disrespect of the notorious privacy (though you might be happy to know that I couldn’t find “Leaving A Doll’s House” in any of the four sizable bookstores I checked and had to finally order it on Amazon). And The Facts, which I made a point of reading after the Claire Bloom, for balance. A graduate school friend of mine was your research assistant for a few years while we pursued our MFAs and it took her almost a year of post-workshop drinking to slyly confess, to a rapt audience of salivating young writers, her association to you. (Otherwise you’ll be happy to know she was loyal; she professed total ignorance of your life, your private matters, even your address. She seemed, in retrospect, somewhat terrified of you. I half-seriously offered her boyfriend a blow job if he’d get me your address. The table of young writers giggled madly and took big sips of beer.)
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