2020-09-The_Atlantic

Play the Atlantic PROMOTION Crossword Our mini puzzle gets bigger and more challenging each weekday. Can you solve this Friday one? On Sundays, play our largest crossword, which is created by a rotating cast of puzzle makers. 1 2345 9 6 7 8 10 11 12 13 14 17 15 16 19 18 20 A Friday crossword from Caleb Madison Across 17. Autonomous Serbian province 5. Crossing on a road trip, perhaps 1. Detective work in the Pannonian Plain 6. Middle-management tools? 6. Beverage named for a leaf 8. Toy that’s making a comeback? 19. Going by and a nut 10. Fashion brand with a rhino logo 20. Fictional French “gentleman 7. Preventing the rest of thief” ____ Lupin the sleepover from getting shut-eye, say 11. “Then again ...” in a text Down 8. Not act up 12. Head locks? 1. Site of many juvenile theft attempts 9. It means “warrior king” in the 13. Temporal chunk Soninke language 2. Hard suit 14. Lucky blackjack deal 15. FX show for which Billy Porter 3. Atlanta-to-Miami dir. won an Emmy 15. A Fish Called Wanda star Michael 4. Saarinen who designed the 16. Score after deuce, perhaps Gateway Arch 18. Biden and Bush: Abbr. TheAtlantic.com/Crossword

period, I read through the books that get African American culture stretching from slaves and whores. The rhetoric of race in anthologized as the American canon, the Harlem to Rio, the state of Bahia might Latin America is different from our own, English, the World Lit, and sampled vari- be fairly viewed as its spiritual heart. Per- of course, but its history, and the ways ous national traditions. I read the Nobel haps the heart of the entire Black world. blood and money operate, are familiar. Prize winners I hadn’t before. Harold Palmares centers on the reenslavement Bloom was the GOAT among readers, so of the last settlement of free Blacks in Plot is beside the point in Palmares— I measured myself in those days against Brazil—and is told from the point of view the book unfolds on a plane of con- the indexes of The Western Canon. You can of Almeyda, a young girl who has learned sciousness where the things achieved are read all of these things and still not know shifting relationships and states of being. much about Black literature. My educa- I joined some Ultimately, the book is about taking full tion there was in bookshops and libraries, friends at the possession of the entire Black experience, but especially in talking with other writers, Black table, where including tenderness—and Jones’s quest visual artists, musicians, filmmakers, danc- they were sitting to free the individual Black voice. Father ers. It was the best education I ever had. in stunned silence Tollinare, born back in the Old World and self-reproach. and wedded to its old sounds, doesn’t One Friday after work at my day job Higgins had just realize his young student’s hunger to as a magazine writer, I made my way from killed himself after expand and integrate: Sixth Avenue to a bar in Hell’s Kitchen Newsweek outed where industry people gathered. I joined his location. During the studies, he’d pass one worn some friends from Newsweek at the Black Bible around and we’d read the sto- table, where they were sitting in stunned to read with the help of a local Catholic ries, and he’d shake his head when we silence and self-reproach. Higgins had just priest named Father Tollinare, though he dropped letters off the ends of words, killed himself, after the magazine outed his tries to limit the books available to her. and he’d say, “In Portugal they say it location. I don’t remember the specifics, The novel has a García Márquezean pace, this way.” “But here we say it this but we talked bitterly about the editorial and, because it imitates the rhythms of way,” I protested once. He looked at decisions that led the police to his door. Portuguese and imports words without me sternly … I was silent because I About the things that white Americans the usual linguistic signposts, it almost wanted to know how to read and write understood and did not understand about feels as though it has been translated into the words, even if I continued to pro- being Black in this country. Things they English. But where García Márquez writes nounce them a different way. might not wish to know. of generals and doctors, Jones tells of At her best, Jones wields the words of The reason I’ve told you all this is so a larger literary tradition with a subversive you’ll understand what I mean when I power that is rare in its all-encompassing say that Gayl Jones’s new work is as rel- purity. Dropping letters, she adds new evant as ever. With monumental sweep, it worlds to that tradition, one that has blends psychological acuity and linguistic been—in this country, and in the Ameri- invention in a way that only a handful of can language—as versed in duplicity as in writers in the transatlantic tradition have revelation. One wishes that the blooming matched. She has boldly set out to con- of Jones’s genius were as simple as the say- vey racial struggle in its deep-seated and ing “You can’t keep a good woman down.” disorienting complexity—Jones sees the The truth is, you can, and it’s been done whole where most only see pieces. for centuries. The old women in Kentucky presumably told her that long ago, and More than a third of all Africans how best to endure. removed from their homeland from the early 1500s to the mid-1800s—more than Calvin Baker is a novelist and the author 4 million people—were transported to of A More Perfect Reunion: Race, Inte- Brazil and enslaved alongside the indig- gration, and the Future of America. enous people, at least those who hadn’t been exterminated. Today Nigeria is the only country with a larger Black popu- lation than Brazil, and in the body of The Atlantic (ISSN 1072-7825), recognized as the same publication under The Atlantic Monthly or Atlantic Monthly (The), is published monthly except for combined issues in January/February and July/August by The Atlantic Monthly Group, 600 New Hampshire Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20037 (202-266-6000). Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C., Toronto, Ont., and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send all UAA to CFS (see DMM 707.4.12.5); NONPOSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: send address corrections to Atlantic Address Change, P.O. Box 37564, Boone, IA 50037-0564. Printed in U.S.A. Subscription queries: Atlantic Customer Care, P.O. Box 37564, Boone, IA 50037-0564 (or call +1 855-940-0585). Privacy: We occasionally get reports of unauthorized third parties posing as resellers. If you receive a suspicious notification, please let us know at [email protected]. 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There are I love the balloons that ODE balloons, float like deities above the and then there aisles in CVS, the balloons to are balloons. made of Mylar and ancient symbolism. These balloons BALLOONS There’s the domestic bal- are magic. These balloons, out loon, over which we shall in the world, will activate gra- By James Parker quickly pass—the sad little tuitous nonmalignant forces. sphere that you blow up at They’ll get you smiles, fist home, with your own labo- bumps, kisses, drinks. I once rious, why-am-I-doing-this walked several blocks with a carbon dioxide. A lot of large balloon in the likeness of pathos, for whatever reason, SpongeBob SquarePants surg- attaches to this balloon. ing and tugging over my head. People cried out, reflexively— Then there is the irre- they were glad to see him. pressible balloon, the bal- (That balloon later escaped, loon pumped taut with car- and I watched SpongeBob toon levity. A balloon of this recede, grinning, into the sort is essentially an arrested blue-eyed void of the sky.) impulse. A trapped prayer, if you like. Each balloon repre- I’ve been hauling balloons sents a thwarted attempt by into my apartment recently, that noble and high-spirited great gaggles of them, in the gas, helium, to fly joyfully up interest of general mood ele- to heaven. vation. There have been occa- sions, too, moments to mark: But the balloon doesn’t birthdays, graduations, what- care. Brainless and glorious, it ever. They’re over. But the bal- bobs about. Its urge to tran- loons remain—glimmering, scend is perfectly contained. immaterial. A flamingo; a sun- Life is heavy, heavy, heavy. flower; a gigantic golden rep- Since we crawled up onto dry lica of the thumbs-up emoji. land, gravity has been patiently The balloon I bought myself dismantling us—we sag, we on Father’s Day: best dad stoop, our lower backs hurt. ever. My wife says they satisfy Experience accumulates, and my “need for cheese”—which it has its own weight. Bring on is to say, my vulgar consum- the balloons. erist attraction to garishness and buoyancy. But to me the balloons are like Yeats’s wild swans at Coole: “mysterious, beauti- ful.” Or like Jeeves at his most silvery and wafting. They travel unaccountably from room to room, trailing their strings. They nudge me at my desk. They drift together, and nod, and seem to confer—a sympo- sium of balloons. They touch one another so gently. James Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic. 100 SEPTEMBER 2020



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